Techno-tyrants

In case you haven't heard, Seattle is home to a tremendously important "think tank." This think tank is called the Discovery Institute, and it's a place where a bunch of white guys sit around and think very hard, at very shiny conference tables. What these guys are thinking about is The Future. One of their mottoes is "The Discovery Institute: making a positive vision of the future practical."

Every few weeks, the Institute sponsors luncheons at the Washington Athletic Club with guest speakers: Newt Gingrich, Jennifer Dunn, a congressman with a disheveled comb-over who knows everything there is to know about Y2K. During the speeches the guys listen attentively and take notes. The food is terrible—dried-out fish that was caught a long, long time ago, cheesecake with a distinct moldy undercurrent. But the guys don't complain. They are warriors, not whiners. A shitty lunch is one of the burdens they must bear in their noble journey toward the Positive Future.

To become a member of this future, you can write a check. If you pay enough, your name will go on the donor list alongside many other important names. Members receive Discovery mailings: notices of luncheons, lectures, and a discount on books written by Discovery Institute Fellows. The Discovery Views newsletter follows the progress of their latest crusades: the Cascadia Project, which hopes to "connect the gateways and trade corridors" from Oregon to BC; the Science and Culture project, which is working to refute Darwinian "materialism" in favor of "intelligent design theory" (an argument that was recently used in Kansas to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools); the Technology and Public Policy project, which involves an "examination of new technologies to determine their implications for the economy, politics and culture." Many of the Discovery Institute fellows went to Yale or Harvard; consequently, they believe they might be geniuses. Many of them have lots of money; consequently, they dream of themselves as conquerors, or kings.

The Discovery Institute is essentially a boys' club. But it's not an old-style New England boys' club, where guys seem stranded in the past, their brains fogged by Early Times, reminiscing about the days before women were allowed inside. At the Discovery Institute, the guys put on a progressive front—there are token women and blacks on the board, they talk about the technological "revolution," they lead healthy lives of 5am jogs and few hangovers. These guys aren't doddering, out-of-touch right wingers—in fact, if you were to ask them, they would probably shy away from any political affiliation at all. They're simply good, God-fearing men who want to help us all "by promoting ideas in the common sense tradition of representative government, the free market and individual liberty."

One of the crown princes of the Discovery Institute is a guy named George Gilder. Gilder is a Senior Fellow and Founder, and he is a revered technological brainiac. He has been on the cover of Wired Magazine; Bill Gates acknowledges him as one of the guys who really makes him think. Among the cyberworld elite, Gilder is spoken of in respectful, hushed tones. He was one of a select group Wired asked to talk about "The State of the Planet" in 1998. The Discovery Institute's literature features him prominently; on its Web site you can click into the Gilder archives—all George, all the time.

George is regularly asked to explain the mysteries of cyberspace to the members of the Institute. Because he seems to understand the intricacies of the technological "revolution," the guys worship him like a prophet. In the dizzying flood of change, George is a trusted guide, called on for explanations, predictions, reassurances. Businessmen pay $300 a head to hear him speak at conferences. Right now he's organizing something called the Telecosm conference, which will take place in Tahoe at a resort called the Inn at Squaw Peak. About 400 tech business types are slated to come, and when George talks about it, he gets positively giddy.

In a phone interview from his home in Tyrningham, Massachusetts, Gilder explains the ideas behind this conference: "Telecosm is about the future of technology. In the era of microcosm it was transistors, bits, that were plummeting in price, and next year transistors will cost a millionth of a cent. And the next era will be determined by the plummeting price of bandwidth." Presumably, if you pay to go to the conference, this will make sense to you. Because according to people who claim to know what he is talking about, George knows what he is talking about. The Seattle Times regularly cites him as "futurist Gilder," as if the future is his job, his specialty.

But George Gilder has not always been a futurist. In fact, he worked for a long time to keep the world from moving forward at all. In the '70s he published a series of books attacking the feminist and civil rights movements. In a book called Sexual Suicide, Gilder argued that women's liberation would lead to the end of the human race. If women achieved economic equality, a "social breakdown" would result. "Women control not the economy of the marketplace but the economy of Eros," Gilder wrote. "A marginal bias in favor of men in the labor force will best promote economic and social order."