A room of one's own
Tobias Jones
THE ROAD AHEAD by Bill Gates Viking, £17.50, pp. 286 In the new dawn which Bill Gates describes the sun has no part to play. His `road ahead' has no scenery, and it promis- es to lead only to a facsimile life played out in the brave new world of technology. As he says (with disconcerting glee), when we all arrive in the promised land
you will be able to conduct business, study, explore the world and its cultures, call up any great entertainment, make friends, attend neighbourhood markets, and show pictures to distant relatives — without leaving your desk or armchair.
Telephones and televisions will melt into one all-powerful computer, the 'new Swiss Army knife'. These wallet PCs (personal computers) will hold our hands as we navigate through virtual galleries, as we shop in `sales showrooms in cyberspace'. To guide us through the fibre optic maze, we'll have the GPS (Global Positioning System), complete with barometers, thermometers, and heart-rate sensors. Identified by fingerprints or voices, we will be able to access digital cash from kiosks, or transcend physical separation by 'inter- facing' friends. When we can't make it to the office we'll simply lelecommute. Over this adolescent Star Trek fantasy, Gates spreads a thin veneer of idealism; those favourite rallying cries of the 'Age of Information' (`save trees: go paper-free; drop e-mail, not H-bombs') provide the subtext of the book. Gates touts the inter- net (and its 'netiquette') as the catch-all solution for the world's ills, as a means to improve education and medicine: 'I want to defy historical traditions', he says. So, like hippies in the Sixties, Gates and his nerds in the Nineties promise to usher us all along the yellow-brick road to love and peace.
Hence, the Microsoft mantra hopes for a computer on every desk and in every home'. Gates envisages 'softer software', malleable to our every need. Microsoft even has a mawkish 'Giving Campaign' which docks the wages of his employees to help save humanity. The 'information superhighway' is but a country lane at present; but Gates hopes to make it bigger, brighter and better. It's hard not to be cynical; to buy into this optimism it appears you have to buy into Microsoft. Billion-Dollar Bill is the phenomenally successful chairman of that company, and he's happy to flash its subliminal messages throughout the book. Big-Brother Bill is the man who liked com- puters because he could 'control' them, who sat in Harvard playing poker to raise capital; who used to 'dream crazy dreams' which — in the best American tradition all came true. And, of course, the same can happen for you, if you care to purchase a few of his products. Gates, then, is an economist, not a prophet. He is at his best when analysing global economic trends, not cultural ones. He is astute on the rise and fall of IBM, on the comparative strengths of Intel, Digital, and Apple. He traces the thread of inven- tion from Johann Gutenburg in the 15th century to Alan Turing in the 20th, and suggests convincing ways in which capital- ism will become `friction-free' with improved communications: 'Adam Smith,' he writes, with a resonant pat to his own back, 'would be pleased'.
This book is a fairy-tale about the new frontier, Gates casting himself as the hero- pioneer, leading the 'information rush'. But behind all this quick-fire American sales- manship, the rhetoric and the hype (by which the media has been easily seduced), Gates often lets slip a more sinister side: in the promised land, 'we'll have to [spooky imperative] keep to a limited vocabulary'. Again, 'narrative fiction ... will not benefit from electronic organisation'. So language will be fractured into jargon, all art into slick graphics that will line our minds and, more importantly, Bill Gates' wallet. And as this book is available on CD-ROM, it's hard not to remember Louis MacNeice's poignant question to future generations in his poem `To Posterity; `When books have all seized up ' he asks,
Will your grass be green, your sky be blue, Or will your birds be always wingless birds?
Bill Gates is a man who knows which side his ideological bread is buttered; and he, and his bank manager, are happy to let the sun set forever on that lyrical, natural world.
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