The Revolution Is Coming, Eventually

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
> Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2003 02:04:50 -0700
> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> .
>
>
> October 19, 2003
>
> The Revolution Is Coming, Eventually
> By KATIE HAFNER
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/19/business/yourmoney/19gill.html>
>
> SHORTLY before noon on a drizzly day in late August, George Gilder had a 
> housekeeping announcement to make during his annual technology conference 
> at the Squaw Creek resort in Lake Tahoe. The weather forecasters had been 
> dead wrong, he said, taking some obvious delight in this pronouncement. 
> Lunch would be served indoors.
>
> Mr. Gilder's swipe at the meteorologists wasn't just an opportunity to 
> elicit a few chuckles from the audience. It was also a subtle reminder to 
> the 350 or so faithful in attendance that he is not the only one who can 
> botch a prediction.
>
> Then again, few people have ever lost their shirts betting on the weather. 
> Investors who believed in Mr. Gilder's wildly optimistic predictions about 
> the telecommunications revolution, on the other hand, spent the last few 
> years watching their portfolios unravel.
>
> Now, slowly but surely, portions of the telecom industry are recovering. 
> Shares of the companies Mr. Gilder recommends in The Gilder Technology 
> Report - a more diverse mix than it used to be - have outperformed the 
> Nasdaq by a healthy margin for the past year, and his adherents are 
> cheering up. And Mr. Gilder is gradually regaining the credibility that 
> nearly vaporized before his eyes three years ago.
>
> Still, a sense of wariness and an air of enthusiasm held in check hovered 
> over this year's Tahoe conference. And if any group has reason to be wary, 
> it is this one.
>
> Perhaps more than anyone else, Mr. Gilder, 63, is - to use one of his 
> favorite words - the reification of all that went right, and then 
> calamitously wrong, in the new economy.
>
> In early 2000, Mr. Gilder presided over a small but lucrative empire that 
> consisted of his newsletter, the Gilder Technology Report, and its various 
> spinoffs - with names like Digital Power Reporter, Dynamic Silicon and the 
> Supply Side Investor - half a dozen annual conferences and a staff of 55.
>
> At the time, Mr. Gilder's net worth, around $7 million, was modest by 
> dot-com standards, but Merrill Lynch and Hambrecht & Co. were vying to 
> take his company, Gilder Publishing, public, valuing it at $150 million to 
> $200 million. His newsletters had 110,000 subscribers.
>
> Then, as quickly as the riches and the promise of more riches came, they 
> vanished. People canceled their subscriptions by the tens of thousands; 
> only the original newsletter survives today, with just 8,500 subscribers. 
> Since the tech bubble burst, all but five staff members have been laid 
> off. A former business partner holds a lien on Mr. Gilder's house. And in 
> a cruel twist of fate, Mr. Gilder, an outspoken critic of the nation's tax 
> structure, finds himself at the mercy of the Internal Revenue Service, as 
> he awaits the agency's final decision on the terms of his tax bill.
>
> Last month, just home from a trip to Shanghai, Mr. Gilder sat in the spare 
> yet elegantly appointed guest cottage next door to his house in rural 
> Tyringham, Mass., and reflected on how he happened to come within an 
> eyelash of losing everything.
>
> George Gilder is a slight, gentle, unprepossessing man. He holds himself 
> with some delicacy, and although he is physically fit (he runs six miles a 
> day), it seems as if a gust of wind could knock him off his feet.
>
> Yet when he opens his mouth to rail against "idiot" American economists, 
> corporate lobbyists and the perniciousness of taxes ("the power to tax is 
> the power to destroy") and government regulation, the mild manner 
> evaporates and Mr. Gilder might be mistaken for a glassy-eyed nut case on 
> the University of California at Berkeley's Sproul Plaza shouting random 
> invectives at passers-by.
>
> Mr. Gilder, however, is no wacko, and his invectives are anything but 
> random. Through the years, he has been building his own version of a 
> socioeconomic unified field theory, integrating politics, sex, economics 
> and technology, with a dose of religion thrown in.
>
> MR. Gilder hails from solid New England stock, if tinged with a 
> "Buddenbrooks" -like air of decay. His family settled in Tyringham in the 
> early 1900's. His great-grandfather was Louis Comfort Tiffany, the 
> glassmaker; a great-aunt, Mary O'Hara, wrote "My Friend Flicka."
>
> When George was 3, his father, Richard, a pilot, disappeared over the 
> Atlantic Ocean during World War II. David Rockefeller, Richard's roommate 
> at Harvard, saw to it that George, who he considered to be like his 
> surrogate son, received a Harvard education as well.
>
> In the 60's and 70's, while a speechwriter for Richard M. Nixon, Nelson A. 
> Rockefeller and George W. Romney, Mr. Gilder branched out briefly into 
> attacking feminism by writing magazine articles and books opposing day 
> care and celebrating a woman's place in the home. In the early 1970's, 
> Time magazine and the National Organization for Women named him Male 
> Chauvinist Pig of the Year. Shortly thereafter, having decided that this 
> was "a triumph I could not exceed," Mr. Gilder migrated to supply-side 
> economics.
>
> He hit his stride with the best-selling book, "Wealth and Poverty," in 
> 1981, in which he argued that capitalism and entrepreneurialism are 
> intrinsically altruistic, oriented toward the needs of other people. 
> Selfishness and greed, on the other hand, pave the way to socialism, as 
> avaricious people petition the state for benefits they haven't earned.
>
> Although the book made Mr. Gilder wealthy, he started looking for a new 
> focus. He hit on computer chips, which he decided were fast becoming the 
> most important development in the world economy. He took some time off to 
> learn solid-state physics, and soon became one of the semiconductor 
> industry's leading pundits.
>
> Next came his infatuation with the "telecosm," a word Mr. Gilder coined to 
> describe the convergence of computers and communications. In the 
> mid-1990's, he argued that the expansion of the Internet was giving rise 
> to demand so great that the so-called big pipes carrying information would 
> need huge capacity to accommodate all the data, voice and video they would 
> be transporting.
>
> <snip>
>
> Archives at: <http://Wireless.Com/Dewayne-Net>
> Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>

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