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 Forbes ASAP, February 23, 1994 Life After Television, Updated 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 of the American immigration—break apart, new fear and anxieties arise about the future. If the center cannot hold, what rough beast, shuffling its slow thighs, slouches toward Hollywood to be born again in gigabytes—and gigadollars—on the information superhighway? Will life after television mean the dissolution of the American hearth into a pornucopia of 900-number videos, full-color cold calls from sultry sisters at Lehman Brothers and real-crime performances in multimedia by superstar serial killers? Or will the new technologies uplift the culture and empower the people, as Life After Television predicted? A Hughes Aircraft Corp. rocket’s red glare in French Guiana, bombs bursting in air on 500 channels, give proof through the night that something is going on out there: 150 choices of DirecTv broadcast satellite images; up to one billion hertz of cable TV bandwidth; star-spangled malls of infomercials; CD radio with fidelity beyond the ken of the human ear; high-resolution wrestlemania; 3,000 films on-demand; interactive personals and impulse pay-per-view playmates; Yellow Pages blooming into home-shopping bonanzas; and videogames galore on compact discs and cartridges. All zooming through the air, blasting through cable and pulsing through fiber at the speed of light. All to be captured, decrypted, decompressed, rendered and rolled out from the new set-top boxes, game players and supertheaters in millions of colors and living rooms. In such a phantasmagoria, what could be missing? The same thing that is missing in much of the media coverage of the information superhighway: the personal computer. What is driving the “telefuture” is not any convergence of films and TVs, consumer electronics and publishing, computers and games. What is driving the change is the onrush of computer technology invading and conquering all these domains. The computer industry is converging with the television industry in the same sense that the automobile converged with the horse, the TV with the nickelodeon, the word processing program with the typewriter, the computer-aided design program with the drafting board and digital desktop publishing with the Linotype machine and the letterpress. The computer industry feeds on the explosive advance of semiconductor and networking electronics: 1) the law of the microcosm, which shows that microchip cost-effectiveness rises by the square of the number of transistors crammed on a single chip, and 2) the law of the telecosm, which shows that computer cost-effectiveness rises by the square of the number of computers connected to networks. According to the famous projection of Intel Corp. chairman Gordon Moore, the number of transistors on a single chip will double every 18 months. According to the record of the last five years, the number of computers attached to networks is rising too fast to measure. Only by comprehending the full force of the computer juggernaut can one anticipate the future of the Information Age. Focusing on the technologies alone, however, is not enough, because the new technologies are often retrofit into failing industries and concepts. To grasp the telefuture, it is still necessary to see the domonetics of the technologies—their social and cultural effects and contexts. The microcosm and telecosm have generated a rich business and domestic culture—a supporting social fabric of PCs and network users—that not only nurtures, sustains, applies and expands the technologies but also is enriched and empowered by them. In positive feedback loops, the customers of the PC culture are also its creators and protagonists. If you keep your eyes on this culture, you can anticipate the sources and vectors of growth. If you focus on the hype of old industries—television and telephony, Hollywood and electronic games, consumer appliances and other diversionary devices—you will miss the real action. The Logic Of Technology Behind all the changes are the supply-side rhythms of creative destruction. Radical innovations sweep nearly unnoticed through the economy from obscure niches such as Woz’s garage, Bill Gates’ Basic, Bob Metcalfe’s ether, Bolt Beranek & Newman’s Internet, Carver Mead’s laboratories and Bob Noyce’s workbench. On the heels of these seminal tides come much expensive hype and hullabaloo from the established industry, which is trying to absorb, deflect or co-opt the threat. This rhythm of real enterprise and reactive public relations explains why the telefuture prophesied in Life After Television rushed in faster than expected, and why the key developments are often downplayed or misinterpreted today. The publicity is easier to see than the broad tides of change that have swept through society since 1989. Take John Malone and Tele-Communications Inc., for example. They are important not for the new dealmaking spectacles but for decades of enterprise that have created a new broadband network unique in the world. With links to 63 percent of America’s homes—coaxial lines with a capacity some 416,000 times the capacity of telephone twisted-pair wires and easily upgradeable to two-way communications—the cable industry commands a key resource for the telefuture. In 1989, however, as Malone consummated his network, he and TCI were still discussed by the press chiefly in the idiom of organized crime. Mostly financed by junk bonds, Cable TV was derived at telecommunications meetings as a conspiracy of political action committees—”PACs with coax”—foisting junk services on the American people. Malone and his colleagues appeared in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times chiefly in exposes of corporate chicanery. By 1993, though, the “cable czar” had reemerged as Dr. Malone, the reigning genius of America’s broadband future. TCI loomed as the spearhead of a cable industry that had become a unique American resource, putting the US as much as a decade ahead of Japan and Europe on the information superhighway. Even Malone could not keep up with the pell-mell pace of change. In the early summer of 1992, on a panel at a NewsCorp Conference, he told me, “There is no short-term need to accelerate the deployment of fiber optics” in the cable system. The winners would follow a strategy of “step-by-step, incremental change,” he told the crowd of news executives and Twentieth Century Fox movie and broadcasting magnates. But the logic of the technology soon engulfed him. Less than a year later, on April 12, 1993, Malone publicly committed his company to a $2 billion investment in fiber—to connect a non-incremental 90 percent of his customers over the following four years. On October 13, 1993, he sold out, probably at the top, to Raymond Smith’s Bell Atlantic Corp., once a sleepy-time regional Bell, now an entrepreneurial dervish on the digital highway. “There’s no time to waste in deploying this infrastructure,” Malone then explained. [ back to top ] [ page | 1 | 2 | 3 | ||
