TELECOSM

Buried beneath futurist hyperbole and purple prose, here lurks a potentially very interesting—if rather blithely utopian—argument regarding the ascendance of fiber-optics communications as the driving engine of technological and economic progress. Unfortunately, Gilder (Microcosm, 1989, etc.) is too busy playing techno-visionary and paradigm-shifter to state his case in a clear, compelling manner.

Reasonably enough, Gilder argues that the silicon microchip, the defining innovation of the computer era, is now being eclipsed by fiber-optics technologies that promise to make human communication universal, instantaneous, unlimited in capacity, and ultimately low-cost. Existing “narrowband” telephone wires were sufficient for voice communications, but are now absolutely glutted by the global proliferation of computers generating and transmitting data over all our telephone switches, modems, faxes, and Internet connections. The solution is to move away from electronics and toward photonics, to make use of the fact that the optical spectrum is literally infinite. It’s a solution that, while being enthusiastically pursued by such companies as Lucent Technologies, Ciena, and JDS Uniphase, also faces reluctance if not downright opposition by the companies that remain invested (financially and philosophically) in a microchip-centered economy, according to the author. Gilder is at his most persuasive when he builds his case upon simple, compelling facts—for example, the fact that a single glass fiber, a tenth of the width of a human hair, can now be made to carry almost as much information per second as the entire Internet carried per month in 1995. Too often, though, he gets caught up in revolutionary fervor, and his reasonable statements regarding the efficiency and power of optical networks give way to mind-numbing faux-poetry (“we must move into the fibersphere where networks of photons serve a penumbra of software on the edges: networks of light linking cathedrals of mind”).

The end result is an unfortunate paradox: an important subject, rendered impenetrable by the self-importance of its author. Gilder groupies and techno-libertarians will eat it up, though.