Internet Envy
The fact that the Internet will make life better
for all humankind has long been noted, even on the East Coast. What seems to
have struck the East Coast only recently is that the Internet is making a
smaller subset of all humankind--people who start Internet-related companies or
join them before they go public--incredibly wealthy. The New York Times
reported as much on its front page recently, so you know
it's probably true.
Out here in cyberland, people have been aware of
this fact for several years. Indeed we have talked of little else since about
September 1996, which is the last time anyone mentioned a book except in the
context of Amazon.com. The basic anecdote--variations on "When I knew him in
college he was stoned all the time ... two years ago he was living in a
corrugated box on his ex-wife's compost pile (we all actually pitched in to buy
him a new futon!) ... then last week they had their IPO, and now he's worth
$350 million"--declined long ago from fresh conversational gambit through
staple to cliché.
So what's new? Money has
always been a fraught topic. A New York writer who regularly mines his sex life
and longings for material begged off an invitation to write about the Internet
IPO phenomenon for
Slate
on the grounds that his feelings about
money are too personal and complex. And envy didn't just become a deadly sin
when its existence was acknowledged by the New York Times . Nevertheless,
the arrival of Internet Envy on the Washington-New York buzz axis is new in
several ways.
Washington types used to be surprisingly immune to envy of
other people simply for being richer. A theory long propounded by Walter
Shapiro ( USA Today political columnist and
Slate
contributor) is that the financial heights of Washington are occupied by
high-salaried lawyers and lobbyists, not by real accumulated or inherited
wealth as in New York. The lifestyle gap between the middle and upper class
does not yawn in front of, say, a Washington Post editor every day.
Journalists--even print journalists!--and high-level civil servants live in the
nicest neighborhoods. More important, of course, Washington has--or had--a
social status ranking independent of money. It's a place where puzzled
gazillionaires can find themselves snubbed at dinner parties by deputy
assistant Cabinet secretaries and patronized by minor TV talking heads.
Even in New York, where
money matters more, there are (unlike in Washington) strong independent
subcultures in which a journalist or college professor or unemployed actor can
take comfort in an independent value system. They could have been bankers or
management consultants but chose not to be. And the people at the top of those
heaps, earning plenty to live comfortably, honestly wouldn't trade being, say,
curator of dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History for being just another
multimillionaire investment banker. On most days.
So what has changed? One element, obviously, is the size of
these Internet fortunes. Hundreds of millions. As syndicated columnist Matt
Miller recently pointed out, with numbers like this surging across the
Times business section, even investment bankers "feel like wage slaves
at $10 million a year." (And, poor souls, these investment bankers generally
cannot find comfort in an independent value system.) Meanwhile, in Washington,
where even New York-style fortunes are rare, it seems that America Online alone
(located in D.C.'s Virginia suburbs) has created a vast new social stratum of
megamillionaires one has never heard of. Gives one pause.
Second, there's the
speed. It's one thing to console yourself that at least you didn't have to
spend 30 years doing a job you would hate. That trick is a bit harder when you
read that someone (inevitably, someone with the same name as that bozo down the
hall sophomore year ... but it can't be ... look, here's his picture ... oh,
hell) joined some nothing of a company, sat there through the IPO, and cashed
out, all in a couple of years. How awful can a job be?
Answer: maybe not so awful at all. In fact, maybe it's
remarkably similar to the job you're doing now. A third startling difference
about Internet IPO wealth is that some of it is raining down on journalists!
Writing journalists, no less, at places like Amazon and TheStreet and iVillage
(dot-com, dot-com, dot-com). This is something truly new in the history of the
known universe.
Slate
's former "Keeping Tabs" columnist Emily
Yoffe observes: "You no longer can say, 'Sure I could have made a lot of money
if I'd decided to be a Wall Street money grubber.' And it's not just [a famous
TV hack] spending every weekend speaking to the Aluminum Manufacturers for
$50,000. We're talking about journalists getting seriously rich just by being
journalists."
Thus journalists have
joined software engineers and business executives in peddling the other basic
Internet Envy anecdote: variations on, "Oh yeah, they offered me the top job at
Somedamnedsite.com--begged me to take it, offered me 75 percent of the equity
plus options for another 75--but I turned it down." Even during the first few
years of Internet frenzy, Internet Envy was not widespread in N.Y.-D.C.
buzzworld because the whole thing seemed to be happening on another planet--to
people one not only didn't know but could scarcely imagine. Only very recently
have lottery winners started popping up in one's own neighborhood.
Internet Envy exists in cyberland itself, too, but it is
much more straightforward. Everybody is trying to do the same thing; some
succeed, and those who don't are envious. You don't have to pretend that you're
not. And there's no queasy feeling that you must have misplaced that notice
explaining how the rules were about to change. ("In Paragraph 19, Line 106,
replace the words 'Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction' with the words 'seven hundred
fifty million dollars.' ") Also, unlike back East, there's no vertiginous
obsession with how young these IPO-heads are, because almost everybody is
scandalously young.
The rules have indeed changed. But they're always
changing, in a couple of ways. Some changes in personal values are simply part
of growing older. Then there are shifts in the values of the general
culture.
To oversimplify: In high
school the jocks are on top (unless, of course, armed losers storm the
cafeteria one day and mow them down). But the smart kids tend to win in adult
life. The glow of that happy discovery can last for years, as Nathan Myrhvold
explained and simultaneously demonstrated in a recent
Slate
"."
These are folks lucky enough to be able to choose their careers and to have a
good shot at success at whatever they choose.
At the crucial moment when they make their choices, many of
these people honestly believe that money--beyond the cost of upper-middle-class
comfort--is not all that important to them, and most of them may turn out to be
right. But some are responding to the fleeting hormonal surges of youthful
idealism, or to the special status hierarchy of the academic subculture where
they temporarily reside. In the most tragic examples, a charismatic professor
will entice them into a lifetime of French medieval history, about which their
curiosity is exhausted before they get their Ph.D.s. In less extreme cases,
they become writers. Then they discover, in their 30s or 40s, that money is
important to them after all. This is the moment when reading about some
28-year-old who's suddenly worth $300 million can have an effect that requires
medical attention.
Sometimes this personal
process of maturity or decay (take your pick) is reinforced by what's happening
in the culture. Money is never unimportant, but there are moments when it is
more important than others. This is one of them. Actually, a graph of the
changing value of money in the status market would look a lot like a graph of
the Dow Jones industrial average: It rose steadily starting about 1982--the
year a star New York Times reporter shocked his journalist colleagues by
quitting the Times to become an investment banker--crested and sank
briefly in the late 1980s, quickly recovered, and has been hitting new heights
ever since. In these days, when even the most softhearted and public-spirited
people become venture capitalists, younger readers may find it hard to believe
there was ever a time when even an extremely ambitious person, motivated
entirely by a desire to do well--rather than to do good, or to do anything in
particular--might well decide to be a journalist. But it's true.
Of course it's possible that the stock market and the
status market have peaked together again. Price-earnings ratios are perilously
high in both. A $400 million fortune gets you about as much status as a mere
$50 million got you a decade ago. Speculators in status futures are rumored to
be pulling out of money and getting into undervalued properties including
kindness, musical talent, and short-term memory. The decline of money is also
expected to benefit blue chips such as physical beauty, according to some
analysts.
So maybe this is the wrong moment to cash in your
reputation as a saint--based on two and a half decades spent bathing patients
in a South American leprosy clinic--for a job (with 50 percent equity stake) as
CEO of Leper.com (soon to be LPRC on the NASDAQ). In this market as in others,
timing is everything.
