Q: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None. Bill Gates just redefines Darkness TM as the new industry standard.
— Ubiquitous Internet joke
HE IS SO RICH, his new $ 40 million mansion’s guardhouse costs $ 900,000. So overexposed, his tote of press mentions in the Nexis database dwarfs that of Dennis Rodman and Pamela Anderson Lee combined. He is the sachem of software, future Lord of the Internet, the world’s wealthiest man. And now, Bill Gates, the 41-year-old founder, chairman, and CEO of Microsoft, is angling for a new epithet — Most Loathed.
Gates’s omnipresence — with his software running on perhaps 90 percent of the 100 million personal computers around the world, his online/cable news network MSNBC, the bestselling book tours, the convention keynote speeches, the coast-to-coast prophesying and promoting and barnstorming — is inspiring an opposite if not yet equal reaction of Gates-bashing, especially on the Internet. The venue is fitting. With Microsoft’s Internet Explorer poised to take the World Wide Web by storm and the company’s other Internet tools proliferating like pods from the mother ship, you can now see emerging on the Net a cargo cult in reverse — awash in Gates’s technology, the Internet villagers don’t worship but revile the man.
Gates aspires to dominate the Internet with software, but he already dominates it in spirit. There are literally hundreds of anti-Bill sites on the Web, each spewing a different tint of bile: There are the Netizens who rail against Microsoft’s rigging the whole game, from operating systems to browsers to content. There are the permanently hostile fans of the Macintosh, who have never forgiven Gates for aping the “look and feel” of their favorite computer and then beating it into submission. There are the libertarian paranoids, who dissect Chairman Bill’s many Orwellian pronouncements (“We could reach the point where cameras record most of what goes on in public,” he wrote, unconcerned, in The Road Ahead, whose new paperback version has just climbed to No. 3 on the New York Times bestseller list). Finally, there are the polymorphous Gates-haters who defy classification, except perhaps in the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association.
The sites are largely unfair, petulant, virulent, coarse, and deeply, seriously satisfying. Thematically, there is an impressive cohesiveness. Web- site names include the “Microsoft Hate Page,” which differs only slightly from the “Official Microsoft Hate Page” (with pictures), “The Official Anti- Microsoft Homepage,” “Legions of Microsoft Haters,” which is not to be confused with the “National Society of Microsoft Haters” (South Africa Chapter), “Microsoft is Watching,” “Microsoft Democracy,” and “Microsoft is Shafty” — with Russian, French, and Scottish versions.
There are also more Gates-centric titles like “Bill Gay!” “Why I hate Bill,” “Punch Bill Gates” (with a hit count tallying the number of “billionaire software moguls assaulted — 5513”), “StopGates” (subtitled “Before he stops you — Welcome, Happy Holidays Friends!”), “Bill Gates Fountain of Dreams” (people recount their Gates dreams, which usually conclude with the dreamer getting fired), “Bill Gates Exploding Head,” and “Bill Gates in Hell — Just Some Light Reading,” whose narrative begins “Bill Gates dies in a car accident.”
Gates paraphernalia includes phony computer programs like “Microsoft Bill,” which comes “with a free subpoena attached from all major software manufacturers who may be plagiarized by your use of this program.” His book is renamed The Toad Head and compared to Mein Kampf. And in case the point is muffled, Gates is pictured in the Fuhrer’s outfit with a Microsoft armband.
His wife is called “wallet chaser” and “pocket protector,” he is called a ” gangster,” “Big Brother,” a “robber baron,” and “Rainman.” And when somebody truly wishes to deliver a low blow to the one-time programmer, as columnist Robert X. Cringley did in an online interview, he simply says Gates “hasn’t written code since 1983. . . . He’s a businessman.”
Online joke collections are scrupulously subdivided into Bill Gates, General Microsoft, MS-Doze, Windows NT, etc. Light-bulb jokes are a staple:
Q: How many Microsoft support staff does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Four. One to ask, “What is the registration number of the light bulb?” One to ask, “Have you tried rebooting it?” Another to ask, “Have you tried reinstalling it?” And the last one to say, “It must be your hardware because the light bulb in our office works fine.”
There are also higher-concept sites like the “Why Bill Gates is Richer Than You” page, which notes numerous similarities in concurrent New Yorker pieces, one on Bill Gates, the other on autism (Gates often rocks back and forth when conversing). From the Gates piece: “He has planned a full-size trampoline for the house he is building.” From the autism piece: “The home of one autistic family had a ‘well-used trampoline, where the whole family at times likes to jump and flap their arms.'”
Another site constructs scenes with Gates as the “new ruler” of NBC, casting himself in all the hit shows:
From Friends:
RACHEL: “Bill, you’re such a dork!”
BILL: “You’re fired.”
From Seinfeld:
BILL: “Let’s make this show about something.”
JERRY: “You can’t. The show is about nothing.”
BILL: “You’re fired.”
Like termination and autism, Satan is a recurring motif. One picture includes a pentagram with the Microsoft logo in the center, and there are Web sites like “Proof Bill Gates is the Devil” and “Proof Bill Gates is the Antichrist.” The latter is one of the more elaborate efforts arguing that Gates may be Lucifer’s trainbearer. When assigning numeric computer-language ASCII values to each letter of Gates’s name, then adding “three” for William Gates III, you arrive at the mark of the beast, 666. (This theory is gaining currency among the end-times adepts of the evangelical community; professional apocalypticians like Dr. Jack Van Impe have noted that Gates’s ghostwriter has come out in favor of “a permanent, wearable recording device which would be turned on at all times and store every conversation one has” — Antichrist technology, for sure.)
Microsoft did not respond to numerous requests for reaction to this Gates- hating frenzy, though its lawyers are usually pretty good about getting in touch with poison-pen Web authors like the one who’s been posting “The Secret Diary of Bill Gates,” in which “Gates” lists his top ten Microsoft innovations, including “predatory pricing, the Nerd interview, ruthless competition, competitor crushing and kicking them when they’re down.”
I turned instead to Jack Shafer, deputy editor of Slate (Microsoft’s online magazine). Speaking from the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., Shafer dismissed the whole Gates-bashing phenomenon “as the pure psychological frailty of envy. . . . I think if any of these people put half the effort into creating software products that they did into their hate- Gates sites, maybe they could make some money, too.”
But surely there is more to the deep vein of aggression that has turned Gates-bashing into a near fullcontact sport, with competitors, even on the record, calling Gates “a squirt” and equating dealings with him to being ” raped.” Lotus president Jeffrey Papows has revealed he and Sun Microsystems president Scott McNealy are “co-captains of the I-hate-Bill-Gates fan club. We just couldn’t decide which of us hates him more.” And an IBM official once said that he “would like to put an ice pick in Gates’s head.”
To his many enemies, Gates represents a historic olio of industrialist- inspired ill will — embodying the monopolistic aggressiveness of John D. Rockefeller, the naked ambition of Donald Trump during his decadent “short- fingered vulgarian” phase (as Spy dubbed it), and the hygienic negligence of Howard Hughes. There is also the fact that Gates, in the words of one industry source, is “a total honkin’ dork.” To critics, this cannot be exaggerated — and not just because of the obvious (Gates’s anachronistic, bowlish thatch of hair, unstyled in the manner of Franciscan-monk-cum-Turtles- tambourine-man). Cull the voluminous record, like the seminal Gates-bashing biography Hard Drive, and Gates’s loathing is a charge easily substantiated:
He used to eat unmixed Tang powder while writing computer programs. He has persistent dandruff. His mother color-coordinated his clothes (blue days, beige days) until he was well into his twenties. Isaac Asimov is among his favorite writers. His pick-up lines have included asking a girl what she made on her SATs. He used to watch videotaped physics lectures on Saturday nights. His handlers have had to schedule haircuts for him on photo-shoot days, since that is the only way they can be sure his oft-greasy locks will be washed.
Allow for the fact that most Net denizens don’t have handlers, and what you see here is a taxonomically precise description of 80 percent of all Netheads. In other words, Gates loathing is a disguised form of selfloathing.
And here is the corollary: As long as self-obsession endures, the Internet will be overrun with Gatesobsession. The greatest geek ever will haunt all the lesser geeks. As Douglas Coupland put it in his novel Microserfs, Gates will be “semi-visible, at all times, kind of like the dead grandfather in the Family Circus cartoons. Bill is a moral force, a spectral force, a force that shapes, a force that molds. A force with thick, thick glasses.”
by Matt Labash
