As a fervent supply-sider, Gilder believes that the U.S.
is in a good position in the 1990’s to exploit a continuing advantage in the automation of micro-designs-so long as protectionism and managed imports do not upset the advantage. With convincing force he maintains that the U.S. The loss of American economic leadership, he writes, has been overstated by those who do not understand that objects like advanced semiconductor chips have become no more than commodities in the exploding world of sophisticated computer design. Gilder’s argument leads him to some provocative conclusions. He thereby underlines at least one fact alien to advocates of economic planning and industrial strategies: that entrepreneurial activity is real, and effective, and that it has logical implications for the economic future. Gilder sees an ordained relationship between content (realized laws of quantum physics) and form (entrepreneurial activity). Others, less wedded than Gilder to technological determinism, might see the workings of analogy here. This logic is also curiously and fortuitously aligned with the free-wheeling creative mayhem of Silicon Valley, the exact opposite of the cumbersome, centralized planning bureaucracies of IBM and other mainframe behemoths. Much of Microcosm is an attempt to show, through the efforts of such pioneers as Carver Mead, a founding giant of computer-chip design, and Robert Widlar, a strange, alcoholic genius of analogue-computer miniaturization, that the logic of subatomic physics is itself a driving force behind the physical shrinkage, accelerating power, and growing decentralization that increasingly define computer development. Gilder tracks this revolutionary movement out of the classrooms at Cal Tech into the entrepreneurial hothouse of Silicon Valley. Sandwiched between such classic Gilderisms as “The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter,” or, “To comprehend nature, we have to stop thinking of the world as basically material and begin imagining it as a manifestation of consciousness,” is an exhaustive examination of the computer revolution, a U.S.-focused capitalistic explosion that rivals any industrial revolution of the past. Their efforts are sweeping aside old, “superstitious” verities in the physical universe, and also clearing the way for global entrepreneurialism, a new era of individual and spiritual freedom, and, finally, a return to morality and the contemplation of the universal mind of God. This is the wisdom which is being blown asunder by the advent of the Microcosm, a catch phrase that Gilder uses to describe the subatomic playing field of the people he most deeply admires, the entrepreneur-inventors of Silicon Valley, avatars of a global information revolution. But instead, prophet-wise, he takes on nothing less than what he perceives to be the conventional wisdom of the entire secular, rationalistic order, the prevailing philosophy of scientific materialism which has, he writes, choked the world with bad physics, bad economics, bad politics, and bad computer design. Gilder believes, and herein attempts to show, that the computer is also a proof of the existence of God.Īctually, if he had put the proposition in those terms, he might have caused less of a stir, by offending a smaller audience. It is an ambitious and provocative attempt to link physics, technology, capitalism, and politics within a revelatory framework that is ultimately religious in inspiration (and Christian in content). But the book wants to be much more than that. Most of Microcosm looks to be no more than a journalistic examination of the expanding computer revolution, a topic on which Gilder writes with considerable ability and expertise. These may be modern times, but something akin to that feeling of secular unease has been stirred by the publication of the latest book by George Gilder, the indefatigable author of Wealth and Poverty and The Spirit of Enterprise, Reaganaut exponent of entrepreneurial populism, devout Christian. Sometimes, the authorities have to be called in. The best sort of people usually shun them. With them, the future is all-or-nothing: revelations, accusations, salvation, damnation, finger-pointing, truth or consequences.
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