 In
1849, gold was discovered in the foothills of the Sierras; the mad
rush to mine out the "gold in them thar hills" created
the State of California, the Barbary Coast of San Francisco, and
the "Big Four" robber barons of the West: Crocker, Stanford,
Huntington and Hopkins. None of these gentlemen actually mined the
gold – far from it. Instead, the Big Four sold the miners their
supplies, shipped their gold back to New York and London, banked
their meager earnings, and built the railroads which connected the
coasts.
Fifty years later, a strike in the Yukon – the last great gold rush – sent thousands to die of exposure in the frozen wastes beneath the Arctic Circle, and, again, only enriched the bankers and merchants of Seattle and San Francisco. The psychology of the gold rush is a pathology formed from equal parts of greed and fear; the desire to be rich as Croesus, amplified by the crushing belief that any thoughtful delay will be catastrophic to a fantasized fortune. The rich will get richer, while the dot-com miners will suffer early deaths from overwork and overworry. I mention this not as part of an impassioned post-Marxist plea to "off the landlords," but rather more in the sense that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. There’s gold in them thar Web, to be sure, but – as in the case of the Amazon river basin – our attempts to mine it may result in a ruination of its fragile and still-nascent ecosystem. Although it may seem polemical to say this, let me state my point clearly: Money is antithetical to thought. People won’t think straight – can’t think straight – when there’s a pile of money lying in front of them, even if it’s more-or-less imaginary. In five years time, when this gold rush has played itself out, we will be left with a residue of the Web circa 1995, when some bright Stanford MBA took a "snapshot" of things as they were, and from this, predicted it would ever be thus. Though it may be difficult to admit, our recovery from this sorry state of affairs relies upon our admission that the Web stopped evolving – completely – in 1995. Nothing much has happened since then, although, for all the sound and fury, you’d think the entire world had been turned upside down. It hasn’t; we’ve simply been hypnotized by our own lust. One example to prove my point: Last year, a nineteen-year-old at Northeastern University wrote a simple program to allow his friends to share their rapidly-growing collections of MP3 audio files. Shawn Fanning has single-handedly created the "killer app" for broadband, redefined how we think of the Internet, and set the entire $50 billion recording industry on its head. Napster, whether it survives even another month, has changed the way we think about the possibilities of the digital era – a Pandora’s box that can never be closed. Already, Napster clones like Gnutella and Scour Acquire pick up where Napster leaves off, and – for now – we’re in another time of rapid innovation, undoing the conservative magic which held us in golden handcuffs for five years. The door is always open to the new New Thing. Paradoxically, when the new succeeds, it becomes the poison which drowns out the next New Thing, diverting attention from innovations which might really be useful, substituting for them the glittery artifacts of consensus reality. Caught in a tug-of-war between our better natures and our baser selves, I wonder if – after the gold rush – we will be proud of our own behavior, and happy for the world we helped to create.
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