Technology & Democracy Project
Big Government and Mass Media always feed on fear of monsters. While politicians promise to protect the people from the dreaded private sector, leading newspapers such as the Washington Post and network shows such as “60 Minutes” chime in with continuing reports on the economy as seen from the shores of Loch Ness. Peering through the shifting, inscrutable murk of Read More ›
Imagine it is 1971 and you are chair of the new Federal Computer Commission. This commission has been established to regulate the natural monopoly of computer technology as summed up in the famous Grosch’s Law. In 1956 IBM engineer Herbert Grosch proved that computer power rises by the square of its cost and thus necessarily gravitates to the most costly Read More ›
There is a world of poverty, decline, and decay, and every place has problems that are promoted by government into crises that then have to be “solved” by new government programs. Now, my great theme for the last decade or so, which I have adopted from Peter Drucker, who is one of the great men of our era, is “Don’t Read More ›
In 1994, four years after I wrote the first edition of Life After Television, the cornucopian afterlife is indeed at hand. With microchips and fiber optics eroding the logic of centralized institutions, networks of personal computers are indeed overthrowing IBM and CBS, NTT and EEC. But as the great pyramids of the broadcast and industrial eras — the familiar masters Read More ›
The perennial question of all suitors of fate and fortune now whispers and resounds through conference resorts, executive retreats and consulting sessions across the land as business leaders from Hollywood to Wall Street pose with pundits and ponder the new world of converging technologies. Symbolized in a famous mandala by MIT’s Media Lab, this grand fondue of information tools — Read More ›
The world of networks breaks into two polar paradigms. Most familiar is the Public Switched Telephone Network. From the tiniest transistor flip-flop on a modem chip through labyrinthine layers of rising complexity on up to a 4ESS supercomputer switch linking 107,520 telephone trunk lines (itself consisting of millions of interconnected transistors), the public network is a vast, deterministic web of Read More ›
In the spring of 1989 when Michael Bookey first visited the Middle School in Issaquah, Wash., to help the school system with its computers, he was reminded of his early ventures into Communist China. After 20 years of working with computer networks, to enter Issaquah seemed to me like encountering an exotic tribe of primitives untouched by the modern world. Read More ›
At first glance, Vahak Hovnanian, a homebuilding tycoon in New Jersey, would seem an unlikely sort to be chasing rainbows. Yet in the converging realms of computers and communications that we call the telecosm, rainbows are less a matter of hue and weather than they are a metaphor for electromagnetism: the spectrum of wavelengths and frequencies used to build businesses Read More ›
In a world of dumb terminals and telephones, networks had to be smart. But in a world of smart terminals, networks have to be dumb. Philip Hope, divisional vice president for engineering systems of EDS, has an IQ problem. His chief client and owner, General Motors, wants to interconnect thousands of 3-D graphics and computer aided engineering (CAE) workstations with Read More ›
George Gilder’s Microcosm is the crystal ball of the next technological era. Leading scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs provide vivid accounts of the latest inventions, revealing how the new international balance of power really lies in information technology. Ranging from computer chips to the greatest minds of Silicon Valley, George Gilder explores every aspect of today’s unprecedented technological and entrepreneurial revolution. Microcosm contains Read More ›