Part 7 (2/2)

”Ninety eight to 2001. Interesting times to be in the Valley. I read your column, you know.”

She looked down at her plate. A lot of people had read the column back then. Women columnists were rare in tech, and she supposed she was good at it, too. ”I hope I get remembered as more than the chronicler of the dot-com boom, though,” she said.

”Oh, you will,” he said. ”You'll be remembered as the chronicler of this -- what Kettlewell and Perry and Lester are doing.”

”What you're doing, too, right?”

”Oh, yes, what I'm doing too.”

A robot rollerbladed past on the boardwalk, turning the occasional somersault. ”I should have them build some of those,” Tjan said, watching the crowd turn to regard it. It hopped onto and off of the curb, expertly steered around the wandering couples and the occasional homeless person. It had a banner it streamed out behind it: CAP'N JACKS PAINTBALL AND FANBOAT TOURS GET SHOT AND GET WET MIAMI KEY WEST LAUDERDALE.

”You think they can?”

”Sure,” Tjan said. ”Those two can build anything. That's the point: any moderately skilled pract.i.tioner can build anything these days, for practically nothing. Back in the old days, the blacksmith just made every bit of ironmongery everyone needed, one piece at a time, at his forge. That's where we're at. Every industry that required a factory yesterday only needs a garage today. It's a real return to fundamentals. What no one ever could do was join up all the smithies and all the smiths and make them into a single logical network with a single set of objectives. That's new and it's what I plan on making hay out of. This will be much bigger than dot-com. It will be much harder, too -- bigger crests, deeper troughs. This is something to chronicle all right: it will make dot-com look like a warm up for the main show.

”We're going to create a new cla.s.s of artisans who can change careers every 10 months, inventing new jobs that hadn't been imagined a year before.”

”That's a pretty unstable market,” Suzanne said, and ate some fish.

”That's a *functional* market. Here's what I think the point of a good market is. In a good market, you invent something and you charge all the market will bear for it. Someone else figures out how to do it cheaper, or decides they can do it for a slimmer margin -- not the same thing, you know, in the first case someone is more efficient and in the second they're just less greedy or less ambitious. They do it and so you have to drop your prices to compete. Then someone comes along who's less greedy or more efficient than both of you and undercuts you again, and again, and again, until eventually you get down to a kind of firmament, a baseline that you can't go lower than, the cheapest you can produce a good and stay in business. That's why straightpins, machine screws and reams of paper all cost basically nothing, and make d.a.m.ned little profit for their manufacturers.

”So if you want to make a big profit, you've got to start over again, invent something new, and milk it for all you can before the first imitator shows up. The more this happens, the cheaper and better everything gets. It's how we got here, you see. It's what the system is *for*. We're approaching a kind of pure and perfect state now, with compet.i.tion and invention getting easier and easier -- it's producing a kind of superabundance that's amazing to watch. My kids just surf it, make themselves over every six months, learn a new interface, a new entertainment, you name it. Change-surfers...” He trailed off.

”You have kids?”

”In St Petersburg, with their mother.”

She could tell by his tone that it had been the wrong question to ask. He was looking hangdog. ”Well, it must be nice to be so much closer to them than you were in Ithaca.”

”What? No, no. The St Petersburg in *Russia*.”

”Oh,” she said.

They concentrated on their food for a while.

”You know,” he said, after they'd ordered coffee and desert, ”it's all about abundance. I want my kids to grow up with abundance, and whatever is going on right now, it's providing abundance in abundance. The self-storage industry is bigger than the recording industry, did you know that? All they do is provide a place to put stuff that we own that we can't find room for -- that's superabundance.”

”I have a locker in Milpitas,” she said.

”There you go. It's a growth industry.” He drank his coffee. On the way back to their cars, he said, ”My daughter, Lyenitchka, is four, and my son, Sasha, is one. I haven't lived with their mother in three years.” He made a face. ”Sasha's circ.u.mstances were complicated. They're good kids, though. It just couldn't work with their mother. She's Russian, and connected -- that's how we met, I was hustling for my import-export business and she had some good connections -- so after the divorce there was no question of my taking the kids with me. But they're good kids.”

”Do you see them?”

”We videoconference. Who knew that long-distance divorce was the killer app for videoconferencing?”

”Yeah.”

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