Like many other specialists in the future, including Karl Marx, [Nicholas] Negroponte had an uncanny knack for identifying a real problem, proposing an idealized solution, and behaving as if the idealized solution was, in fact, the actual solution. This was to ignore certain rules of thumb that were repeatedly discovered, and repeatedly forgotten, by countless philosophers, farmers, politicians, industrialists, and just about everybody else as mankind continually blazed its trail into the world of tomorrow. For one thing, the future almost never turns out as predicted, because most dazzling new inventions either don't work the way they're supposed to, don't work at all, or work exactly as designed but in ways that annoy the hell out of their owners. The world of the future always takes a lot of fixing up. It was clear that Nicholas Negroponte had never heard the cautionary tale of the Waltzing Tycoon.

At the end of the 1980s, Bruce Wasserstein was the reigning boy wonder of Wall Street. At the First Boston Corporation, he had gone from strength to strength, merging gigantic corporations to form even more gigantic corporations. Then, with his longtime partner, Joe Perella, he had cut loose from the old firm and set up shop in midtown Manhattan. Empty pizza boxes littered the desktops; cables snaked across the floor. In his new private office, the master of the game spoke to a reporter about his bold and far-reaching plans for American capitalism.

Suddenly, the room dimmed. Without interrupting his speech, Wasserstein slowly raised his hand, as though asking permission to visit the washroom. The reporter said nothing. Still talking, Wasserstein then raised his arms and began to waggle them up and down.

"Mr Wasserstein," asked the reporter, "is everything all right?"

"Perfectly," said the magnate. He continued to talk, now with an air of annoyance. Abruptly, he left his seat. Neither a small nor an agile man, he began to move swiftly around the room, waving his arms and sometimes joining his hands high above his head, as though doing jumping jacks. He also climbed onto a piece of furniture.

"Mr Wasserstein," said the reporter, "should I get Mr Perella?"

"I'm trying to turn on the lights!" the tycoon explained.

Actually, Bruce Wasserstein really was trying to turn on the lights. His office, like the office of many another financier, had been equipped with a lighting system attached to a motion detector. The idea was to save energy. There was no wall switch. When you came to your office, the office turned on the lights, because the office knew you were there. The lights remained on for as long as you were in residence, because the office sensed your presence. Or so the theory went. All over Manhattan, men in Savile Row suits and women in Chanel dresses were pirouetting madly about in their workspaces, trying to turn on their lights.

Negroponte would say, correctly, that the problem could have been solved with an improved motion detector. The trick was to develop an improved motion detector that didn't do something else wrong — and then persuade the maddened customers that it really, really didn't do anything else wrong. An even better trick was to install a wall switch. In the meantime, the broad, sunny highway to the future had taken a small educational detour, prominent members of the financial community had been given a salutary lesson in new technologies that were just smart enough to be extremely stupid, and the human race stumbled on. Generally speaking, the company or individual who makes a bundle out of the future is the company or individual that makes the least bad guess about something and then makes it work, often in unforeseen ways. For example, James Watt, the supposed inventor of the steam engine, did not invent the steam engine. He repaired a pump. This was not, however, the way Nicholas Negroponte viewed the future. To Negroponte, the future would conform itself to his vision, arrive at daybreak in the morning next Thursday, and work perfectly.

L. J. Davis, The Billionare Shell Game
Copyright © 1998 by L. J. Davis. All rights reserved.

Posted 22 November 1998

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