Keeping Score with the Digital Elite

By Bradley W. Bloch

Now that our exuberance has given way to something less irrational, we will each have certain recollections of the Great Internet Frenzy that appear to us with even greater poignancy than they did when they occurred. One memory that keeps returning to me - begging to be prodded and poked like a loose tooth - is of a gathering of the digital elite that took place in Silicon Alley at the end of February, just as the Nasdaq was hitting its peak.

By midway through the second day of the conference - dubbed Silicon Alley 2000 - the collective satisfaction of the thousand or so attendees had hit fever pitch, and for good reason. What with Sam Donaldson fairly squirming with glee as he described the rejuvenating powers of working on ABC.com, Ed Koch making a surprise appearance to congratulate the assembled digerati on becoming New York’s second largest economic force (while, naturally, plugging his new Web site), and Mark Green giving an early stump speech as he guns for Gracie Mansion, it would have taken Buddha-like indifference not to feel like you were at the center of the center of the world.

It would be easy in retrospect to poke fun at the giddiness that prevailed, but to do so would be missing the point. For even in the most irrationally exuberant times, Internet self-satisfaction - like related varieties in Hollywood and Washington - is a complicated phenomenon. Because just about the time you start feeling pretty good about yourself, you realize that the person sitting next to you - who was just written up in Silicon Alley Reporter or The Industry Standard - feels even better about herself, which makes your own satisfaction seem so...provincial. So now instead of being happy you have not one but two reasons to be depressed: first, because someone else in close proximity is doing better than you, and second, because you actually allowed yourself be happy in the first place, which is surely a sign that you are losing your edge. In the twenty-first century global village, provincialism gets its own digital scarlet letter.

This is where things stood - a state of collective cognitive dissonance - when Douglas Rushkoff took the stage. Rushkoff, who is a professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and the author of seven books on new media and popular culture, is equal parts Marshall Macluhan and Jackie Mason. He’s from the physical comedy school of social criticism, contorting his body when talking about Real Media’s people-stuck-to-flypaper ad campaign.

Rushkoff’s message that day was simple - and far more poignant now than it was that afternoon: Everyone in the audience needed to lighten up. He had been spending time with a book entitled Homo Ludens - Man the Player - written, as it happens, on the eve of the decidedly unplayful Second World War. The book’s central premise, as Rushkoff presented it, is thatmankind’s self-actualization occurs as we move along the continuum from survival to fun. Fun is where the innovation and creativity - the raw materials of the Next Big Things - are mined. So in order to keep the New Economy rolling along, we had to treat it like a game. All of it - the investor presentations, the frantic marketing campaigns, the last-minute new product tinkerings - is just a cross between The Truman Show and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, in which we are merely contestants. "None of you," Rushkoff reminded us several times, "are going to starve."

In our current morning-after sobriety, when some of those staff meetings around the Foosball table are starting to look pretty embarrassing, Rushkoff’s call for more play may seem dubious. But he was right in pointing out the critical role that insouciance has in innovation, including that at the core of both Silicon Alley and Silicon Valley. "We were interested in playing with toys," Dan Sokol, one of the Valley’s pioneers, recounted in a recent New York Times article. And Rushkoff was right, too, to rail against those in the game who aren’t having fun, whose jargon-filled endeavors smack of me-too desperation - those very people against whom the current shakeout is directed.

At the same time, however, I had certain problems with Rushkoff’s message. For one, I couldn’t help but think, That’s easy for you to say, pal - you’re up there. It’s easy to say everything’s a game when you’re one of the winners, which Rushkoff - much-heralded guru, magna cum laude from Princeton, author of seven books, yada, yada - indisputably is. Conspicuous insouciance, after all, is a timeworn gambit of the fabulously successful.

This is what I was thinking when it was time for the Q&A, and I struggled to distill my objections into something fitting the form of a question. Rushkoff had drawn a bunch of interlocking pyramids to illustrate his talk; the largest one had "LUDENS" at the apex and "$URVIVAL" written at the base. So I asked how far down the pyramid he thought he could apply his "Don’t Worry, Be Happy" philosophy.

Rushkoff immediately picked up on what I was getting at, and shrugged his shoulders and puckered his face into a "Whattaya gonna do?" grimace. "It’s difficult," he admitted. "But you know, I’ve been to downtrodden villages in South Africa, where people have nothing, and there are people there that manage to be incredibly happy. Sometimes fatalism can be very liberating."

As Rushkoff moved to the next question, it occurred to me that he had tossed out the kernel of a profound truth. On the back of a handout advertising a panel discussion, I scrawled a diagram of my own:

Perhaps, all things being equal, happiness has a bipolar distribution - it’s easiest to be content when you have everything or nothing -- Ut Caesar ut nihil, as the Romans used to say. And it is clear that we are talking about scarcity and plenty in more than simply economic terms. Material well-being is often bundled with less-tangible things like access, opportunity, and so on, that collectively do a great deal to dictate quality of life. Of the first state nothing more needs to be said; of the second, one need only to recall the rich traditions in literature, religion and philosophy that celebrate privation. "I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive," Henry Miller began Tropic of Cancer, his last-ditch attempt to give meaning to the pathos of his comically disappointing life.

My chart also provided me with a theoretical underpinning for why it is that things so often get worse before they get better: it’s the moving down the slope to get from one side to the other. Of course, sudden changes of fortune do take place. The most moving story in Hollywood isn’t anything dreamed up by Steven Spielberg, but rather the hope of getting discovered at the corner drugstore. And what we envy in those people is not so much their good fortune as its very suddenness - their exemption from the arduous and uncertain journey. Everyone wants to be resurrected, but nobody wants to die.

But there was a final problem I had with Rushkoff’s comments: If life is a game, when does the scorekeeping end? After all, if Rushkoff lamented the death of play in the Internet world, surely the relentless tallying was largely responsible. In the primordial days of Silicon Alley’s Homebrew Club, the only thing at stake was bragging rights. All of that changed when money - fantastic, laughable sums of money - began changing hands. There is nothing that unsettles one’s judgment like watching a friend get really rich.

But perhaps the recent turn of events has resolved this issue. The current downturn is not enough to cripple the New Economy, only hobble it a bit. IPOs have been postponed as a more critical eye is turned toward long-term viability. People are no longer recalculating the value of their portfolios a dozen times a day. If the scorekeeping has not stopped, it has at least become less rabid. And it is hard to argue that this is a bad thing.