Bill Gates, David Letterman, NFTs & You
Watch this clip from 1995.
David Letterman: What about this internet thing? Do you do you know anything about that?
Bill Gates: It’s become a place where people are publishing information. Everybody can have their own homepage. Companies are there. It’s wild what’s going on. It’s the big new thing.
Dave: Yeah but you know it’s easy to criticize something you don’t fully understand—which is my position here— but I can remember a couple of months ago there was a big breakthrough announcement that on the internet they were going to broadcast a baseball game and I just thought to myself—does radio ring a bell?
Audience Laughs.
Fundamentally new things are really hard to understand in the beginning. Since most people start with such limited knowledge, intuitions are a poor barometer for what a radically new technology will become. Most minds can’t put existing analogs through a 10x evolution.
Cars were once mechanical carriages. In the early days they sucked. These fragile contraptions needed paved roads or they blew tires. They ran out gas and petrol stations were few and far between. Cars didn’t start when it was cold and overheated when it was hot. It was not immediately obvious that these things could ever replace horses which had none of those failings.
(But once a new technology surpasses the previous, adoption moves quick. In New York’s 1900 Easter parade there was only a single car in the sea of horse drawn carriages. By 1913’s festivities there was only one horse left.)
Back in 1995 Bill Gates had a good intuition about what the internet might become, not because he was a genius, but because he was building it. I’m sure his insights were practically derived: “If we connect this server cluster to the one in Europe and dedicate enough bandwidth, this baseball game can be heard globally!” The next hop to revolution wasn’t so far away: “what would it be like if one day we had enough servers and bandwidth to put all videos on the internet?” I’m sure many people writing HTML in the 90’s independently arrived at the concept of YouTube but it seems we needed Moore’s Law, Adobe Flash and Janet Jackson’s nipple to make it a reality. (Seriously, the impetus to build YouTube was when the founders tried to find Janet’s boob on the internet after the Super Bowl and couldn’t.)
With perfect vision from our current future perch it is obvious that Bill was “right” and Dave was “wrong.” But there is a third character in that clip even more off-base—the audience. At least Dave wrestled with the idea of the internet before ultimately dismissing it. It was the audience who just laughed.
In 1995, I was beyond excited when the BBS I set up to chat with my pals Nick and Bruce actually worked. With my 14.4 baud modem plugged into the teen line and a three way call going between the two of them on the house line, joyous statements like “you just typed ass!” rang out from our family basement.
It was also around this time that Jon Trowbridge and I started “Geeks on Wheels.” It was a High School get rich quick scheme on a mission to install RAM and teach people willing to part with $5/hour about the Internet. (Believe it or not, this endeavor predates the term “startup” but I’m sure that’s what we would have mistakenly called it.) I mention this not to brag about the nearly $50 that enterprise brought in but to humble myself. Whereas Jon knew the Internet was it, I argued that the connected future would come via platforms like AOL & CompuServe. I thought the Internet was too slow, too complicated and too low fidelity in comparison to those CD-ROM powered competitors. I saw the horseless carriage, he saw the car.
By the time I started college the .com crash confirmed “the death of the Internet” at least in the papers and on cable TV. I paid it no mind because by then I was a faithful convert to the world wide web and it’s glorious road ahead. I often kick myself for both seeing and believing in a decent bit of what would come but not buying up the right URLs or investing in Amazon. But lately I don’t lament not having a DeLorean in the garage. We’re back to the future.
This post was supposed to be about Web3. I was going to explain with my sharpest pen how smart contracts and DAOs will change the world. How the Canadian Truckers and Vladimir Putin solidified crypto more than a bouncing QR code commercial ever could. I wanted to explain that NFTs aren’t jpegs or mp3s but rather a quantum state of mp3 + the masters + a digital backstage pass + stock in the band. I wanted to write a different post this morning but I don’t think that one would have mattered—most would have laughed.
This was the right one if it inspires just one of you to build or a few of you to do. The future is coming fast once again.
And if this nipple inspires your Punks or Solana, hook a brother up at rewirethematrix.ETH
