Next: The Future Just Happened

Michael Lewis has an almost unique talent for providing one with an intuitive feel for a subject while simultaneously making you laugh out loud. I think I learned more about Wall Street from "Liar's Poker" than all the great serious tomes I've read, while at the same time enjoying it as pure farce, and yet I was left with an increased respect for the people and institutions. How is that even possible? After "Liar's Poker" I needed to read more of Mr. Lewis, but I avoided "Next" for a long time because the internet is my "Wall Street", a place with which I am intimately familiar. Non-technical books on the subject thus tend to annoy me, as I keep picking out nits where I feel the dilettante has gotten something wrong or missed the point. Boy, did I underestimate Michael Lewis. "Next" is as brilliant as "Liar's Poker", hilarious and incredibly informative. He intuitively captures the significance of the Internet: the way it breaks down all the old silos of expertise and authority and distributes them into the homes of everyone. The best part is probably the description of Jonathan Lebed, the 15-year online trader charged with securities fraud by the SEC...and the complete inability of the SEC to come to grips with the absurdity of the situation.

This is an excellent book that rationally examines the Internet and the social change it has invoked. Rather than just bemoan and whine about the impact, Lewis has bothered to investigate the reasons for the myriad changes. His book should be required reading for sociology and business classes. He has a sarcastic wit yet keen insight into the radical shifts that have taken place, and he speculates on what the future might bring. Central to Lewis's observations is the idea that the Internet has altered the relationship between the "insiders" and the "outsiders": between those who formerly controlled information and its flow to their benefit i.e., those who try to define what that information is, and those who have always been denied access to that power and information because of youth, lack of formal education, or lack of capital. In Next, Lewis shows how the Internet is the ideal model for sociologists who believe that our "selves are merely the masks we wear in response to the social situations in which we find ourselves." On the Internet, a boy barely in his teens flouts the investment system, making big enough bucks to get the SEC breathing down his neck for stock market fraud. What really makes them mad is that he has beaten them at their own game. When being accused of "manipulating" stock prices, he throws their logic back at them, asserting that that's the whole point of the stock market, that without manipulation, there would be no stock market. He watched stocks being hyped by professionals at the behest of companies and to the benefit of their own portfolios, in a world where companies cared more about their stock's value than the products they produced. A Blomberg study revealed that amateur predictions were twice as likely to be correct than those of stock analyst professionals. Markus, a bored adolescent, too young to drive, became one of the most respected legal advisors on Askme.com. His legal expertise came from watching myriads of legal television shows and from searching out the answers on the Internet. Ironically, his information appears to have been correct, and even the head of the American Bar Association admitted that most legal counsel is simply a matter of dispensing appropriate information. The story of how Askme.com got started is in itself instructive. It was designed by a software company to permit corporations to create an intranet that provided the capability for anyone to ask a question and anyone else in the corporation to provide an answer. Thus the information flow would change from the traditional top down pyramid model to a more pancake-shaped environment where information moved horizontally. It could be a bit unsettling for some people to see a vice-president get assistance from an assembly line worker, but the results were much more profitable companies, so the software became quite popular. The only concern prospective customers had was whether a product could withstand heavy us

This is NOT one of those tedious and hyperventilating books pompously declaring that the Internet has made all human knowledge before 1996 obsolete. Aren't we thankful for that? I know I am.This delightful book insightfully reports some of the ways our world culture is changed and re-ordered because of the way the Internet has flattened the structure and availability of information. Mr. Lewis uses the image of a pancake versus a pyramid. That is, through the web anyone can be an expert and everyone can communicate with everyone else. Privileged positions are evaporated. As he illustrates with several of his vignettes, not only does no one on the Internet know you are a dog, they don't know that the stock trader or the person dispensing legal advice or social theory is a fourteen or fifteen year old typing away from some nook in his parents' house.Mr. Lewis digs deeper than most and his writing has color and bite that is often laugh out loud funny and makes his points vividly. For example, he digs out the facts and tells a more complete version of the teenage stock trader who was forced by the SEC to pay a quarter of a million dollar fine. By interviewing Lebed's parents, his accusers at the SEC, and the wunderkind's teenage fellow traders, the author let's us see how the adults flounder in trying to understand what is happening to their world and how the youngsters breath this stuff so naturally they don't even see the revolution they are waging.I think Mr. Lewis's point that the kid wasn't doing anything actually malicious is spot on and that the real "crime" is that he was using all of the tools available to him more proficiently than the old elite.While I enjoyed every story in the book, the bit about the 10,000 year clock and the Long Now Foundation was particularly and disturbingly funny. We are shown a bunch of rich over-achievers going through their mid-life crisis by engaging in a bunch of self-important pseudo-intellectual analysis (for example, Stonehenge is a failed monument!). I won't reveal Mr. Lewis's punch line to this bit, but it is terrific.This is no alarmist piece and there are few bold predictions of the future (except around TiVo and television of the future) and that is wonderfully refreshing after so many years of fully amped hype around the frictionless future. What we do get is a tour around the way some wonderfully creative outsiders have faced necessity in their lives and used some inexpensive tools to invert their station in life. This is great stuff that is worth reading more than once and thinking about very carefully.

This is the most funny and thought-provoking book I have read in years. No where else can you learn more about the social effects of the Internet. Michael Lewis is in better touch with the Internet revolution than anybody else I know. This is his best piece yet. The stories he tells of Jonathan Lebed and Marcus Arnold are absolutely amazing and fasinating.

Old elites beware! Your time is up! Become the new elite today! That's the message of this intriguing, fascinating, and thought-provoking look at what's already happened on the Internet. I not only thought that this is the best book about the social effects of the Internet, I also think it is by far Michael Lewis's best work. This book deserves many more than five stars as a result.The original idea was simple. There are all of these people making a big splash on the Internet as individuals. Let's go meet them in person and find out what's really going on. Believe me, it's different from what you read in the newspapers or saw on television. With the aid of a researching crew from the BBC, Mr. Lewis found that the cutting edge of the Internet revolution was going on with 11-14 year olds. Soon, it will probably drift lower in age. Because the Internet lets you play on a equal footing and assume any identity you choose, youngsters with guts and quick minds can take on major roles. Usually, their parents have no clue until adults or major authority figures start arriving on their doorstep challenging what the youngster is doing or seeking personal advice. The core of the book revolves around the stories of Jonathan Lebed who used chat room commentaries to help drive his $8,000 stake into over $800,000 in less than three years, Marcus in Perris, California who became Askme.com's leading criminal law expert based on his watching of court TV shows, and Justin Frankel who became an important developer of Gnutella for filesharing while having trouble getting an education in school. Mr. Lewis makes the point that these youngsters weren't doing anything that their elders don't do in other forums. Yet the established authorities deeply resented and challenged them. Mr. Lewis suggests that the old elites "get a life." Their day is over. He uses the analogy of his father's refusal to adapt his law practice to the methods of personal injury lawyers using billboards and television ads to show this is how the existing elites always respond . . . by condemning and trying to ignore the new.At the same time, Mr. Lewis raises several important questions that will stay with you. After having been king of the hill for your 15 minutes of fame at 15, how will you feel about the rest of your life as an also-ran? His portrayal of Danny Hillis's project to create the 10,000 year clock captures that point very well. He also lampoons Bill Joy's arguments that the Unabomber had it right that we (the existing elites) need to constrain technology. The basic point is that economic and social effectiveness will rest on the foundation of how effective you can be rather than who you are, what degrees you have, what age you are, or who you know. In other words, the Internet has added another degree of leveling to our society. Surely, that's good. I'm a little more optimistic than Mr. Lewis about the implications. I think that many people will find the lower b