Customer Reviews

Next: The Future Just Happened

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(36)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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The book shows how ones life can be affected by the Stock Market. Jonathan Lebed is 14-year-old boy who is accused of Stock Market fraud. Lewis shows Jonathan in a family setting just to depict the stress the stock market could cause on a small town family. One of the main point that Lewis is showing in presented when he writes, "the point is even a fourteen-year-old boy could see how it worked-why some guy working for free out of a basement in Jackson, Missouri was more reliable than the most highly paid analyst on Wall street"(pg.57). The problem was not that Jonathan did what he did but that fact that he was so young an inexperienced.
By reading this book it further my knowledge on how misleading the Stock Market could be when I agree to invest my income I will be more cautious.

This book just happened to be a really great book. After reading review after review of this book, i realized that i felt the same way as everyone else. I thought that this book was going to be really bad or really boring. Well I got news for you...this book was great! It's the many stories of people all over the world who have had different beneficial and damaging experiences witht the internet. Personally i liked it, and I'm not one big on computer nerd books. This is not one of them. This is a book for everyone.

Next: The Future Just Happened is about how the internet is changing the world. Lewis profiles Jonathan Lebed, a teenage stock market wizard (the SEC says he was a stock market manipulator -- Lewis isn't so sure); a teenage law expert who has never studied law; a teenager in England who is using Gnutella software as a springboard to, I don't know, take over the world, I guess.

It seems obvious from the first half of the book that teenage boys are using the internet to become rich, powerful, and influential. So maybe all the internet has really done is speed things up by a few decades. But Lewis throws the over-thirties among us a small bone by interviewing an aging rock group that uses the internet to raise money for a tour, an eighty-something woman who participates in WebTV polls, and the creators of TiVo.

The second half of the book is a bit unconvincing. Set-top boxes, big deal. Those teenagers rule the book, and it would seem, the world.

Lewis, as usual, writes an engaging book, it pulls you right in and moves quickly. The Lebed story itself makes the book worth your time.

Talks about the dramatic changes brought about by the Internet in a world where adults are supposed to rule. Anecdotes range from a kid whose instincts in playing the stock market prove to be better than experienced stock brokers to a teenager whose legal advice prove more useful in the people's eyes compared to the members of the Bar. All these are possible as they compete in the ultimate playing field called the Internet.

Author then progresses from the Internet to the concept of change in general and closes with Bill Joy's article on Wired magazine titled, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" outlining the software guru's fear of change. In the end CHANGE of which the Internet is just one form is the ultimate leveller in any playing field.

Excellent writing!!!! I give it 5 stars

To be totally honest, I was prepared to hate this book - I've (at least until recently) never been a Michael Lewis fan. But this book was a pleasant surprise - Lewis dropped his smarter-than-thou sarcasm about most things and instead delivers a great deal of insight on how the web is truly changing things - for all of us.

Similar subject matter to the Cluetrain Manifesto, but MUCH better delivery. Worth a read.

The internet revolution has allowed teenagers to influence the stock market, the music industry, and even the interpretation of law itself. Lewis investigated various sites on the internet, and then interviewed the people responsible for the material. Lewis discovered that by masking their identities, teenagers are able to do pretty much anything they want. Fifteen year old Jonathon Lebed manipulates the investment system, making about $800,000. The SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) forces Jonathon to hand over some but not all of his profits, proving that even the government cannot do anything about the number of kids who are overtaking the business world. The next kid that Lewis interviewed is also a fifteen year old boy, Marcus Arnold from Perris California. Marcus disguises himself as an attorney, offering free legal advice to whoever needed it. Even after revealing his true identity Marcus ends up #1 on AskMe.Com. Finally Lewis interviews a fourteen year old British boy a follower of the creator of Gnutella, a web-based file sharing program. Lewis also reveals that it was a mastermind nineteen year old who was responsible for the worldwide file sharing system, Napster.
It is always interesting to find out that kids have the power to change our world. Although the book started off slow, it soon picked up the pace. I recommend this everyone, especially teenagers. Also if you're an internet fan, this book might inspire you to do who knows what.

Michael Lewis describes how the internet revolution has allowed teenagers to influence the stock market, the music industry, and even the interpretation of law itself. Lewis investigated various sites on the internet, and then interviewed the people responsible for the material. Lewis discovered that by masking their identities, teenagers are able to do pretty much anything they want. Fifteen year old Jonathon Lebed manipulates the investment system, making about $800,000. The SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) forces Jonathon to hand over some but not all of his profits, proving that even the government cannot do anything about the number of kids who are overtaking the business world. The next kid that Lewis interviewed is also a fifteen year old boy, Marcus Arnold from Perris California. Marcus disguises himself as an attorney, offering free legal advice to whoever needed it. Even after revealing his true identity Marcus ends up #1 on AskMe.Com. Finally Lewis interviews a fourteen year old British boy a follower of the creator of Gnutella, a web-based file sharing program. Lewis also reveals that it was a mastermind nineteen year old who was responsible for the worldwide file sharing system, Napster.
It is always interesting to find out that kids have the power to change the world. Although this book was a bit of a slow read at first, it soon picked up its pace.
I recommend this book to everyone, especially teenagers. Also if you're a big internet fan, this book might inspire you to do who knows what.

This is an extremely good book. It is essential for everyone planning on living in the 21st century. It gets into the minds of both middle aged adults and teenagers and spells out exactly what is to come. The Internet has changed the world in which we live and this book lets you know how. It's a quick read with great reward.

Is the internet just another technology? Nothing more than a fast delivery system for information? So thought many people post the Feb 2000 bust up of internet stocks.

No, says Michael Lewis (author of 'Liar's Poker' and 'The New New Thing'). In a BBC televised study into the 'internet consequences of society' Lewis examined how people had responded to, and used the internet to change teir lives.

"The internet," he says "had offered up a new set of social situations" to which people had responded by grabbing a new set of 'masks'. The mask was the role they had chosen to play for themselves using the opportunity provided by the internet.
Jonathan Lebed wore a mask. It was the mask of a financial expert, ladling out stock recommendations on Yahoo! message boards and making himself some $ 800,000 in six months' trading. Nothing wrong in that, you may well ask. That's what Wall Street analysts do all the time. The only problem, it seems, was that Jonathan was 15 years old!

The US S.E.C. filed an investigation. Lewis discovers that it had no clue about what, exactly, Jonathan had done wrong. Chairman Arthur Levitt gave Michael Lewis an appointment mistaking him for Michael Thomas. In a hilarious interaction, Lewis says that when the error was pointed out, "the chairman's face wore the expression of a man whose brain was undergoing the human equivalent of rebooting".

Nor were Lewitt's thoughts on market manipulation, the crime for which Jonathan was being prosecuted, clear. (In this it is similar to the Indian situation). Lewitt summons Director of Enforcement, Richard Walker, to explain.

Walker explains. Manipulation is "when you promote a stock for the purpose of artificially raising its price." Pray, what is 'artificially raising?'
"The price of a stock is artificially raised when subjected to something other than ordinary market forces," recites Walker.
What are those?
An ordinary market force is one that does not cause the stock to rise artificially!

Voila! Lewis exposes the circuitous, subjective and pompous logic of regulators in his inimitably style.

What Jonathan has done is to don a 'mask' of a financial expert. In so doing, he has shaken the financial services industry. For, if a commoner like him could, using the tool of the internet, give advice to others and make a pie for himself, why, then, how could the aristocracy of Wall Street, viz. the analysts, the brokerage houses, the research firms, the TV channels, et al. hope to justify their fees?

Lewis describes this phenomenon as moving power from 'the center' to 'the fringe'. Andy Kessler, a Bell Labs engineer turned Wall Street analyst turned venture capitalist points out, "intelligence always moves to the edge of the network".
The outsiders on the fringe use the technology of the internet to come up with newer innovations that threatens the center. They bypass the rules. Venture capitalists finance them because great profit can be made when the old source of insider power, up for grabs, are threatened. There results chaos; the center threatens the new players with lawsuits, government regulation and public shaming. Either the incumbents then co-opt the fringe players or the fringe players become the incumbent with new rules. The whole process is then repeated. This is how capitalism rejuvenates itself.

This is what happened with 20 year old Justin Frankel, an employee of AOL. In March 2000 he posted software that would undermine AOL and a lot of other profitable companies. The software was Gnutella (a geek joke combining the free operating system software Gnu, with Nutella, the chocolate spread). It enabled people to share files, computing power or anything else without the need for a central server that could be shut down (as Napster was). Suddenly, the whole recording industry was threatened. It co opted Frankel by buying over his company for several million dollars. Within days, the fringe threw up another challenger, Gene Kan, who, in turn, was bought over by Sun Micro.

Fifteen year old Marcus Arnold wore the mask of a legal expert on a site called AskMe.com, which threatened the legal fraternity. "Technology had put afterburners on the egalitarian notion that anyone can do anything by enabling pretty umuch anyone to try anything, especially in fields in which 'expertise' had always been a dubious proposition.'
The book talks about how the broadcasting industry was threatened by two black boxes, one, TiVo (developed by Jim Barton and Mike Ramsay) and the other, Replay (by Anthony Wood). These allowed TV watchers to search and store TV programmes of their choice (without commercials!) and view them at a time of their choice. It moved power from the 'center', i.e. the network control room, to the 'fringe' i.e. to the viewer. Suddenly, the concept of prime time was threatened, and, with it, that of commercial television!

There are far wider implications than commercial advertising. What would happen to brands who advertise one-size-fits-all on prime time? The black boxes also have the capability to determine viewing preferences, enabling a slice and dice approach to advertising.

These and several other insights are what make 'The Future Just Happened' a compelling book to read. It is written in Lewis' highly readable style with some exquisitely funny passages.
Perhaps the only point of disagreement emanates from Lewis' unnecessarily harsh criticism, in the final chapter, of Danny Hillis and Bill Joy. Hillis is the person who designed the world's fastest supercomputer. Bill Joy is the chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, where he helped develop Java. This chapter adds little to an otherwise recommendable book.

I think Michael Lewis is a brilliant writer, and this book is another little gem from him. He writes a lot like Tom Wolfe, and like Wolfe takes a rollicking interest in transformational social trends, which as a former investment banker, Lewis thinks about in the context of business and technology. His central idea here is that contemporary technology, most importantly the Internet, is undermining the established order in all sectors of our society by democratizing information and access to markets. Lewis researched this book by hanging out with a lot of very ordinary people, some of them scruffy adolescents, whose lives have nonetheless become lightning rods for extraordinary developments. He starts with Jonathan Lebod, the 15 year old New Jersey kid who a couple of years ago brought down on himself the full wrath of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by earning nearly a million dollars in trading profits through stock manipulation, all of it accomplished between school and bedtime over a PC in his room. A true investigative journalist at heart, Lewis spent days with young Jonathan, eating meals with his lower middle-class family and accompanying him to school. The portrait that emerges is of a fairly typical adolescent - bright enough, but certainly no genius - who learned how to hack around the Internet and, in the process, developed an uncannily accurate sense of how financial markets work. Lewis's own career started on Wall Street - so he knows what he's talking about here - and the point he's making is that power elites, such as Wall Street professionals, depend more on privileged access to information and markets than they do on any really proprietary expertise. Jonathan seemed to stumble pretty easily on what he learned, and once he had it, he played game as effectively as if he'd been a million-dollar-a-year Solomon Brothers trader. Lewis portrays the comically ferocious response of the SEC to this small incident as representing an intuitive understanding on their part that Jonathan Lebod represented the early stages of something deeply threatening. The author seems to be suggesting that they have good reason to worry. Lewis tells several other stories in this vein, all of them based in-person research and all of them demonstrating ordinary people discovering, more-or-less inadvertently, some quirky application of new technology which allows them to outwit or outperform established institutions or experts. He tells us about Marillion, an over-the-hill rock group who, when dumped unceremoniously by their record company, discovered they could thumb their noses at the industry by direct marketing to their loyal fans over the internet. Their careers rose to new heights. He also tells us about Marcus Arnold, another adolescent, who became the top-ranked legal expert on AskMe.com until jealous middle-aged competitors, with expensive law degrees and years of highly-compensated experience, spilled to beans to Marcus's online clients that he was a 15 years-old brat. It seems the clients didn't really care, though, and Marcus soon regained his ranking! Lewis takes an elfish glee in all these nerds, children and little people getting the better of grown-up establishment types. In a cleaned-up, erudite kind of way, there are echoes of Abbie Hoffman in his writing. While Lewis isn't giving us a treatise here, and he doesn't spend much time theorizing, he does try to spell out briefly what he's getting at, which is that the direction of modern technology is leading us into ever more extreme forms of democracy. He believes that established social and economic patterns will continue to be threatened by nobodies armed with new knowledge and access formally controlled and guarded by powerful elites. While Lewis clearly enjoys the comic spectacle in all this, if you read him carefully, you begin to realize he's not himself necessarily a partisan of this revolution. He's just the story-teller. Lest there be any doubt about his ambivalence, the last chapter of this book is entitled "The Unabomber Had a Point". In it, Lewis talks about a number of former high-tech gurus who have begun to have second thoughts about their lives, raising critical questions about the direction of technology, even gravitating towards a kind of modern-day Ludditism . While Lewis is careful not to adopt this stance either, he is clearly thinking about it, and wants us to think about it too. There have been many lengthy tomes in recent years written on the evolution of technology, and I found this little book to be more thought provoking than just about anything I've seen. It's also hilarious and easy to read, and I highly recommend it.