Gilder and the Chess Club

George Gilder was the pied piper of the new economy day traders in the 1990s. His strategy boiled down to this: Identify the enabling technologies behind the Internet boom, seek out the companies that are poised to deliver in that market space, and invest your pants off.

His book Telecosm was the sacred text of the telecommunications boom. Inspired by his prognostications everybody and their grandmother bet money on the companies laying down mammoth fiber optics trunk lines for high-bandwidth communication worldwide. Things went along swimmingly until the bubble burst. Former giants like Global Crossing (who endeavored to bridge the seas with fiber bandwidth) found their assets being sold at fire sale prices.

Now Gilder's reputation might be slowly rehabilitated, thanks to the steady advance of internet-based video and VoIP telephony. From iTunes to Google Video to YouTube (which accumulates an astonishing 35,000 videos a day) - everybody's using more and more bandwidth - and increasingly for user-created content.

Looking at it from a purely sociological perspective, offerings like Google Video prove that lip synching, pratfalls, dancing around like an idiot, and flatulence are the common features of world culture. From Bangladesh to Bay City Michigan this stuff is apparently universally funny - at least to the average somewhat-geeky teen, the bookish honors students and international chess club dorks who seem to create these videos. (I won't provide links, but you can rummage around for yourself.)

Copyright fear has caused Hollywood to miss many chances to take advantage of bandwidth to deliver content online according to an updated profit model. There are some late exceptions – and ABC deserves some accolades for their current effort. But a generation is growing up entirely comfortable with creating and distributing their own media, and they are inadvertently taking advantage of the bandwidth glut from the first wave of Internet deployment. When any entrenched powers grow fearful and slack we shouldn’t be surprised when younger upstarts make something new and repurpose unused resources. Right now Internet video might only consist of juvenilia, but I’d bet good 1990s-style money this trend will eventually prove more disruptive to media and culture than we can currently fathom.