Negroponte: Prophet or flim-flam man? Analysis/Humor Nicholas Negroponte authored the coffee-table book of the nineties (Being Digital), and traced a long, indelible trail across the Web in words-to-the-wise, generalizations, boasts, and bad puns. He described the Net revolution as going from "bits to bytes," from the material to the informational. He spoke with assurance of the re-inventing influence of technology ("technology invents the future") and hit paydirt with the prediction of the Net's decentralizing effects. For Nick, big government and big business are destined to find their powers broken up, their structures leveled, and their directives diluted. But chaos won't rule the future, the convergence of media will, with positive influences everywhere, taking the sting out of accessing knowledge, encouraging volunteer research and education, and instilling multicultural team-work. His message would be enticing, if he were less of an all-round walking-talking success story. Negroponte, with his European haircut and button-down shirts, soft-spoken tones, and entrepreneurial pizzazz, lends doubt to wisdom. As director of the MIT Media Lab, best-selling author, founder of Wired magazine, and advisor to governments and Fortune 500 companies, he smacks of the showman, shaman, and P.T. Barnum of the digital big top. With his gizmos, his gadgets, his 007 cam in the bow tie, he looks the impresario, the Henny Youngman of byte. But there is much truth to what he says, and his generalizations usually hold water. He irritates not so much from being right as from being the ringleader of the culterati, the intellectual snobs who pontificate from their establishment pulpits, and whose power seems to serve as much to generate resentment as to garner respect. In the coming leaderless world, the self-proclaimed leader -- good guy, Hottentot, and big shot -- invites a shower of rotten tomatoes. With his gift for mugging at the camera and ogling in the limelight, Negroponte seems to validate the hunch that there is a hero-worshiper born every second. Being Digital, like Negroponte's Wired pieces, has the smoothness of business magazine exposes. His style borrows from the phenomenalism of the eighties -- the "if-you-look-the-part, you-are-the-part" kind of flim-flam, "go get 'em," and "don't-take-no-prisoners" quarterbacking. He has the testosterone zeal of a billionaire yuppie, and probably incarnates the human model who succeeded the dour authoritarian of the forties and fifties. His cornflakes-in-milk good cheer, win-win disposition, and go-for-the-gold dazzle make us regret the days when MIT doctors and college professors began their orations with a phlegmy cough. To be fair, Negroponte's style seems tailored for the times. Somehow we need an Oprah Winfrey of high tech, and Nick fits the ticket. His shtick is a seamless confluence of hucksterism and applied know-how: the stuff of Edison and Ford in the era of Einstein. He brings together the nerds and the neckties. Can we blame him for trying to please everyone? Looking back on the recent evolution of the Net, Nick Negroponte whistles with wonder at the distance covered by a simple concept: the convergence of media and medium, the marriage of computers and networks. Years ago, he visualized that products would become services, and already many objects available on the Net (books, electronics, clothes, etc.) begin to take on the character of services, and lose some of their value as objects of barter. The notion of leverage, of commingled value, is giving the Web an economy the world has never known, and with which it must catch up. Flim-flam man? Negroponte? Shucks, no. Related: www.nicholas. www.media.mit.edu/ people/ nicholas/ Wired/ October 20, 1999