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The Rise Of The 15-Year-Olds
Lewis' latest book, Next: The Future Just Happened, is getting some enthusiastic applause from the popular media, whose binary view of the Net holds that it's either destroying the world or changing everything in it. In a similiar vein, Time asks in its cover this week "Do Kids Have Too Much Power?" The magazine, along with many so-called experts, seems to think so, and cyberspace is a big reason why. There can't be a better place on the Web to have this conversation than here.
Lewis argues that the Net has spawned a great status revolution, one that especially affects the technologically skilled young. The insiders are now out, and the outsiders in; high school sophomores and juniors are in charge and the people who have always run things are doomed and irrelevant. Lewis sees one powerful institution after another, from Wall Street to the music industry to the legal profession, being transmongrified by kids who, thanks to the Net, can do for free what many professionals have been charging tons of money for.
Kids, with sophisticated technology skills and more time on their hands than almost any other segment of the population, are fighting to get hold of traditionally proprietary (thus valuable) information. It's giving lawyers and corporations fits. Companies wonder how they can possibly survive as new media technologies -- open source among them -- make information cheaper and more available.
Is this a revolution, and is it really upon us?
To make his case, Lewis visits a series of casually-dressed, informally-educated teenagers in the U.S. and England, including the celebrated Jonathan Lebed of Cedar Grove, N.J., who rocked Wall Street and the SEC by turning himself into a master online stock manipulator in a few short months, though that's supposed to take years of high-intensity experience and training. Lewis also profiles Marcus Arnold of Perris, Calif., who joined the knowledge-sharing Web site AskMe and shortly become its most popular legal expert, dispensing wisdom he gleaned from many hours of Court TV watching, humiliating attorneys everywhere.
These kids, says Lewis, are destroying the "old priesthoods" of lawyers, investment gurus, academics and CEO's. Technology has "put afterburners on the egalitarian notion that anyone-can-do-anything, by enabling pretty much anyone to try anything -- especially in fields in which 'expertise' had always been a dubious proposition. Amateur book critics published their reviews on Amazon; amateur filmmakers posted their works directly onto the Internet; amateur journalists scooped the world's most powerful newspaper."
In my opinion, Lewis stumbles badly here. It's true that amateurs have gained access to fields once closed. But how many best-selling books are propelled by Amazon reviews? And who did Jonathan Lebed's parents call when he got into trouble -- Marcus Arnold or a criminal attorney who'd passed the bar exam?
The idea that anybody can become an instant expert at any age in any context is pretty creepy. It doesn't even apply to programming or Web design, let alone law or finance. Besides, expertise isn't power. Publishing houses, bar associations and medical groups still wield enormous influence, not only over their respective fields but with with regulatory agencies and, viat hordes of lobbyists, with lawmakers. Entrenched insiders have great win-loss stats.
Lewis believes such insiders are as irrelevant as the czars. What they know isn't so important, and it's obviously been over-priced.
But like much of the media, he focuses on the exceptions more than the rule. Most 15-year-olds on the Net are not making millions or dispensing legal advice; they're gaming, coding, downloading music, talking to their friends, surfing. You will never hear most of their names on the news. It's true that younger people now have access to once-restricted enclaves like the stock market, and they are forcing institutions to change. But that isn't the same as overthrowing them.
It's the nature of media to focus on aberrations, which makes for good stories but poor social reality. When a plane crashes, the wreckage is on TV screens 'round the clock for days. But planes rarely crash.
How about a follow up, perhaps a brief article about the geeks in your book? What's going on with Jesse? How is his friend Eric? Perhaps I missed it somewhere, but what better place to ask than here, eh?
It's a book I purchased and read with enthusiasm, and was impressed with. I was inspired to plan my own move and future in my education and career.
It's in the works, so to speak, but if all goes well, I'll get a higher paying job, and be moving next year after I get my degree.
It's kids who grasp technology and run with it to the future, right? So where has it taken the geeks, other than out of Idaho? What do these kids have to look forward to?
It seems, however, that people have no interest in the realities of the situation though, since they make no effort to confirm the expertise of these children (the lawyer or the stock analyst). They are satisfied to be getting free advice where previously they were paying exhorbinant fees.
Interestingly, after Marcus Arnold revealed to his online patrons that he was in fact a teenager - after a backlash by the professional lawyers on the site - he became even more popular than he was before he revealed his true identity. This suggests that people to not put additional value in formal training, but rather, that they are satisfied with the perceprion of expertise that the shroud of the net provides. It's an interesting comentary on the state of American culture that even after the shroud of anonymity is lifted, people still prefer the teenage pseudo-expert, to the formally trained real thing... For this phenomenon, I have no explanation.
--CTH
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When I first started using computers it was far before the age of 15 however it's not so much of age as it is maturity of some 15 yr olds. As well as mindset. I'm 21.. I'm young but people who normally talk to me wouldn't assume that I'm 21. Infact very few people believe me when I say I'm 21 and then they don't believe that because I'm "African-American" (or whatever you wanna call me to fit into your cateogrized mindset) I do what it is I say I do.I have large resposnsibilities and am in charge of some corps infrastructure. Which isn't that big of a deal (to me at least).
Then again around the age of 15 I got myself into trouble at a famed 2600 meeting and ended up in Military Intel a couple of months before my 17th birthday all thanks to our friends at AT&T security (and a snitch). In any event, it's more of the mindset for exmaple if you take a young 15 y/o coder to a musuem he/she is quite possibly going to be more interested in whats there (ie: questions will be asked, whats that, etc, etc). You do the same with a non "computer lit" 15 y/o and they'll be complaining in 5 minutes. As information becomes more freely available people are finding new hobbies, new likes and dislikes, more things to protest against, learning new things and generally broadeing their horizons. Because of this every new generation gets smarter and smarter and smarter. That is the way it should be and what I would like to call the "true" singularity is beginning.
It's better to look at mindset than it is to look at age. The quicker we start learning to respect 15 yr olds as people will genuinely good ideas (moral character etc put aside in this discussion) and stop catergorizing them as being damn confused teenagers, the quicker big business will learn how to adapt.
For big business it really is a simple task, just ask them for some of their ideas, let them see some of their ideas working. It really is a fair trade off.
As for 15 yr olds being experts in anything the only way you can become an expert is to have experience. Being 15, you have little experience as life itself is an experience. So I don't care what loop hole they used, what legal advice they give as it is all based upon others peoples work and past experiences.
Life is too dynamic for any of that to hold water. To be an expert you have to be able to handle all situations regardless of their dynamics and at the age of 15 yrs old you haven't even really begun to see what you can and can't do. That prima donna shit is for the birds. But a 15 yr old who knows they don't know it all and are constantly learning.. Those are the ones you have to look out for because those will become experts.
In a word, no.
When did kids *not* regard their elders as "clueless, hostile, and incompetent" - and when did their elders not feel likewise about them? Never. It's basically a flavor of egocentrism: everyone thinks that they're devoting their energies to the most important things that are happening in the world. If they care about the relative "merit" of Britney Spears vs. Christina Aguilera, how could you *not* care? You must be an out-of-it doofus if you don't. If IMing and its shorthand are second nature to them, how could it be so difficult for you to get the knack? You must be a total boob. Striking closer to home, how could anyone in their right mind not know that Linux is better than Windows, or not care about the erosion of our liberties represented by the DMCA, or not be up-to-the-minute current on the latest crypto/infosec technology? Such people must be "clueless" indeed, right?
There is, however, one thing that's different about the current situation: on the net, nobody knows you're a dog. Anyone can pass themselves off as an expert, if they know just a tiny bit more than the people around them. There are millions of pseudo-experts out there on the net, and even more millions of totally ignorant people feeding the pseudo-experts' egos. As long as the pseudo-experts stay just one tiny step ahead of the people seeking their advice, the shallowness of their knowledge might not become apparent. That's particularly easy to do in the computer field, still more so in open source, when a reasonably intelligent person can dig in and find the answer to a specific question, and then lay claim to total mastery of that whole area of knowledge - with almost no danger of their ruse being discovered. Consultants have been doing this to corporations for decades. Now anyone can do it. The real barrier that has been broken is not the barrier to expertise itself, but to all-but-unassailable claims of expertise.
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> U.S. and England, including the celebrated
> Jonathan Lebed of Cedar Grove, N.J., who rocked
> Wall Street and the SEC by turning himself into
> a master online stock manipulator in a few short
> months, though that's supposed to take years of
> high-intensity experience and training.
First, this kid "pumped and dumped" stocks. If you don't know what that means, you're more likely to think he was a genius. Second, Wall Street and London stock exchange companies have been recruiting "informally educated" kids (almost always men) to do trading-floor work for years. In London they're called "Barrow Boys" --- guys puffed up on testosterone and able to do math in their heads, because they have a background in bargaining in other kinds of street market. Third, Katz's sentence would be a lot truer if "a master stock manipulator in a few short months" read "a master stock manipulator FOR a few short months". It's always possible to beat the experts in the short-run (remember those little old ladies from Iowa or wherever?).
Note that "the myth of the genius" != "there's no such thing as genius". The former is a sociological phenomenon, a cultural archetype that people like Katz (and many geeks) like to latch on to. Of course there are plenty of smart 15-yr-olds. But they're not running the world.
The arrogance of saying "I just know it" for a kid who presumes to know everything you need to know about a professional field people spend years in graduate school for rather efficiently reveals that this kid's attitude probably won't take him far in serious academic study.
If I had to hire a programmer, and I ask a potential employee "where did you learn to program" and he said "well, I just know it" then I'd tell him to get the hell out. I'm not saying you have to go to university to become skilled in a field, but for knowledge based professions, you must at least have a base of book knowledge, and the kid in question apparently never thought to go to the library and read an intro to Jurisprudence.
If the kid spent his weekends looking up answers to questions in the local univeristy legal library, then I'd think he was a industrious worker with a promising future. But this kid is quite full of BS, and his answer on askme.com are engineered into piles of BS, so its mildly rediculous that he's getting all this positive attention.
If you start your own company, make a million dollars in the first 2 years and your 30 it makes a small story in a local paper. Maybe a bit more if it is publicly-popular.
It's only really news if your 15.
To use Napster as an example, myself, and others, would have produced something similar a long time ago, but the thought of going to jail was not pleasant.
Ending up in court getting sued over copyright infringment wasn't exactly my idea of having a good business model.
Maybe my problem is I thought the situation through too far. I should have just produced an application and worried about the consequences later. Oh wait, I'm not 15...
(Anybody who has actually read the protocol specs on Napster would be aware that Napster is a piece of shit from a technical standpoint, it truly is amazing it works at all...)
Second, yes, kids do have too much power today. Think of how full of piss and vinegar you were when you were 17, and then think about all the experience in life you've gained since then.
Remember that old saying, "Knowledge is power"? Well, that's true, but that's only half the story. The corollary to that saying is "But it is only powerful if you have the wisdom to use it."
As an example for us nerds reading this, consider something as simple as the C language. You can sit down in an afternoon and read Kernighan and Ritchie's C Programming. Officially, you now "know" C. But can you do anything useful with it? NO. You don't really "know" C until you have implemented a complex system with it.
The 'Net empowers all people. But some kids lack that maturity and experience in life to be able to use this empowerment wisely. As an obvious example, consider all of the script kiddies running around, downloading tools off of the net, clogging up the web and defacing websites. These kids actually think being "leet" is worthwhile.
I used to be one of theses. I used to think that I new all I needed about Unix. Then I stepped out of my bedroom and discovered the real world. Where things are not so simple. Where downloading a little something from whatever warez site when I needed it is not an option. Where going root to fix something is usually not the good way to do it. In a word, real-world enterprise-style computing.
And this my friend, isn't something a 15-year old can grok (usually there is exceptions I guess, but I'm still looking for one. I just remembered theses two "sysadmins" college kids that didn't knew what colocation was.)
Nobox: Only simple products.
My experience with the upcoming generation of kids these days is sure, they are very competent and pick up knowledge much quicker. I was a sys/network admin at my alma mater, and I took on the task of training students (mostly freshman) in the fine art of sys admin of UNIX machines.
To my joy, these kids took very well to the tasks. They learned Linux very quickly, as well as the shots of Solaris and AIX I threw at them. I was very impressed. However, to my continuing amazement, I watched as they would use what they learned to stomp on people. I know the whole "I have power and I'm going to use it" human nature thing always comes into play when people get root, but not like this.
I really couldn't believe the total lack of respect and ethical disregard these kids had for sys administration. I know that people need time to adjust to the responsibilities, but these kids didn't seem to. They just thought it was "cool" to keep flood pinging other servers, nmap'ing people, etc. I don't know what these kids aren't learning, but I don't see the evolution of sys admins as being a bright future if this attitude continues.
What will business be like in 10 to 20 years when it is today's 15 year olds running the corporations? Will they remember the so called "freedom" of the net during their youth? Or will they simply fall into the old line of corporate profit, lobbying Washington, and trying to crush the same "fredom" they grew up with? Only time will tell, and it should be interesting.
I agree the Internet is an equalizer but I don't believe that many dissident's in Nigeria have access to a computer, much less an Internet connection. Both are pretty hard to get when you make less than $1/day on a good day. Here in North America at least there are places like public library's where people can get online and express their opinions. I'm lucky enough to own my own computer but I do know that my public library doesn't charge anything for the Internet access they provide. Kudo's to them.
The most amazing 15 year old I've run across isn't even American. MacMillan India Ltd. is publishing a book he wrote as a 14 year old. From the jacket blurb: "...The author, Ankit Fadia, 16 years old is a tenth class student, studying in Delhi Public School R.K. Puram. Ankit Fadia, who at the tender age of 14 wrote this book, is the youngest author for Macmillan in their 110 years of history. He started his website, Hacking Truths for a small circle of friends to whom Ankit would send out periodic manuals, but very soon it evolved into a worldwide community of thousands of like mined people who subscribed to receive information that really mattered. The basic motive behind Hacking Truths is to spread the message of ethical hacking which would revolutionize the global security scene. He believes ethical hacking is like vaccination - you fight eveil for positive gains..." So go ahead, Slashdot Effect Ankit's website Hacking Truths...it's pretty cool.
I started programming in '79 when I was 11 years old on my Atari 800.
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Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.