Net savvy youth prove the future just happened

By CHARLES ARTHUR

Once upon a time, Michael Lewis was a city trader, one of those people who would get a price on his grandmother if she could be sold.

His relaxed charm belies a brain that is still just as sharp. Yet even he shakes his head at some of the people he met while researching his latest book, The Future Just Happened.

"It's unnerving being 40 and watching a 15-year-old running circles around you," he says.

At the heart of his book are his travels to meet teenagers living in New Jersey, a desert town called Perris south of LA, and Oldham. What he saw was a disruption of the way society works, or has worked until now.

"There's a genuine thread in the book that the disruption is between older and younger people," he says.

"The internet means grown-ups are at an increasing disadvantage. People over 35 have a big sense that they're washed up at an earlier age, that they're at the mercy of younger children."

The children aren't doing it on purpose. The net allows it by providing access to software and information, not to mention the millions of other people who might be smarter (so you can work with them) or stupider (so you can exploit them).

That tends to worry adults, such as those at the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US. It demanded that a 15-year-old, Jonathan Lebed, pay back $500,000 that he had made through boosting and trading stocks online.

It wasn't clear that Lebed had done anything wrong, but the SEC took the view that pumping and dumping stocks is properly a job for people in Wall St.

Lewis knows all about that, of course. He rose to fame with his 1989 book Liar's Poker, an insider's account of a trader's life during the heady days before the 1987 crash.

He knows about the net and its reality, too, having spent more than a year shadowing Jim Clark, the man who essentially created the browser company Netscape just as its star was waning.

The result was his 1999 book The New New Thing, a fascinating insight into the thinking of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

Lewis argues that "kids" - his generic term for children and teenagers - don't have to fit into the social order because they aren't yet part of it, and often dislike it.

And the rapid change the internet can generate leaves adults floundering. It is "an uncivilising force in life, to have something that discredits you as you get older".

He shakes his head. "A lot of our mental infrastructure is built on the belief that experience matters. When that falls away, all is lost."

The book can be seen as a voyage through some places where that infrastructure is being torn down. He first visits Lebed, whose grasp of the principles that knowledge is king in the money markets reminded Lewis, "rather scarily", of himself.

Then he meets Marcus Arnold, whose legal expertise flowed entirely out of his own confidence. Would you want a 15-year-old as your lawyer? Since they didn't know his age, lots of people did. They couldn't tell the difference between him and a trained attorney - except the guy on the net was free.

Once he became an expert, Arnold's career took on a life of its own. The AskMe.com site on which he appeared had a system of rankings that were driven by the number of questions the expert answered, the speed of his replies and the quality of those replies, as judged by the recipients, who bestowed on them a rating of one to five stars.

Soon Arnold was ranked No 10 out of 150 or so experts in AskMe.com's criminal-law division, many of whom were actual lawyers.

Arnold claimed to have two years' legal training, but his only knowledge, in fact, was drawn from watching television courtroom shows and browsing the net.

Real lawyers started firing in more technical questions and it became clear the boy was struggling.

But this provoked a backlash. A lot of people seemed to believe that any 15-year-old who had risen so high in the ranks of AskMe.com legal experts must be some kind of wizard.

They began to seek him out more than ever. They wanted his, and only his, advice. Arnold made No. 1 in the rankings.

For Lewis, seeing real lawyers furiously fighting off Arnold, the newcomer, mirrored his own childhood.

His father was a lawyer in a firm where they would argue about the pronunciation of Latin phrases. Lewis saw him upended by the new types, who advertised, chased ambulances and took nothing for granted. Now, Arnold and others like him are doing it to them.

The third person Lewis spoke to was Daniel Sheldon, aged 14 when Lewis saw him. He lives in Oldham and is deeply involved in swapping software, regardless of trivia such as "ownership".

His intimate knowledge of the systems that give the music and film industries nightmares suggests, to Lewis at least, that he will be worth a lot of money in a few years.

He's still in touch with these kids.

"They're all friends. Daniel is the most evolved of them. He's just very mature, wise beyond his years.

"Lawyer kid" (his shorthand for Arnold) is "genuinely weird. He has no compass, no reference point. He thinks it's normal to say things such as, 'I was born with legal knowledge'.

"But Jonathan Lebed - parts of him remind me of me. He's a cooler customer than I ever was. There's a cold, calculating quality which I was never capable of."

Lewis started researching in May last year, when the financial markets had begun their downward slide. He didn't start writing until November, when they were well into a death spiral. And he didn't finish it until the time it was pretty hard to detect a pulse in many internet investments.

"It was interesting trying to get my head around the question of what's left after the [stock market] bubble has burst."

Which makes this, he thinks, the perfect time to produce a book about the net.



According to the rumours, Lewis is pretty rich in his own right - through his Wall St existence and now his books - so he can afford to write only where it interests him. His effortless style is, of course, the result of hard work; he doesn't entirely enjoy it.

"I know people who have had their lives ruined by having a book they have to get written," he says. "It hangs over them and they can't get out from under it.

"I find writing such a pain in the arse that I don't want to do it unless I'm really interested. I took the same length of time to write this as the other ones: about eight months of actual writing. It took months to research The New New Thing."

Liar's Poker, of course, was researched mostly by turning up for work.

So is he sure that his principles represent what is really going on?

"You know," he grins, "this isn't science. It's journalism."

True enough, but it's journalism that gets to the heart of the issue. If you don't feel disrupted now, you may do when you've finished it.

- INDEPENDENT

* The Future Just Happened will be available in New Zealand from the end of the month in hardback at $59.95.