Bill Gates' The Road Ahead

Howard Stern's Miss America

by Ana Marie Cox

Miss America Howard Stern's second bestselling autobiography hasn't gotten past the first chapter before we learn the limits of Stern's powers. Unable to deceive the sleaze-police who patrol the public chat-rooms of his on-line service, he laments his lack of technical know-how. He admits that "I've always loved using technology to create opportunities to have orgasms," but laments "I'm no Bill Fucking Gates." Coincidentally, there is something of a parallel moment in Bill Gates even-better-selling autobiography, The Road Ahead. Gates surveys the limited amount of material available on the Internet and notes, with nary a trace of irony, that new technology is always initially usurped for illicit purposes: "It never takes long to figure out how to apply any new technology to the oldest desire," and since he is Bill Fucking Gates, you can bet he does, informing the reader that "certainly a few romances around Microsoft have benefited from e-mail. When my wife, Melinda, and I were first going out, we took advantage of it."

Gates' book has been marketed as business book and Stern's as a literary peep-show, but at their heart, these books are both about the power of technology to shape a public persona. While Stern's fame is rooted in a medium exponentially older than Gates' electronic domain, both their books make attempts to overcome their own "book-ness" in favor of interactivity. The Road Ahead makes this attempt obvious with a CD-ROM offering "the complete book text with hundreds of multimedia hyperlinks, a special interview with Bill Gates, video demonstrations of future technology, a World Wide browser and more." In a catch-22 characteristic of the entire Gates world-view, this preview of future technology is useless if you don't already possess the current versions. Thus, it is the Stern book's low-tech aping of high-tech style which is ulitmately more successful than The Road Ahead in communicating the kinetic, frenetic style of the Information Age. Miss America's interior design is a marvel of fonts and sidebars, its visual hyperactivity approximating virtual hyperlinks without resorting to the computer.

Bill GatesThis is not to say that Stern has beaten Gates at his own game. No, if anything, the financial success of Gate's book (which is outselling Stern's) proves that Gates' electronic persona doesn't need to be successfully translated into print in order to be compelling.

Stern handles his fame with manic schizophrenia that is genius in its hyperbole. Within the same chapter, the same paragraph, sometimes within the same sentence, Stern curses and revels in his celebrity. "To be one of the faceless crowd...Not to be the tall, gawky freak who has to make everyone laugh," is quickly replaced with "Screw being faceless in the crowd--being a nobody sucks." These  flip-flops are dizzying and exhilarating, a funhouse of opinion and  exaggeration that reflects the truth through so many different  mirrors that after awhile it doesn't matter anymore. Sure, Stern makes an attempt at heartfelt revelation--radio fans will be surprised to learn it has little to do with the size of his dick--but by the end of the book, we are not one step closer to knowing anything more about the "real" Howard Stern. And we don't care.

Bill Gates is as cagey about his "real" self as Stern is manic. Throughout The Road Ahead, Gate's decision to make his personal story subordinant to the story of the information highway mirrors the way he insists the highway itself will be "unobtrusive" to our future lives. And in much the same way that Gates has quietly engineered a virtual monopoly on PCsoftware--a situation which radically limits the number of choices available--Gates insists that allowing the highway to make decisions for us will make our lives easier.

Discussing the possibilities of hyperlinked advertising, he writes: "In the future, companies may pay not only to have their products  on-screen, but also to make them available for you to buy. You will  have the option of inquiring about any image you see. This will be another choice the highway will make available unobtrusively. If  you are watching the movie Top Gun and think Tom Cruise's  aviator sunglasses are cool, you'll be able to pause the movie and  learn about the glasses or even buy them on the spot."

Gill MatesThis passage, culled from a chapter about "friction-free  capitalism," is fairly indicative of the tone of the entire book, from Gates' awkward and questionable pop culture references (Early on we  learn that The Bridges of Madison County is "a book I enjoyed  greatly"), right down to the eerie way Gates grants "the highway" sentient autonomy ("a choice the highway will make available...").

But if Stern's juvenile but dead-on satire fills us with fascinated revulsion, if in the wake of Windows 95, Joan Brewer's Bill-centric conspiracy theories are starting to sound plausible...well, we get the celebrities we deserve. The gears that turn the machinery of stardom have propelled them both--the geek and the shock jock--into the kind of national awareness once reserved for movie stars and politicians. Bill Gates goes on Letterman, Howard Stern runs for governor. It all makes some kind of hideous sense.