This is from the january/February issue of Mother jones magazine. to
check out the magazine, go to http://www.mojones.com.
kelly
Billing Us Softly
by Jeffrey Klein
Microsoft's business has grown so spectacularly that its operations
base in Redmond, Washington, is now housed in two "campuses," the
second even more well endowed than the first. At both, casually
dressed employees, looking like successful young professors, hum
about. Walking past perfectly groomed grounds through a spacious lobby
to their private offices, these programmers can pick up the colorful
1997 financial report. Microsoft's digital masterminds may be
insulated from ordinary financial stress, but not from the sense of
menace that pervades their leader's mind. Right at the front of the
report is a worried black-and-white photo of chairman and CEO Bill
Gates. His overview statement contrasts starkly with both the tranquil
setting and the spectacular revenue numbers.
"Like any time in our 23-year history we have great opportunities but
face a number of threats," he warns. "Competitors are battling with us
on many fronts." But he is determined to brave these myriad threats in
order to "help make the 'Web lifestyle' a reality." It is a lifestyle,
he explains, "in which people take advantage of the Internet to lead
more informed and productive lives, and have more fun."
A relative latecomer to the Internet, Gates envisioned its market
potential in his 1995 book, The Road Ahead: "The day has almost
arrived when you can easily conduct business, study, explore the world
and its cultures, call up great entertainment, make friends, go to
neighborly markets, and show pictures to distant relatives...without
leaving your desk or your armchair.... Your network connection...will
be your passport into a new, 'mediated' way of life."
Now the ever expanding Web is as endlessly fascinated with Gates as he
is with it. His wealth so strains the imagination that rendering all
those zeros comprehensible has become a favorite Web pastime. The
Internet teems with sites devoted to Microsoft, including several with
up-to-the-minute calculations of how many 747 jets Gates' holdings
would fill if converted into dollar bills (304) or how much cash he
could shell out to every American ($137) or what a Lamborghini is
worth to him in terms relative to the average wage earner (63 cents).
Underlying this fascination is a dim memory from high school history:
Wasn't there something bad about kings?
Bill Gates' voracity seems undiminished-if anything, his prosperity
has made him even hungrier for control. Gates claims that he only
wants to make our digital lives faster, simpler, and fun; he'll be the
neutral middleman who helps satisfy our wishes just by pumping
electronic wriggles into our workplaces and homes. But if the mediator
is the message, we're in big trouble. Neither his colleagues nor his
competitors pair Gates with images of neutrality. The mere mention of
his name conjures dread.
As monomaniacal as Gates seems, his dominance is not an anomaly, but a
foreseeable consequence of the new technological era. Most consumers
want an invisible standard under the hood of all their new machines.
We are willing to spend billions in return for effortless access to
the bits and bytes that have suddenly become so important. As Gates
points out, Microsoft does make things faster. Cheaper. Friendlier.
His software increases productivity. His Web browser lets your
fingertips call up more information than you could ever want to know.
Still, the Justice Department and Ralph Nader rightly wonder if
consumers really have a choice of brands left. Microsoft's success in
standardizing software has highlighted the company's monopolistic
drives. Silicon Valley, where I worked as a journalist for eight
years, is filled with software geniuses who wrote code for a better
mousetrap only to discover that market share and a war chest regularly
trump innovation. Obviously Microsoft is now using its whopping 90
percent market share of operating systems to foist its Internet
Explorer on consumers. But since Microsoft is giving away this browser
for free, by "bundling" it with its Windows desktop software, it's
difficult to imagine angry consumers rallying around the cause,
claiming they're being ill-served.
Many Americans are nonetheless watching the Justice Department's
antitrust suit. Their real question is whether Bill Gates is more
powerful than our government. Microsoft's indignant response to the
suit leaves us uncomfortably wondering whether or not national
governments retain the power even to slap the wrist of brazen
corporations.
Of course, greedy visionaries with a gift for vertical integration are
older than Windows. John D. Rockefeller, and his Standard Oil monopoly
(one of the monsters that antitrust law was created to slay), once
threatened civil society because he controlled the sale of a physical
commodity that people and governments had no choice but to consume.
Bill Gates is striving for monopolistic power over strings of symbols.
How do we confront the fact that our physical needs-commerce, goods,
services-have become inextricably intertwined with new ethereal
desires?
Everyone at Microsoft is dedicated to the manipulation of those
desires. The company deliberately hires bright young people straight
out of college. They're well prepared to provide what the company
craves but are not yet formed as adults. A job at Microsoft basically
means graduating to a richer "campus." Marooned on a bucolic island
without any other culture, their personal and professional lives
become almost indistinguishable. A star programmer is like a young
doctor being socialized through an internship or a young lawyer
seeking partnership. Perhaps the main difference is that the medical
and legal professions have traditions, however debased. During the
decade following the invention of the PC, the absence of any such
tradition seemed appealing, particularly since the digital pioneers
were emanating from the counterculture.
In my limited contact with current and former Microsoft workers, I've
noticed two conversational tendencies that can, unfortunately, be
traced to the counterculture. They can be extremely aggressive
thinkers, questioning basic assumptions about all politics, all
communication, all social organization prior to the digital era. They
are not simply parroting the Microsoft line when they mock the
pathetic behemoth that is government for sticking its nose into
postmodern commerce. But their brains also retain a whiny lobe, which,
for example, repeatedly complains that their company is only one-sixth
the size of IBM (its stock valuation is, in fact, more than 1.5 times
higher) and therefore doesn't deserve to be on anyone's radar screen.
These are the offspring of Bill Gates the outsider, Bill Gates the
Harvard dropout, Bill Gates the high-tech David who slew the
blue-suited, wing-tip-wearing Goliaths at IBM. Gates still looks
uncomfortable in a suit. He is a hero of the nerds who sought to
remake the corporate world into a more dress-down-everyday kind of
place, where authority came from good ideas, not job titles. It was a
crusade against mindless business practices, and Bill Gates won. But
any hope of an alternative culture from which a more soulful way of
conducting commerce might emerge is gone. Too many people at Microsoft
are openly cynical about their careers, admitting they are there
simply for the cash-and the cash-out.
Greed in, greed out. The nascent Web lifestyle already hints that,
without consciousness and countervailing forces, our failings will
haunt us in this brave new world. The unencumbered flow of information
over the Internet wires sounds amazing in principle, but its earliest
culture contains too much of what the cynics have expected: junk
e-mails (etherealized snake oil salesmen), rumors of conspiracy
(etherealized superstitious villagers), and proliferating pornography.
The public hasn't been crying out for Web sites devoted to the Bob's
Big Boy in Burbank, California, yet here we are.
In his chapter on "friction-free capitalism," Gates talks without
irony about a more commercialized future: "In an unobtrusive way, the
Internet will offer you the option to inquire about images you see. If
you're watching a video of Top Gun and think that Tom Cruise's aviator
sunglasses look really cool, you'll be able to pause the movie and
learn about the glasses or even buy them on the spot." Gates is now
pouring enormous resources into WebTV, which he believes will move
products in hitherto unimaginable ways.
Of course, Gates isn't overtly forcing his version of
wanting-and-instantly-getting down our throats. We seem eager to
swallow it. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is a good model of the
technological dystopia we should fear: Instead of social control
enforced from the outside, Huxley envisioned a world enervated from
within. We have spent much of the late 20th century guarding against a
Fahrenheit 451-like state in which books are burned; meanwhile,
Huxley's world, in which most people won't bother to read a book, may
be slipping in the back door.
By marketing to our worst parts-our childlike fascination with
glittery technology, our desire for instant gratification, our
vulnerability to planned obsolescence, our misguided notion that wave
after wave of "information" is empowering rather than distracting-Bill
Gates has been instrumental in making a mindless world attractive. As
Gates blandly puts it: "Our goal is to allow people to get their work
done in the easiest way possible, without thinking about the tools
they're using."
To the extent that the digital age makes the various transactions of
daily life more convenient, opposition becomes virtually impossible.
Resistance isn't futile, it's uncomfortable. Not having a computer
network is a liability for many businesses. E-mails are more easily
returned than phone calls. Requests for information from governments
or corporations are more and more likely to be met with the response,
"It's on our Web site." And so we acquiesce, bit by bit, to conducting
our work lives in the ethereal world while we begin to find "fun" in
the Web lifestyle that Bill Gates is eager to construct for us.
Paradoxically, the empire through which Gates will sell convenience
and placation is built upon dread. His fear of losing control of what
he calls "the digital nervous system" keeps everyone around him
running scared. Fear motivates the behavior that we document in our
cover stories: his establishment of a Washington, D.C., lobbying force
similar in scope and cunning to that of Philip Morris; his drive to
infiltrate foreign markets, dominating the industry's anti-piracy
campaign just to broaden Microsoft's market share; his need to collect
data on the consumers who use his products ("the better to serve you
with, my dear"); and his construction of an elaborate media campaign
to neutralize the growing suspicions we harbor about Bill.
In the sterile heart of Aldous Huxley's consumer dystopia, citizens
were insulated from dread. At the end of the book, one of the 10
Controllers of the world explains that, in a proper civilization,
"what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the
natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any
temptations to resist."
Is this where we want to go today?
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