A Generation of Fools
by MF Boswell

I showed up 15 minutes late for the local Multimedia Alliance meeting last night, and that was a mistake. Not a seat to be had, and the sandwiches had long been scarfed up. The organizers had expected a hundred people, but twice that many packed the room. The few faces I knew were vastly outnumbered by strangers. Suits from US West and Intel. Media artists dressed for a shredder's convention. Technofreaks, video producers, students, teachers, and a whole gaggle of just-interested drop ins curious about "multimedia."

The featured presentation was a new CD-ROM game, but the real reason for the wall-to-wall throng was, I suspect, an impending sense that something explosive is on the verge of "happening." A trend, a business opportunity, or a new (I hate the word) paradigm for entertainment or learning. There's an insurgent notion going around that these opportunities are no longer reserved for corporations---in fact, they exist largely in spite of them; the real potential in new technologies is in the home, in the virtual garret, on the desktop. Remember the first time you logged onto the Web and saw that, yes, you really COULD hopscotch across the planet from server to server, YOU, like a cyber Peter Pan? You were thrilled, and exclaimed, "The world is mine!" Then you paused a moment to scratch your head, and wondered, "Well, ok, what now?" Something's happening, yes, hmmm, but what?

We're in a curious time between the promise of technology and the realization of. . . something unknown. The desire to create content and space for that something brings together a variety of people with little in common, save a huge capacity to dream. Last night I saw a friend who had built a fortune in quick-lubes, but he's venturing his capital now into educational CD-ROMs. There was another who had quit his sales job to go design Web pages for the Catholic Church. A high school student who's making "the next Myst" (join the club), and a news reporter who's negotiating with Disney to produce the film version of his computer game.

What's up here isn't a movement, or a culture, or an industry, it's the defining of a kind of generation. One bound not by age, but by vision and attitude. It's the 10-year-old who can render a wireframe spaceship on her PC; and it's the founder of Lotus, now teaching the insights of Buddha to programmers at MIT. It's a generation gripped by a mad inventive imperative---sprinkled with a touch of magic---who know that everything from mythology to mathematics can be re-imagined in silicon (how Joseph Campbell would have loved "Myst"), and who understand that the Hero With a Thousand Faces is. . . You. Now.

The coming of truly powerful microprocessors is helping us re-define the creative process, so anyone with a decent CPU can literally invent new ways to create, and create new ways to invent. Want to explore new worlds of the mind? Make them up them yourself as you dream along, in 24-bit color. Think there's nothing new in music? Listen to "Grayfolded," a Grateful Dead performance that never actually happened, born out of scattered concert riffs spanning 25 years, yet resulting in a single composition wholly fresh and original. Music for the next century, brought to life on a Mac yesterday.

Who is doing all this, this. . . inventing? Not the "experts," not the "wise." You don't need a Nick Negroponte to know which way the wind blows. The most interesting ideas, art, communities and opportunities in multimedia, and in cyberspace, are being happily sprung to life by amateurs and Fools. Francis Coppola once predicted the next great American storyteller would be a teenage girl with a camcorder---and why not? While across the spectrum, the most radical and threatening experiment in the history of investing is taking place right now on your screen. You and I and a gonzo cast of upstarts in virtual Motley, staging guerrilla theater raids on the dreary bastions of Wall Street ("Pardon us, we're just Fools, look the other way if we make you nervous"), we're doing exactly what every established institution fears and can't handle. We're inventing new ways to share information, sometimes incredibly valuable information, freely and openly, and thumbing our collective nose at those who would lock it away. Foolish, ingenious subterfuge!

Indeed, the Fool as an archetype is the emblem of the generation I'm talking about. The mythological Fool---take a peek at your old Tarot cards---is the symbol for the unlimited creativity and spontaneity inherent in every moment. "The Fool tells you to believe in yourself," says the Tarot, "to follow your heart, no matter how crazy your impulse may seem." He's the spirit of those who are beginning to use technology in instinctive and unpredictable ways, who are crazy enough to BELIEVE IN THEMSELVES and have the moxie to get away with it.

I saw many of this Foolish Generation at last night's meeting, some in their teens, some in their 70s, but all with a certain curious look in their eyes. Watch out for these people---they're mischievous, wild and restless. I think they lie awake at night, and dream during the day. They see and hear things others don't. I want to be one of them.