An information technology visionary who writes compellingly about the
relationship between technology and economics, George Gilder is the
author of Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology
(1989), Wealth and Poverty (1981), and numerous other works. His 1990
book Life after Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and
American Life is now being issued by W.W. Norton Co. in a revised
paperback edition with five new chapters.
Gilder has been a fellow of the John F. Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard and is currently a senior fellow of the Discovery
Institute in Seattle. He lectures widely across the Country and around
the world and will be a featured speaker at the Educom'94 conference
this fall in San Antonio. Educom Review caught up with him just as he
was about to leave for Europe to present a speech at Cambridge
University.
Educom Review: You've used "A Convergence of Corpses" as the title for
the prologue to Life after Television, and you've said that mergers such
as the one recently attempted by Bell Atlantic and TCI "mostly miss the
point of the digital age." Who are all these corpses, and how are all
these mergers missing the point?
GILDER: The real driving force of all this information technology is the
triumph of the computer. Just as the personal computer essentially
displaced the mainframe over the past ten years, over the next ten years
the personal computer will displace the television set, the telephone,
and an array of other appliances. So companies that attempt to exploit
the opportunities of convergence by converging with TV sets, for
example, tend to fail, as 3DO seems already to have failed, precisely
because of that mistake. Meanwhile, Creative Labs was based on a less
exciting technology--a soundboard for the PC--but has become an enormous
company riding the tremendous ascendancy of
personal computing.
ER: So your advice to 3DO would have been . . . ?
GILDER: Well, my advice at the time was that they had better get
connected to computers and regard computers as the interactive
appliance. If they focused on the TV set, they would lose. And that's
what seems to have been happening.
Other errors are being made by companies that target the set-top box and
devote an enormous amount of design effort to squeezing computing power
into the price point and form factor of a consumer electronics set-top
box.
ER: Why did 3DO ignore your advice?
GILDER: Well, I guess they were just infatuated with television. They'd
come from founding MTV, and they imagined TV as an instrument with a
future that somehow commands larger markets than the personal computer.
But personal computers in homes are increasing ten times faster than
television sets, and PC owners spend fifteen hundred bucks for the
device itself and then another fifteen hundred bucks on software and
peripherals, and within that price point you can accomplish anything
that a set-top box or game machine can accomplish. And if you have
broadband connections, for example, over cable lines through a cable
modem, the PC can do anything the TV can do and do it just as well.
That's the key limitation today: bandwidth. As Andy Grove says, infinite
processing power will get you only so far with limited bandwidth. The
key to the next generation of computer development is coupling the
personal computer with broadband networks.
Today, the personal computer is crippled by its need to devote most of
its MIPs [million instructions per second], or a large portion of them,
to compressing and decompressing any images that it uses. Thus
teleconferencing, for example, and video telephones are so drastically
unsatisfactory because all the computer MIPs are devoted to compressing
and decompressing rather than to real computer functions.
Once the PC is connected to broadband networks, it will really ascend to
its dominant level in homes as well as offices. And that will be the
crucial opportunity for educational materials as well.
ER: You say in Life after Television that "TV ignores the reality that
people are not inherently couch potatoes; given a chance they talk back
and interact." Then how do you explain some of the disappointments of
interactivity, such as GTE's Cerritos project, or the US West/TCI
project in Denver, neither of which seemed to gain much loyalty from its
subscribers?
GILDER: The explanation is that they all use the TV, and the TV is
inherently a couch potato device, which is particularly lame at
presenting text. Yet text is a crucial part of multimedia communications
and interactivity. Those projects made the same error that 3DO made:
they converged with a corpse. Unless you're a necrophiliac, that's not
particularly gratifying.
ER: Alan Kay used the phrase "mouse potatoes" to express the concern
that the new media would be mass communications oriented and that
literacy would fall apart.
GILDER: Well, any instrument that creates "mouse potatoes" is going to
fail, because it's going to make people poorer. Markets expand in the
long run only if they are absolutely central industries in the economy--
if they're creating capital rather than depleting it. TV in general
dissipates and deflates human capital, and game machines are
distractions that fail to edify their users.
The people who use PCs generate wealth with them rather than merely
distract themselves, so they're willing to invest a lot more effort into
their PCs. They're willing to master the intricacies of use, and they're
also willing to contribute to the development of further applications.
In contrast, all these consumer electronics devices are mostly self-
limiting, because they don't contribute to wealth creation, but instead
actually distract people from their career and their higher pursuits.
ER: By emphasizing the extent to which people are different, don't you
run the risk of ignoring how much they are actually the same, that is,
of ignoring what we might uncharitably call the herd instinct that
dictates a lot of fashion, a lot of politics, and a lot of life?
GILDER: Well, I think that people are the same in relatively lower-level
ways, so if you have a medium that appeals chiefly to the way people are
the same, they're going to gravitate increasingly to prurient interests,
morbid fears and anxieties, and shocks and sensations. If you do that,
the whole culture will become depraved--and I think that's what happened
with the TV--whereas I think that if you appeal to people's special
curiosities and hobbies and career interests and other ambitions--if you
appeal to people's first choices rather than their lowest-common-
denominator choices--then the culture gravitates toward excellence
rather than toward mediocrity, toward distinction rather than prurient
interest and titillation.
ER: So what becomes of the herd instinct? Does it go away?
GILDER: There will always be certain things that people still want to do
in large numbers, but in general it's people as individuals or as
members of homes and families that can cement to more edifying
disciplines. A mob can just say yes or no, whereas an individual can
articulate, can express subtle and complex ideas, can respond to art,
can aspire toward God.
Rather than encouraging the mass tendencies of the population, we should
be trying to counteract them and to educate the population. Education is
a fulfillment of individual distinction and excellence; it shouldn't be
a pandering to mass taste and appetites. And to the extent that schools
do try to cater to their students rather than to teach them, the schools
will fail and will contribute to the general deterioration of learning.
ER: If we think of life before television as the age of the amateur
(with social life focused on the family piano, on amateur theater
groups, on sandlot baseball games), and life during television as the
age of the professional (with social life organized around boob tube
performances by millionaire actors, comedians, athletes, and
politicians), how should we think about the quality of life after
television? Will it help us back to the idyllic past of the amateur? Or
will it be better than our past as well our present?
GILDER: I think it will be better. I think the culture will take a form
more resembling the book culture than the TV culture. There are 55,000
books published in the United States every year. There's a religious
book market as big as the trade book market, and each of those markets
amount to about $2.5 billion. There are a huge number of successful
technical books and career books, and there's a wide diversity of
literature. I think the book market is a much better reflection of
American culture than the TV market, which I think is a perversion of
American culture.
In general, the interactive media culture will resemble book culture and
literary culture more than it will the current mass culture. You know,
the people who produce mass culture are the ultimate elitists. I've
often debated with them, and they'll say to me, "You don't understand,
George, the reason that the boob tube is an idiot box is that people
really are boobs. We've done market research. We know they're boobs."
Well, I think they just don't understand the business. Of course,
confronted with the boob tube, we're all boobs; when I get into a hotel
room at night and start clicking through channels, I get distracted by
the shocks and sensations just as anyone else would. The critical fact
is that a mass medium is no good whatsoever at conveying educated ideas;
if it happens to convey a sophisticated idea, that's just an accident.
I think the French were perfectly right in trying to exclude U.S.
television programs, because for the most part such programs are the
ultimate realization of mass taste, and they are depraved and
destructive. They are deeply destructive to American society,
particularly to any effort to educate anyone in it. And yet the schools
increasingly try to simulate the TV culture, which is their worst
betrayal!
ER: Simulate TV culture in what way?
GILDER: By having students read dumb books that seem to be simulations
of TV sensibility. By avoiding anything difficult. By trying to pander
to the kids, to entertain them rather than teach them.
ER: Compare two serious approaches to television: PBS and C-SPAN. Some
people have said that C-SPAN is what public television ought to be. What
do you think?
GILDER: C-SPAN now exists without the aid of public TV, and PBS works at
all only because of the garbage that's on all the other channels. Just
by being explicitly elitist, PBS can shine luminously in the darkness.
But beyond that, I just don't really believe any of these channels or
networks have a future. And, particularly, I don't think TV news has any
future at all. So I believe that although within the existing regime of
thirty channels or whatever, C-SPAN and PBS are better than the others,
it's all still a vast wasteland. A channel like C-SPAN will still have a
place in a world where you have one channel and it's yours, but
enterprises like PBS and CNN are resources only for a world in which
there are few channels and no control over them.
ER: Why is there no future for TV news?
GILDER: Because TV news is all governed by the two-minute rule, which
says that you can't devote more than two minutes to a story unless it's
a war or something. But the reason for that is not that people have any
particular desire for two-minute stories; to the contrary, people want
much more than two minutes on any story that actually interests them.
TV's two-minute rule exists because people will zap any story longer
than two minutes that doesn't interest them. And so network news is
guided entirely by that negative constraint, and within the two-minute
limit, it necessarily has to go for sensational images and crashes and
fires and murders and whatever.
News is getting worse and worse that way, and the only reason TV news
now succeeds is its timeliness and its ability to present video, but
newspapers will shortly be able to present video and pictures and
everything else in just as timely a way as television does; moreover,
the newspaper of the future will be able to give you access to archives
and to advertisements that actually step you through to the transaction
itself, a process that requires text.
ER: You've pointed out in Life after Television that some 70 percent of
the costs of a film go for distribution and advertising, saying, "In
every industry--from retailing to insurance--the key impact of the
computer-networking revolution is to collapse the costs of distribution
and remove the middlemen." What's the future of the middlemen in
educational systems? Do you agree with Lew Perelman's thesis in School's
Out that hyperlearning will replace, rather than merely reform,
conventional education?
GILDER: Yeah, I agree mostly with Lew. I don't think that things change
so abruptly as he implies they will, but it's clear that because schools
are centralized and dominated by these educationist elites, they're
ineffective in teaching children. And so I think in the same way as the
computer has tended to break down all existing hierarchies, monopolies,
pyramids, and power grids of established industrial society, it will
break down centralized educational institutions as well. There is no
correlation--period--between spending per student and performance per
student, adjusted for education and income of parents. But there is a
very statistically significant negative correlation between the amount
of bureaucracy per student and the performance of the student.
So it's clear that the middlemen in education are not merely dead wood,
they are also a destructive force, and they actually prevent education.
It's teachers that are needed, and teachers don't need much supervision.
The computer essentially replaces vertically organized institutions with
horizontally organized institutions. It distributes intelligence and
power rather than concentrates them; it endows teachers with authority
and responsibility rather than reducing teachers to being instruments of
some educational bureaucracy. And the reason teachers don't care about
anything but money as far as their organizations are concerned is that
the bureaucrats have destroyed the experience of teaching and the
gratification of teaching. This is why the schools are such perverse
institutions. As Lew Perelman says, academia is a socialist bureaucracy
as big as the Soviet government at its height, and it is going to fail
just about as cataclysmically.
ER: Do your observations apply from top to bottom? Do they also apply to
higher education?
GILDER: Well, I think there's greater diversity in higher education--
quite a lot of diversity--and that the schools people think are good are
mostly bad, and some of the schools people think are bad are in fact
quite good. For example, I think about 70 percent of the courses at
Harvard are useless. You know less when you finish than when you
started. All those endless sociology courses and social science courses
and social psychology and political science courses, and the endless
efforts to retrieve some inkling of truth from Marxism!
You know, it's as though they were still teaching some pre-Copernican
astronomy--they're really obscurantists in those institutions. It
reflects the collapse of the elite culture in the United States, but I
think there are a lot of other cultures out there, and a lot of schools
that people don't pay attention to are in fact a lot better. Schools
like Hillsdale, schools like Thomas Aquinas.
There are also schools like CalTech and Harvey Mudd--schools that are
excellent in science and technology. These are the best schools in the
country, because the one thing this culture does well is science and
technology. One of the real jokes is when you find MIT increasingly
trying to teach students the humanities. I think the humanities as
taught in existing universities are mostly perverse: Nihilist,
relativist, feminist, and Marxist. Marxism is just a completely
worthless mode of study, and yet it's pursued intently at a great many
elite universities as though there's something still in it.
ER: What would you recommend to a 17-year-old?
GILDER: Well, I think there are two possibilities. One is, if such 17-
year-old boys or girls really have their act together, have strong
convictions, and know what they want to study, then it would be
interesting to attend one of the elite universities and be kind of a
counterforce there and create an adversarial culture. Publications like
the Dartmouth Review, the Salient at Harvard, and the Prospect at
Princeton are part of a whole series of conservative publications across
the country that are kinds of centers of resistance and rebellion on
these corrupt campuses, and that's probably a pretty good education, to
pursue that course. In general, however, I'd recommend getting a
technical or scientific education, because I don't think the schools are
teaching anything else.
ER: Granting that technological advances will have a great impact on the
general culture, don't you fear that money will have an even greater
impact? Are cities with thirty trashy radio stations better served than
towns with only two, and are they not the victims of investors who are
chasing maximum ad revenues? Have the 55,000 trade books published last
year in the United States produced a better general culture? Or has the
culture been affected mainly by the small number of books--and movies
and television shows--that were hyped into best-seller-dom?
GILDER: I think that America is still the world's leading economy and it
produces a tremendous amount of art and literature that elude the elite
media and elite institutions and elite critical vessels. If American
culture were really summed up by TV culture, there would be no leading
software company, no world-leading
scientific/educational enterprise, no globally ascendant computing
industry. Bioengineering wouldn't be centered in the United States, and
so forth.
So I really don't think this elite mass culture--and I believe it is
elitist, contrived by elites to pander to mass prurience and anxiety--
can generate anything worthwhile, and I don't think it does. The actual
success of the United States does not stem from what the media generally
treat--in other words, phenomena like the personal computer that are
incomparably more important than phenomena like Madonna.
ER: What is the hardest part of your ideas for people to comprehend?
I'm sure that many of the people in charge of the converging corpses of
Hollywood, TV, cable, and publishing have read your books or heard you
speak. Why do you think they can't get the message?
GILDER: Well, I think a lot of them do get the message, and the ones who
do are actually doing well. The ones who are pursuing the PC incurred
nothing but upside surprises last year. At the beginning of the year it
was predicted by Bill Gates and Andy Grove--the world's leading experts
on the subject--that between 34 and 37 million personal computers would
be sold in 1993; the actual number turned out to be almost 50 million
computers--about 30 or 40 percent more than expected.
And all the people who produce software and peripherals for personal
computers and personal computer networks prospered. The computer
industry grew 20 percent or so last year, while consumer electronics was
stagnant. A lot of people developed CD-ROMs, which were a $5-billion
business last year, up from virtually nothing a few years ago.
The cable industry, which I consulted with a lot and which I think I
influenced a lot, recently launched a wide array of products to connect
computers over the cable network, and those products are going to be
very important and valuable. I predict that during the next five years
or so the computer industry will yield more products for cable companies
than the TV industry does.
ER: What advice would you give to the president of a college or
university?
GILDER: I think a kind of organizing principle, such as St. John's Great
Books Program or St. Thomas Aquinas's orientation toward the Catholic
worldview, can animate an educational experience, whereas trying to be a
smorgasbord of secular social theory is going to result in both a bad
experience for students and failure as an educational institution.
You've got to be willing to teach some specific thing. You can't adopt
some relativist posture, because that will mean that fanatics will
dominate the institution, and most of these institutions are dominated
by propagandists rather than by teachers.
ER: And what would you advise college and university presidents to do
with regard to information technology?
GILDER: They should digitize their libraries and make them available
from student rooms over computer networks. They should in general not
restrict the resources of the college to the classrooms in it, but reach
out from their own classrooms to students around the world who want to
take courses with the excellent teachers available, while at the same
time allowing the students on campus to reach out around the world. In
other words, make your educational institution one that summons the best
from universities everywhere, rather than focusing on the faculty and
students that happen to be assembled at your particular location.