THE COSMIC CAPITALISTS

The Cosmic Capitalist understands that reality is being altered by INELUCTABLE HISTORICAL FORCES OF UNPRECEDENTED MAGNITUDE. There’s Moore’s Law, which describes the rapid doubling of performance of the microprocessor. There’s Metcalfe’s Law, which says the value of a computer network is equal to the square of the number of nodes. And there’s the Law of Gatesian Cultural Hegemony, which says that every cockamamie notion that bubbles up amongst the digitheads of Silicon Valley quickly spreads and infects the psyche of all of corporate America.

Hence, the culture of casual dress, gee-whiz futurology, and acne-era speech patterns is tie-dyeing the world of the white collar. Chrysler is running TV commercials that portray its design teams as a bunch of technoweenies in a garage. Alcoa is tearing down the walls in its corporate offices to give the executive suite the open-air flexibility of a start-up software company. And suddenly there are squads of Cosmic Capitalists across the business landscape, all of them co-religionists in the faith of Technomarxism: They share the belief that technology ineluctably drives history and that we live at the dawn of a new and unprecedented age.

The cover story in the July issue of Wired embodies Technomarxism with almost psychotic perfection. “Two metatrends — fundamental technological change and a new ethos of openness — will transform our world into the beginnings of a global civilization, a new civilization of civilizations, that will blossom through the coming century,” write Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden. Their piece, “The Long Boom,” reverberates with the tones and phrases of Cosmic Capitalism: “relentless process . . . unprecedented alignment . . . powerful forces . . . unassailable trends . . . inextricably linked . . . phenomenal growth . . . five waves of technology . . . unprecedented global integration . . . completely new types of work. . . .” The authors celebrate the transformative powers of telecom technology, genetic technology, nanotechnology, and microtechnology and predict a break with all recorded history in the form of an endless boom economy.

Gary Hamel’s cover story in the June 23 Fortune echoes the breathless wonder: “We live in a discontinuous world — one where digitalization, deregulation, and globalization are profoundly reshaping the industrial landscape. What we see is a dramatic proliferation of new economic life forms: virtual organizations, global consortia, net based commerce, ad infinitum. . . . We have reached the end of incrementalism in the quest to create new wealth. . . . There is an inflection point where the quest for divergence is transformed into a quest for convergence, and a new collective viewpoint emerges.”

Most puny non-cosmic mortals cannot even fathom the awesome, universe- shattering magnitude of the changes we are seeing today. “We are at that very point in time when a 400-year-old age is dying and another is struggling to be born,” announces Dee Ward Hock, a 67-year-old management guru. For most Technomarxists, Hock’s timeline is far too short. They think the breakup of the Bell system is the most significant event since the invention of the printing press half a millennium ago, the microprocessor is the most important advance since Arabic symbolic mathematics two millennia ago, and the mouse is the greatest invention since the mouse.

You’ve got to think absolutely, positively, supremely big. You don’t want to make five-year plans. You want to make thousand-year plans. You don’t just want to think about business. You want to envision a totally new world.

After all, we live in an age of transition from a power society to a knowledge society, from a hierarchical society to a networked society, from a skim-milk society to a 2-percent-fat-milk society, and in this new age everyone has to make lots of predictions. In their Wired article, like a Nostradamus on Prozac, Schwartz and Leyden envision a glorious future. The Net, according to them, will be the main medium of the 21st century. By about 2002, Europe will have integrated into one nation. Around 2005, 20 percent of Americans will teleshop for groceries, videophones will catch on, labor shortages will hit Germany. Around 2012, gene therapy for cancer will be perfected. By 2018, micromachines will do cell repair. By 2019, Americans will have made a multicultural society, and the global civilization of civilizations will already be three years old. By 2020, cars will run on hydrogen. By about 2000 — just 30 months away! — a spirit of generosity will have returned to the American soul.

Cosmic Capitalists aren’t making bets on the future; they are oracles. They know history, and they know individuals don’t make history Technology makes history, and those who understand technology understand the forces creating the New Man. That’s why the big magazines can’t go three issues without a story taking us inside the cerebral cortex of Bill Gates. His book is called The Road Ahead. What else do you need? Apparently we need more, because side by side with Gates’s book are shelves and shelves of similar volumes with titles like What Comes Next and What Comes After What Comes Next.

Today’s Cosmic Capitalist shares the same perspective as the French revolutionaries of 1789, the art-world revolutionaries of 1913, the Russian revolutionaries of 1917, the hippie revolutionaries of 1968, and (to some extent) the Newtoid revolutionaries of 1994. The past is irrelevant. The future starts now. Material forces push us forward. Human nature is repealed. Religion is irrelevant. The wise are clued in to the emerging forces. We are seeing the birth of a New Man. And we — lucky we — are here for the start of it all. The excitement is matched only by the delicious ecstasy of self- aggrandizement. All history revolves around us!

If you’re not hip to the cutting edge, it’s off to the ash heap of history. As John Koa, formerly of Harvard Business School and now of Stanford, exhorts his students and clients, “You must ruthlessly trash outmoded obstructions to creativity: standard operating procedures, protocols, norms of behavior, a confining brand image, the revered memory of old successes.”

Cosmic Capitalists live for new ideas, new thinking, new ways of thinking. Even the rules of speech have got to go. You’ve got to eliminate any hint of a prose style and instead talk like a 15-year-old joystick junkie. Next year’s cost projections? They’re insanely great. How’d the IPO go? It was really cool. The San Jose conference? Flipped my nuts. Serious mind rub. Real- time life experience.

As the fellows at Wired say: “Open, good. Closed, bad. Tattoo it on your forehead.” And boy, are the Cosmic Capitalists open. Relentlessly avant- garde, the Cosmic Capitalist tries to manage his company so that it will resemble the inside of a popcorn popper. Hierarchies are officially flattened (while salary structures are quietly steepened). Companies like Dreamworks throw out job titles because titles are confining, old wave (just don’t take Jeffrey Katzenberg’s parking space). At Inhale Therapeutic Services, CEO Robert Chess got rid of executive offices; now everybody sits in large cubicles called “bullpens.” At Oticon, a Danish hearing-aide manufacturer, there are no permanent offices. The desks are on wheels, and employees roll themselves around and bunch up according to the task of the moment. Oticon is nearly paperless; snail mail is received in the “paper room,” and if you want to take the document back to your desk you’re supposed to scan it into the computer and shred the original (the shards descend in a clear tube through the work area and into the bin below).

At Procter & Gamble, elevators (which are thought to destroy conversations) are out, while escalators (which are thought to enhance them) are in. Corridors are wide, with couches at odd intervals to encourage schmoozing. IDEO, a design company, has long rolls of butcher paper spread out over conference tables for brainstorming and doodling. Kodak has “humor rooms” with games, toys, and Monty Python videos.

Every issue, Fast Company, the bimonthly that is the Pravda of the new movement, runs a “jobtifiesofthefuture” column, which is so outside-the- box the editors can’t even bring themselves to put spaces between the words. Tom Grueskin is chief imagination officer at Gateway 2000. Courtney Dickinson is a culture team leader at Sapient, a systems integration company. Keami Lewis is manager of culture development at Rosenbluth Travel. Marian Salzman is director of the Department of the Future of TBWA Chiat/Day in Amsterdam. Bob Heckman is chief growth officer at the Thomas Group, a consulting firm.

You thought your kid was just wasting time at that alternative high school where smoking cigarettes was a form of gym class, but in reality he was preparing to serve as a consultant to a Cosmic Capitalist with a $ 600- million-a-year revenue stream. In addition, the fiftyish cutting-edge robber baron wants to accumulate a slouching entourage of 23-year-old, nose-pierced, head-shaved, fingernail-painted, tattooed grungeoids to prove he’s got the next generation’s most creative minds at his beck and call.

It would be unheard of to go into a Cosmic Capitalist office and find a bunch of people in blue suits, white shirts, and red ties. Instead, to prove they are freethinking bohemians, Cosmic Capitalists tend to wear the Microsoft uniform: Timberlands, khakis, faded blue-flannel shirts. Others, Hollywood influenced, go in for collarless linen shirts or the $ 2,000-suit- with-a-black-T-shirt look. If they’re fat, they favor loud sweaters. Those with strong cheekbones can sport the really tiny European eyeglasses that give you about as much peripheral vision as an astigmatic worm.

To show that he is not an uptight organization man, the Cosmic Capitalist needs a wacky accouterment. The accouterment of choice for Dreamworks’s Katzenberg (and many others) is the Supersoaker water cannon. It has boyish charm, and it’s a subtle reminder of power, since a company pooh-bah can soak an underling, but an underling would never retaliate. Netscape’s Webmaster, Robert Andrews, uses a nerf gun. Cosmic Capitalists who play in a middle-aged rock band with a name like “The Prostate Pretenders” are beyond number. All Cosmic Capitalists practice Playfulness With a Purpose, the preferred personality style for ambitious creatives.

To decorate their own spaces, Cosmic Capitalists must have a kitsch collection, even a small one. Some people collect yo-yos. Richard Saul Wurman, an entrepreneur who stages conferences where Cosmic Capitalists pay big bucks to mind-meld, collects ashtrays. Further down the corporate scale, employees decorate their cubicles with the gewgaws of a life far more exciting than the one they actually live. A skiboard may hang from the ceiling, next to an ominously broken piece of bungee cord. The remnants of a boyhood lust for comic books may be taped to the side of a terminal. Women’s cubicles feature Curious George books.

All this proves that the Cosmic Capitalist isn’t just a businessman. He is an artist. “Ever since the day you first wrapped your fingers around a crayon, ” the new Apple Computer ads begin, “you were driven by the need to create.” Businessmen used to like to describe themselves as warriors; now artists are the role models of choice. Silicon Valley is Paris in the Twenties, except that the creative product for Hemingway and Fitzgerald was expat novels, whereas now it’s video compression systems and the eye candy for computer games with titles like “Serial Killer” and “Flesh Eater.”

Back in 1964, Marshall McLuhan heralded the Cosmic Capitalist age when he wrote in Understanding Media, “The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The next logical step would seem to be . . . to bypass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness.” And lo, it has come to pass. The Cosmic Capitalist wanders the halls of his silicon sweatshop preaching the gospel of the new age. Linear thinking is dead, and the new era beckons when executives unshackle themselves from the mindsets and habits of the past and soar into a realm of unfettered imagination.

It used to be that this modernist ethos — this desire to be free of history, to leap out into a brave new future — flourished only in politics (where it created the disastrous Marxist utopias) or in architecture (where it created the disastrous urban schemes of Le Corbusier) or in literature and the arts (where it led to a burst of creativity and then decades of exhaustion). But just when you thought the modernist impulse was so old and outmoded that it would die of senescence, it hits the high-tech valleys where the silicon gurus march, blithely unaware of the generations that have trod this path before them. The Cosmic Capitalists have seen the future. God help us all.

David Brooks is senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.