In this book, Michael Lewis uses real life stories to illustrate how the internet is allowing for changes in our society. Many of his stories are about kids. He talks about a teenager who uses the internet to manipulate the stock market to make hundreds of thousands of dollars and eventually is caught by the SeC. In another example a teen is sought after for legal advice even after a real lawyer tries to discredit him because of his age. The book is entertaining to read because of the stories, but it contains insights into how technology is currently being used and how it is likely to be used in the near future.
Central to Lewis's observations is the idea that the Internet hasn't really caused anything; rather it fills a type of social hole, the most obvious of which is a need to alter relations between "insiders" and "outsiders." In Next, Lewis shows how the Internet is the ideal model for sociologists who believe that our "selves are merely the masks we wear in response to the social situations in which we find ourselves." It is the place where a New Jersey boy barely into his teens flouts the investment system, making big enough bucks to get the SEC breathing down his neck for stock market fraud. Where Markus, a bored adolescent stuck in a dusty desert town and too young to even drive, becomes the most-requested legal expert on Askme.com, doling out advice on everything from how to plead to murder charges to how much an Illinois resident can profit from illegal gains before being charged with fraud ($5,001 was the figure Markus supplied to this particular cost-benefit query). Where a left-leaning kid of 14 in a depressed town outside Manchester is too poor to take up a partial scholarship to a school for gifted children, but who spends all hours (all cheap call-time hours, at least) engaged in "digital socialism," trying to develop a successor to Gnutella, the notorious file-sharing program that had spawned the new field of peer-to-peer computing. Lewis burrows deeply into each of these stories and others, examining social phenomena that the Internet has contributed to: the redistribution of prestige and authority and the reversal of the social order; the erosive effect on the money culture (both in the democratization of capital and in the effect of gambling losing its "status as a sin"); the decreased value we place on formal training (or as he puts it "casual thought went well with casual dress"); and the increased need for knowledge exchange.
Lewis's observations are piercingly sharp. He can be very funny in portraying ordinary people's behavior, but remains thorough and insightful in his examination of the social consequences. He notes that Jonathan Lebed, the teenage online investor, had "glimpsed the essential truth of the market--that even people who called themselves professionals were often incapable of independent thought and that most people, though obsessed with money, had little ability to make decisions about it." While Lewis's commentary gets a little more dense and theoretical toward the end, Next is an entertaining, thought-provoking look at life in an Internet-driven world. --S. Ketchum
Lewis has more noteable works
If you want to read Lewis at his best, get Moneyball or Liar's Poker. Next begins promisingly enough, with interesting vignettes on a teenage daytrader who manipulates markets with his cheerleading postings on internet financial sites and an interesting piece on a junior high kid who builds himself into a legal expert on an anonymous website, armed only with the insights he gleaned from television shows. These stories serve Lewis' premise of how technology will allow the decline of specialization and the democratization of opinion; we're moving towards a society where being properly lettered matters far less than being right. Credentials used to serve as their own validation of opinion and expertise, a self-fulfilling prophecy that begged challenge, but the internet allows anyone to opine, irrespective of their bona fides. As evidenced by the fact that you're reading my review :)
Sadly, the book then heads precipitously downhill with his musings on the future of technology and various other meanderings. It's standard alarmist fare of the "We're mad, this technology must eventually kill all of us" variety. My sense is that Lewis knew he had something more than an essay, but something less than a book when he begin thinking about this project. He opted for the book. The resultant 80-100 pages of filler he tacks on becomes a trial for the reader and dilutes what could have been a lively read.
Lewis is a good guy and interesting writer: look elsewhere for his best work.
Simultaneously hilarious and insightful
Michael Lewis has an almost unique talent for providing one with an intuitive feel for a subject while simultaneously making you laugh out loud. I think I learned more about Wall Street from "Liar's Poker" than all the great serious tomes I've read, while at the same time enjoying it as pure farce, and yet I was left with an increased respect for the people and institutions. How is that even possible?
After "Liar's Poker" I needed to read more of Mr. Lewis, but I avoided "Next" for a long time because the internet is my "Wall Street", a place with which I am intimately familiar. Non-technical books on the subject thus tend to annoy me, as I keep picking out nits where I feel the dilettante has gotten something wrong or missed the point.
Boy, did I underestimate Michael Lewis. "Next" is as brilliant as "Liar's Poker", hilarious and incredibly informative. He intuitively captures the significance of the Internet: the way it breaks down all the old silos of expertise and authority and distributes them into the homes of everyone. The best part is probably the description of Jonathan Lebed, the 15-year online trader charged with securities fraud by the SEC...and the complete inability of the SEC to come to grips with the absurdity of the situation.
They're Not Just Playing Computer Games
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.