God can you stand it? The entrepreneur as chemical engineer of the universe and Darwin refuted by what? Oh, yeah an economist. Sure thing dude...
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It's interesting you'd highlight the Gilder interview.
He is, as you no doubt know, one of the founding members of Discovery and is largely responsible for its course change towards the sunny isle of 'intelligent design'. Others might remember him as a quarrelsome, self proclaimed "anti-feminist".
Gilder is a very confused man, a ramshackle, dollar store version of Buckminister Fuller for our bullshit besotted, future bereft age.
He first came to my attention as one of the most prominent boosters of techno-utopianism (a mental failing that lazy, stupid or reading comprehension challenged people incorrectly accuse me of exhibiting). He has perfected a method for transferring cash from execs: a.) pick a tech that's obscure to most biz types (for example, microprocessors, or, more recently, broadband as "content distribution" method) b.) breathlessly extrapolate the far flung implications c.) write a book and go on a lecture tour describing how everything's going to change in oh, five minutes and how your audience will become rich(er) if they listen to your guidance.
Consider this serpentine blurbiage, describing his book, "Telecosm":
The supreme abundance of the telecosm is the electromagnetic spectrum, embracing all the universe of vibrating electrical and magnetic fields, from power line pulses through light beams to cosmic rays. The scarcity that unlocks this abundance is the supreme scarcity in physical science: the absolute minimum time it takes to form an electromagnetic wave of a particular length. Set by the permeability of free space, this minimal span determines the speed of light.
[...]
More at Gilder's website:
<http://www.gildertech.com/bookstore.html>
As marketing text goes that paragraph for Telecosm is almost insanely nonsensical but useful, because it illustrates an important component of Gilder's success as siren singer to elements of the business class: his freewheeling use of false complexity.
False complexity is an important tool for buttering up corporate owners and senior managers; it keeps things light but flatters by pretending your audience is clever enough to grasp the subtlest concepts.
It works like this...
Imagine you're an exec at a biotech startup. You don't have a science background but you assembled the money needed to get the firm - a spin off from a large pharma - rolling so you're in command. Everyday you're working with and talking to PhD level scientists who're doing new and remarkable things. You're a Mayberry Machiavellian, a simple guy living with his real estate agent wife and 2 kids in a million plus price tagged McMansion. Your drafty and overpriced home is neatly tucked away in a cul de sac'ed, upper middle class development named Raven's Beak or maybe Eagle's Nest...even you don't always remember. Your book choices tend towards slim volumes on 'Christian styles of leadership' and neo mid-20th century cowboy adventures. You aren't very intellectually curious.
You're a nice enough bloke - good husband, good dad, churchgoer - but it irks you to the point of petulance that you can't really keep up with whatever the hell your staff's going on about. Because of your wounded pride, this situation, which probably wouldn't bother a mature and open minded person, creates tension: on the one hand, you're in charge but on the other, you're perpetually in the dark.
Along comes Gilder.
He tells you that although the scientists are important it's you, the entrepreneur, who really "assembles the disparate elements into meaningful cohesion" or um, something and, therefore, *you* who are the true creator.
Self esteem and cognitive dissonance problems solved, you happily hand over money for Gilder DVDs, books, and retreats.
BTW, this is a real example, a micro-saga I watched unfold in almost real time which showed the power of Gilder's quasi-religious tech fantasia over a mind as soft as a rotten melon.
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Gilder's turn towards 'intelligent design' (which can be interpreted as a "value add" - a marketing hook for boosted sales to the faithfully church attending Mayberry Machiavellian set) is the result of his fuzzy headed understanding of Shannon's information theory (a topic too big and too odd to fit in this post). Ray Kurzweil, one of Gilder's fellow Utopians, also moved towards almost-spiritualism but of the opposite kind: Kurzweil talks (ceaselessly, it seems) about what a certain sort of hyper-geek calls the "technological singularity", an imagined future state when biotech, information tech and various other technologies coalesce into a vaguely defined, ultra feedback acceleration/complexity vortex of marvelousness which somehow creates a shiny new world.
Here's Kurzweil's site if you're curious:
<http://www.kurzweilai.net/index.html?flash=1>
And a Wiki page about the tech singularity:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity>
I think that's enough traveling down the gossamer paths of UtopiaPlex for now.
.d.