George Gilder, Michael Milken, and the imp of the polymathic perverse
David Weinberger participated in a panel at the Ninth Annual Milken Institute Global Conference this week, and it rankled me. Rather than ask him what he was doing hobnobbing with billionaire felons, I sought the answer elsewhere. I think I found it in George Gilder’s book: Telecosm - the World after Bandwidth Abundance. George Gilder is a good writer. He’s engaging and he has a sense of the perverse that only a Ripon Society Republican could embrace. He writes anti-evolutionary claptrap for the Discovery Institute, and his prescience regarding market movements is second only to his scientific acumen.
“I don’t think Internet valuations are crazy, I think they reflect a fundamental embrace of huge opportunities. Virtually all forecasts estimate something like a thousandfold rise in Internet traffic over the next five years. That means that if you are an Internet company today, you are dealing with only a tenth of 1 percent of your potential traffic in just a couple of years. In 10 years, at this rate, there would be a millionfold increase.”
George Gilder, Wired Magazine, 9/1999
In Telecosm, Gilder lionizes Milken. He hews to a Chicago School naivete reminiscent of all the adolescent masturbatory fantasists who found libertarianism via Ayn Rand’s novelistic fiction. And Al Greenspan. Republicans do love their felons, whether they’re the ones who gutted it out for Nixon following Watergate, or the cheesy paranoid marines who took the fall for senescent Reagan in the Iran/Contra gangsterism. Milken seems to be one of Gilder’s favorite felons because he put together sufficient capital for the criminals at MCI to work the miracle of abundant bandwidth a little more quickly, but generally in about the same amount of time that it would have happened in a non-criminal investment context.
You guys hate these rants don’t you.
Here’s the point, let me take you back to the glory days when the Nazi pope was free of the burdens of office and even of faith, and was able to consort with mild mannered ineffectual post-modernists. There’s a loose connection here… work with me. One Johanna Mehan is quoted as saying “This distinction between public and private parallels, but is not identical to, the distinction he [Habermas] draws between system and lifeworld. On the one hand, action in the modern world is coordinated by systems which function according to means-end rationality; the market is a paradigmatic example of such a system… On the other hand, actions are coordinated primarily by communicatively mediated norms and values, and by the socially defined ends and meanings which constitute the fabric of the lifeworld.” Now Johanna and Jurgen have something in common I think with David.
At the Milken Conference, the white collar crook proudly hosted a couple of winners of the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics named in Honor of Alfred Nobel. One can’t really call that a Nobel prize for a couple of reasons. The first is of course that it isn’t. And the second is that gave it to a bunch of gamesters from Chicago, people like Milton Friedman, so how could it be? That aside, there’s Milken, onstage with Scholes and Becker, brilliant men for all their University of Chicago reluctance to deal with the gordian knot of economics in any way but with a sword. And you can see where this all turns… fellows in the Hoover Institution (they honored that fellow with an institution), felons from the federal institution, a childish billionaire’s faith in rotten-child economics and simplistic understatement of sociological complexities… oh Becker, oh Habermas, oh Weinberger… you don’t even smell the brimstone when Milken and Ratzinger appear.
There are all kinds of rhetorical fallacies in the associations I’m making. While George Gilder doesn’t “believe in” evolution, and while he does believe in Michael Milken and Intelligent Design, what does that have to do with the price of bandwidth in a municipal wireless context? And why drag the good Dr. Weinberger into this besides the fact that - like Habermas - he skirts close to something Hannah Arendt would have recognized, that thing - as David Cesarani noted - that bespeaks the tension between “the monstrous and the mundane.”
