Transformation

TECHNOLOGY

Next Stop: Cyberspace

It started, as the big ideas in technology often do, with a science-fiction writer. William Gibson, a young expatriate American living in Canada, was wandering past the video arcades on Vancouver's Granville Street when something about the way the players were hunched over their glowing screens struck him as odd. "I could see in the physical intensity of their postures how rapt the kids were," he says. These kids clearly believed in the space the games projected."

That image haunted Gibson. He didn't know much about computers--he wrote his breakthrough novel, Neuromancer, on an ancient manual typewriter--but as near as he could tell, everybody who worked much with the machines eventually came to accept, almost as an article of faith, the reality of that imaginary realm. "They develop a belief that there's some kind of actual space behind the screen," he says. "Some place that you can't see but you know is there."

Gibson called that place "cyberspace." In the years since, there have been other names given to that shadowy space where our computer data reside: the Net, the Web, the Cloud, the information superhighway. But Gibson's coinage may prove the most enduring. By 1989 it had been borrowed to describe not some science-fiction fantasy but today's increasingly interconnected computer systems--especially the millions of computers jacked into the Internet.

Spring 1995

Deep Blue Funk

As was to be expected, the end of civilization as we know it was announced on the back pages. On Feb. 10, 1996, in Philadelphia, while America was distracted by the rise of Pat Buchanan, the fall of Phil Gramm and other trifles, something large happened. German philosophers call such large events world-historical. This was larger. It was species-defining. The New York Times carried it on page A32.

On Feb. 10, Garry Kasparov, quite possibly the best chess player who ever lived, sat down across a chessboard from a machine, an IBM computer called Deep Blue, and lost.

Feb. 26, 1996

WORLD

The New World Order The American century ends in bangs and whimpers

To the ground soldiers of Operation Desert Storm, the shortest road home from Saudi Arabia cuts through Kuwait. But the prospect of traveling along it fills the grunts with dread.

Life at the front is a song of dark fear, deep pride, lost mail, long waits and improvisation. The white heat of the summer is hard to remember now, when it becomes cold enough at night to leave ice rattling inside canteens. At the very front lines, the motto is "Travel light, freeze at night." Soldiers sleep in parka linings, with socks on their hands if their mittens are missing. They wish they could requisition extra toes.

It is a nuisance to lug around gas masks and protective gear, but no one complains. For the troops on the ground, the greatest fear is of chemical attack, a strike by an enemy they cannot see. The closer to the front, the more raw the nerves. mres, or Meals, Ready to Eat, are the soldiers' most accessible enemy. Everyone hates them. Egyptian soldiers refused them. Only ravenous Iraqi prisoners of war wolf them down--including the chewing gum. When the milk runs out, there is pineapple drink to pour on the cornflakes.

Feb. 25, 1991

The Death of Somalia

Every child under five receives a plastic bracelet, which entitles the wearer to a protein biscuit and a bowl of gruel. The bands are coded; blue for severely malnourished; red for those on the verge of death.

As the boy's eyes roll back beneath fluttering eyelids, an older woman gently presses them shut. Workers have grown accustomed to the desperate, and few have pity, any longer, to spare. Comfort comes in strange forms in this ravaged land.

Sept. 21, 1992

Three Days In August

An abyss opened for a moment, and black bats flew out. They filled the air with old nightmares, throwbacks to a style of history that the world had been forgetting. The Soviet Union was seized by a sinister anachronism: its dying self. Men with faces the color of a sidewalk talked about a "state of emergency." They rolled in tanks and told stolid lies. The world imagined another totalitarian dusk. If Gorbachev was under arrest, who had possession of the nuclear codes?

Three days: then the bats of history abruptly turned, flew back and vanished into the past. By act of will and absence of fear, the Russian people accomplished a miracle, the reversal of a thousand years of autocracy.

Sept. 2, 1991

NATION

Apocalypse in Waco An explosive mixture of guns and messianic faith

The sun didn't blacken, nor the moon turn red, but the world did come to an end, just as their prophet had promised. The End drove up in a tank, spitting gas, fulfilling prophecies. And if anyone wants to harm them, says the Book of Revelation, fire pours from their mouth and consumes their foes.

Buzzards circled overhead and the wind blew hard on the day the Branch Davidians died. Before the sun came up, state troopers went door to door, telling people to stay inside. Over their loudspeakers, the tired negotiators called one last time for David Koresh and his followers to surrender peacefully. Then they got on the phone and told him exactly where the tear gas was coming, so he could move the children away. The phone came sailing out the front door. They will make war on the Lamb, and the Lamb will conquer them.

May 3, 1993

At Heaven's Gate

So last week, in that spacious rancho Santa Fe mansion, with the bougainvillaea in full bloom outside, 39 bodies were laid out on their backs on bunk beds, looking like so many laboratory specimens pinned neatly to a board. Each was dressed in black pants, flowing black shirt, spanking-new black Nikes. Those who wore glasses had them neatly folded next to their body. It was a remarkably well-choreographed departure. But the largest mass suicide in U.S. history blasted the doors wide open onto a considerably less tidy world--a jumbled universe of UFOs and extraterrestrials careening smack into apocalyptic Christian heresies and end-is-nigh paranoia.

April 7, 1997

O.J. on the Run

When asked how they could have let the most famous double-murder suspect in history slip away under their noses, the angry police commander and the tight-faced lawyer and the whole choir of commentators all said the same thing: "We never thought he would run."

In crisis, people condense into their essential selves. O.J. Simpson was, essentially, a very great runner. That was how a bowlegged kid with rickets escaped the slums where he was born, how a football superstar had become a national icon, always outrunning his obstacles, finding daylight where there wasn't any. "I'll tell you," he used to say, "my speed has always been my best weapon. So if I can't run away from whatever it is, I don't need to be there."

But there was never a run like last week's final play. The chase had become a game: the police weren't really trying to overtake him, and he wasn't really trying to escape. He just wanted his mother. He wanted to go home. He found his blocker in his faithful friend and longtime teammate Al Cowlings, and together they slipped away from the lawyers and doctors and eluded the police who had come to take O.J. into custody on charges of first-degree murder.

June 27, 1994

The Unabomber's Lair

The hunters found their quarry right where he was meant to be, the place he had picked with the same care he brought to his other handiwork. Lincoln, Mont., sits as close as you can get to the spine of the western hemisphere and still have a post office and a library within walking distance. Theodore John Kaczynski lived at heaven's back door, just below the largest stretch of unbroken wilderness in the continental U.S. There are no cars, no roads, no buildings beyond a shelter or two, and on any given day more grizzly bears than people. This is America as the explorers found it, still sealed, unlit, unwired, resembling most perfectly the place the Unabomber wanted America to be.

Maybe it wasn't really so lonely at night in the woods at the edge of the Scapegoat Wilderness, where the trees sound like a crowd waiting for the curtain to rise. It is a place where a man who hates technology would have plenty of time to practice what the Unabomber preaches. He could listen to the forest rustle and hum, the larches and ponderosa pines hundreds of years old, the tamaracks and the lodgepoles that totter when the wind rubs up against the Continental Divide. What he didn't know was that for the past few weeks, the trees were listening back.

April 15, 1996

TELEVISION

Seinfeld Calls It Quits

Visiting Jerry Seinfeld's home in the Hollywood Hills, one finds that the benefits of being a top television performer are readily apparent: even the three Porsches in his smartly tiled garage--two vintage, one a 1997 Turbo S--have a view of all Los Angeles. This is thanks to a picture window cut into the garage's wall. Yes, it's nice to be a TV star's car, just as it's nice to be a TV star. And now that even Mikhail Gorbachev has begun doing commercials for Pizza Hut, it seems pointless to argue with the medium that so dominates our lives and culture. Most of us threw in the towel long ago. But not Jerry Seinfeld. While the rest of America has been off getting college credit for studying Silver Spoons, the star, one of the executive producers of the situation comedy that bears his last name, is unafraid to bite the hand that feeds him.

Jan. 12, 1998

SCIENCE

A Sheep Named Dolly

One doesn't expect Dr. Frankenstein to show up in wool sweater, baggy parka, soft British accent and the face of a bank clerk. But there, in all banal benignity, he was: Dr. Ian Wilmut, the first man to create fully formed life from adult body parts since Mary Shelley's mad scientist.

The creator wore chinos. Wilmut may not look the part, but he plays it. He took a cell nucleus from a six-year-old ewe, fashioned from it a perfect twin--adding the nice Frankenstein touch of passing an electric charge through the composite cell to get it growing--and called it Dolly.

March 10, 1997

SPORT

The Greatest

Then there's the old, sickly guy with the Chicago Bulls. Gratitude for this bounty should not be an overnight realization, but the 44 minutes Michael Jordan put in the other night against the Utah Jazz crystallize the notion that we are blessed. It's not enough that he plays every game triple-teamed by the pressures of age (34), a fifth title and his own Airness.

Needing a victory last Wednesday in the Delta Center, where the Jazz never lose, Jordan stayed on the floor despite a debilitating viral infection. "He just made big shot after big shot," said teammate Scottie Pippen, who literally had to hold Jordan up at the end of the game. "He's the greatest."

Pippen is right. Jordan is the greatest athlete in the history of American sports, Muhammad Ali's nickname to the contrary. Jordan's only competition, really, is Ruth.

June 23, 1997

BUSINESS

Layoffs for Laughs

The Trojan War had Homer. The Spanish-American War had William Randolph Hearst. Every calamity has its bard, and downsizing's is Scott Adams. True, Patrick Buchanan deserves some credit for recognizing exactly what it means to employees to be expendable gaskets in America's re-engineering. But Adams, the creator of a sack-shaped, ever threatened corporate loser named Dilbert, was there first. The result is that Dilbert, which already runs in more than 800 newspapers with a readership of some 60 million people, is still the fastest-growing comic strip in the country.

Dilbert is a phlegmatic, mouthless engineer who, explains Adams with some understatement, "is not fully drinking all of the passion and variety that other people might be."

March 18, 1996

PEOPLE

Death of a Princess

She lived a fabled life and a cautionary tale, a princess of irreducible splendor yet one who bore testimony to the commonality of loneliness and heartbreak. On the day 16 years ago that Charles, the Prince of Wales, married Lady Diana Spencer, the Archbishop of Canterbury declared, here is "the stuff of which fairy tales are made." That fairy tale ended even before their divorce was announced, a love story that was false, it was shown, from the very beginning. Diana emerged scathed, but she had other causes to tend to--her sons, the sick, the war-ravaged, her own heart. The marriage was dead, but long live the princess.

And now she is gone.

Sept. 8, 1997