When Internet stocks began their free fall in March
2000, the Internet was finally put in its proper place. It was nothing
more than a fast delivery service for information -- that was what
serious people who had either lost a lot of money in the late stages of
the Internet boom or, more likely, failed to make money began to say
now. The profit-making potential of the Internet had been overrated, and
so the social effects of the Internet were presumed to be overrated.
But they weren't. Speeding up information was not the only thing the
Internet had done. The Internet had made it possible for people to
thwart all sorts of rules and conventions. It wasn't just the commercial
order that was in flux. Many forms of authority were secured by locks
waiting to be picked. The technology and money-making potential of the
Internet were far less interesting than the effects people were allowing
it to have on their lives and what these, in turn, said about those
lives.
What was happening on the Internet buttressed a
school of thought in sociology known as role theory. The role theorists
argue that we have no ''self'' as such. Our selves are merely the masks
we wear in response to the social situations in which we find ourselves.
The Internet had offered up a new set of social situations, to which
people had responded by grabbing for a new set of masks. People take on
the new tools they are ready for and make use of only what they need,
how they need it. If they were using the Internet to experiment with
their identities, it was probably because they found their old
identities inadequate. If the Internet was giving the world a shove in a
certain direction, it was probably because the world already felt
inclined to move in that direction. The Internet was telling us what we
wanted to become.
I have already written here about Jonathan Lebed,
the 15-year-old boy in the New Jersey suburbs who used the Internet to
transform himself into a stock market manipulator. Jonathan's story
suggested that you couldn't really understand what was happening on the
Internet unless you understood the conditions in the real world that led
to what was happening on the Internet -- and you couldn't understand
those unless you went there in person and looked around. Once you did
that, you came to appreciate all sorts of new truths. For instance, the
Internet was rock 'n' roll all over again. Not rock 'n' roll now, but
rock 'n' roll in the 1950's and 1960's, when it actually terrified
grown-ups. The Internet was enabling a great status upheaval and a
subversion of all manner of social norms. And the people quickest to
seize on its powers were the young.
A Finnish company, Nokia, figured this out before I
did. Nokia has come to dominate the mobile-phone business to the point
where pretty much everyone now agrees that the Finns will be the first
to connect mobile phones to the Internet in a way that the rest of us
will find necessary. The Finns were successful because they were
especially good at guessing what others would want from their mobile
phones. One big reason for this -- or so the people at Nokia believe --
was that they spent a lot of time studying children. The kids came to
each new technology fresh, without preconceptions, and they picked it up
more quickly. They dreamed up uses for their phones that, for reasons
no one fully understood, never occurred to grown-ups. The instant text
message, for instance.
To create an instant message, you punched it by hand
into your telephone, using the keypad as a typewriter. On the face of
it, this is not an obvious use of a telephone keypad. The difference
between the number of letters in the alphabet and the number of keys on
the pad meant you wound up having to type a kind of Morse code. The
technique had been popularized by Finnish schoolboys who were nervous
about asking girls out on dates to their faces and Finnish schoolgirls
who wanted to tell one another what had happened on those dates as soon
as it happened. They had proved that if the need to communicate
indirectly is sufficiently urgent, words can be typed into a telephone
keypad with amazing speed. Five and a half million Finns sent one
another more than a billion instant messages in the year 2000.
The instant message has fast become a staple of
European corporate communication. The technique spread from Finnish
children to businessmen because the kids taught their parents. Nokia
employed anthropologists to tell them this. Finland has become the first
nation on earth to acknowledge formally the childcentric model of
economic development: if you wanted a fast-growing economy, you needed
to promote rapid technical change, and if you intended to promote rapid
technical change, you needed to cede to children a strange measure of
authority.
When capitalism encourages ever more rapid change,
children enjoy one big advantage over adults: they haven't decided who
they are. They haven't sunk a lot of psychological capital into a
particular self. When a technology comes along that rewards people who
are willing to chuck overboard their old selves for new ones, the people
who aren't much invested in their old selves have an edge. The things
that get tossed overboard with a 12-year-old self don't seem like much
to give up at the time.
I spent my childhood in New Orleans. I would like
now to consider this otherwise uninteresting fact, as it is bound up
with my interest in identity and change. New Orleans has always been an
excellent place to observe progress. To know progress, you need to know
what it has rolled over or left behind, and when progress is moving as
fast as it is now, recalling its victims is difficult. New Orleans keeps
its anachronisms alive long enough for them to throw the outside world
into sharp relief. For instance, until the mid-1990's you could find
actual gentlemen lawyers in New Orleans, who thought of themselves
mainly as members of an honorable and dignified profession. One of these
dinosaurs was my father.
Right up until it collapsed, the old family law firm
that my father managed clung to its charming habits. The gentlemen
lawyers wrote notes to one another arguing over the correct
pronunciation of certain phrases in ancient Greek. They collected
strange artifacts from dead cultures. They treated education as a branch
of religion. They wore bow ties. They were terrifyingly at ease with
themselves but did not know the meaning of casual Friday. Their lives
had been premised on a frankly elitist idea: an attorney was above the
fray. He possessed special knowledge. He observed a strict code of
conduct without ever having to say what it was. He viewed all entreaties
to change with suspicion. The most important thing in the world to him
was his stature in the community, and yet so far as anyone else could
determine, he never devoted an ounce of his mental energy to worrying
about it. Status wasn't a cause; it was an effect of the way he led his
life.
The first hint I had that this was no longer a
tenable pose -- and would not be a tenable pose for me -- came from a
man I had never met called Morris Bart. I was some kind of teenager at
the time. My father and I were driving along the Interstate highway that
ran through town when we came upon a giant billboard. It said something
like: ''Are you a victim? Have you been injured? No one represents your
interests? Call Morris Bart, attorney-at-law.'' And there was a big
picture of Morris Bart. He had the easy smile of a used-car dealer.
''Do you do the same thing as Morris Bart?'' I asked my father.
''Not exactly.''
''But his billboard says he's a lawyer.''
''We have a different kind of law firm.''
''How?''
''We don't have billboards.''
''Why not?''
''It's just not something a lawyer does.''
That was true. It was true right up to the moment
Morris Bart stuck up his picture beside the Interstate. My father and
his colleagues remained unmoved, but the practice of law was succumbing
to a general force, the twin American instincts to democratize and to
commercialize. (Often they amount to the same thing.) These are the two
forces that power the Internet and in turn are powered by it.
Morris Bart was a tiny widget inside the same
magnificent American instrument of destruction that the Internet has so
eloquently upgraded. A few years after Bart put up his billboard, the
lawyers in my father's firm began to receive calls from ''consultants''
who wanted to help teach them how to steal clients and lawyers from
other firms -- a notion that would have been unthinkable a few years
earlier and remained unthinkable to some. A few years after that, the
clients insisted that lawyers bill by the hour -- and then questioned
the bills! The old game was over. The minute the market intruded too
explicitly, the old prestige began to seep out of the law. For the
gentlemen lawyers, it ended about as well as it could. But still it
ended. And for people whose identity was wrapped up in the idea, the end
gave their story the shape of tragedy.
I recall the feeling when it first dawned on me that
the ground beneath my teenage feet was moving. I did not enjoy the
premonition of doom in my father's world. But what troubled me even more
was that some part of me wanted my father to have his own billboard
beside the highway -- which of course he would never do. My response was
to leave home and invent another self for myself. Had the Internet been
available, I might have simply gone online.
That's what Jonathan Lebed did. And that's what
another teenager with an AOL account named Marcus Arnold began doing
last summer -- putting on a mask that would cause even Morris Bart to
shudder and delivering another insult to the social order and its
reigning notions of status and expertise.
The Askme Corporation was created in 1999 by former
Microsoft employees. The software it sold enabled the big companies that
bought it -- 3M, Procter & Gamble -- to create a private Web for
their workers. This private Web was known as ''knowledge sharing.'' The
knowledge exchange was a screen on a computer where employees could put
questions to the entire company. The appeal of this was obvious. Once an
AskMe-style knowledge exchange was up and running, it didn't matter
where inside the company any particular expertise resided. So long as
expertise didn't leave the company, it was always on tap for whoever
needed it.
AskMe soon found that it was able to tell a lot
about a company from its approach to the new software. In pyramid-shaped
hierarchical organizations, the bosses tended to appoint themselves or a
few select subordinates as the ''experts.'' Questions rose from the
bottom of the organization, the answers flowed down from the top and the
original hierarchy was preserved, even reinforced. In less-hierarchical
pancake-shaped companies, the bosses used the software to create a
network of all the company's employees and to tap intelligence wherever
in that network it happened to be. That way, anyone in the company could
answer anyone else's questions. Anyone could be the expert. Of course,
it didn't exactly inspire awe in the ranks to see the intern answering a
question posed by the vice president for strategic planning. But many
companies decided that a bit of flattening was a small price to pay to
tap into the collective knowledge bank.
The people who created the AskMe software believed
that it gave companies whose bosses were willing to risk their own
prestige and authority an advantage over the hierarchical companies
whose bosses were not. They didn't say this publicly, because they
wanted to sell their software to the pyramid-shaped organizations too.
But they knew that once the software was deployed, companies that
flattened their organization charts to encourage knowledge to flow
freely in every direction would beat companies that didn't. Knowledge
came from the strangest places; employees knew a lot more than they
thought they did; and the gains in the collective wisdom outweighed any
losses to the boss's authority.
In short, the software subtly changed the economic
environment. It bestowed new rewards on the egalitarian spirit. It made
life harder for pyramids and easier for pancakes.
Out in the field, AskMe's salespeople, like
salespeople everywhere, found themselves running into the same five or
six objections from potential buyers -- even when the buyers were
pancake-shaped. One was ''How do you know that your software won't break
down when all of our 200,000 employees are using it heavily?'' To prove
that it wouldn't, AskMe created a Web site and offered a version of its
software to the wider public. The site, called AskMe.com, went up on
the Web in February 2000 and quickly became the most heavily used of a
dozen or so knowledge exchanges on the Internet. In its first year, the
site had more than 10 million visitors.
This was striking in view of how peripheral the site
was to the ambitions of the AskMe Corporation. The company made no
money from the site and did not bother to monitor what went on there or
even to advertise its existence. The millions of people using the site
were drawn by word of mouth. The advice on the site was freely offered.
The experts were self-appointed and ranked by the people who sought the
advice. Experts with high rankings received small cash prizes from
AskMe.com. The prizes -- and the free publicity -- attracted a lot of
people who don't normally work for nothing. Accountants, lawyers and
financial consultants mingled their licensed knowledge with experts in
sports trivia, fortune telling and body piercing.
AskMe Corporation didn't think of it this way, but
its public Web site suggested a number of questions. What is the wider
society's instinctive attitude toward knowledge? Are we willing to look
for it wherever it might be found or only from the people who are
supposed to possess it? Does the world want to be a pyramid or a
pancake?
In the summer of 2000, in a desert town called
Perris, halfway between Los Angeles and Palm Springs, 15-year-old Marcus
Arnold offered his reply to those questions, and a thousand or so more
besides. Marcus's parents had immigrated to Perris from Belize by way of
South Central Los Angeles. Why anyone would move to Perris from
anywhere was not immediately clear. Perris was one of those nonplaces
that America specializes in creating. One day, it was a flat, hazy
stretch of sand and white rock beneath an endless blue sky into which
recreational skydivers routinely plunged; the next, some developer had
laid out a tract of 10,000 identical homes; and the day after that, it
was teeming with people who were there mainly because it was not
someplace else. The decision of human beings to make a home of it had
little effect on the identity of Perris. Even after the tract houses had
been deposited in the desert, Perris was known chiefly as a place to
leap onto from an airplane.
Marcus lived with his parents and his twin brother
in a small brick house a mile or so from the big drop zone. Over the
family's two-car garage, from morning until night, people stepped out of
planes and plummeted to earth, and the blue sky above Marcus was
permanently scarred by parachutes. Marcus himself was firmly earthbound,
a great big bear of a boy. He was six feet tall and weighed maybe 200
pounds. He did not walk but lumbered from the computer to the front
door, then back again. The computer squatted on a faux-antique desk in
the alcove between the dining room and the living room, which were as
immaculately kept as showrooms in a model home. It was the only computer
in the house. In theory, the family shared it; in practice, it belonged
to him. He now needed as much time on it as he could get, as he was a
leading expert on AskMe.com. His field was the law.
When I first visited Marcus, the blue screen
displayed the beginning of an answer to a question on AskMe.com that he
had bashed out before I arrived:
Your son should not be in jail or on trial.
According to Miranda versus Arizona the person to be arrested must be
read his rights before he was asked any questions. If your son was asked
any questions before the reading of his rights he should not be in
prison. If you want me to help you further write me back on this board
privately.
The keyboard vanished beneath Marcus's jumbo hands,
and another page on AskMe.com popped up on the screen. Marcus wanted to
show me the appallingly weak answer to a question that had been offered
by one of the real lawyers on the site. ''I can always spot a crummy
attorney,'' he said. ''There are people on the Web site who have no clue
what they're talking about -- they are just there to get rankings and
to sell their services and to get paid.'' Down went his paws, out of
sight went the keyboard and up popped one of Marcus's favorite Web
sites. This one listed the menus on death row in Texas. Photographs of
men put to death by the state appeared next to hideous lists of the junk
food they had ordered for their last meals. Marcus browsed these for a
minute or two, searching for news, then moved on, without comment.
One privilege of adolescence is that you can treat
everything around you as normal, because you have nothing to compare it
with, and Marcus appeared to be taking full advantage of it. To Marcus,
it was normal that you could punch a few buttons into a machine and read
what a man who was executed by the state this morning had eaten last
night. It was normal that the only signs of life outside his house were
the people floating down from the sky and into the field out back. It
was normal that his parents had named his identical twin brother Marc.
Marc and Marcus. And it was normal that he now spent most of the time he
was not in school on the Internet, giving legal advice to grown-ups.
Marcus had stumbled upon AskMe.com late in the
spring of 2000. He was studying for his biology exam and looking for an
answer to a question. He noticed that someone had asked a question about
the law to which he knew the answer. Then another. A thought occurred:
why not answer them himself? To become an official expert, he only
needed to fill in a form. He did this on June 5, 2000 -- a day already
enshrined in Marcus's mind. ''I always wanted to be an attorney since I
was, like, 12,'' he said, ''but I couldn't do it because everyone is
going to be: 'Like, what? Some 12-year-old kid is going to give me legal
advice?'''
''They'd feel happier with a 15-year-old?''
He drew a deep breath and made a face that indicated
that he took this to be a complicated question. ''So when I first went
on AskMe,'' he said, ''I told everybody I was 20, roughly about 20, and
everyone believed me.'' Actually, he claimed to be 25, which to a boy of
15 is, I suppose, roughly 20. To further that impression, he adopted
the handle LawGuy1975. People who clicked onto his page found him
described as ''LawGuy1975 aka Billy Sheridan.'' Billy Sheridan was
Marcus's handle on America Online.
A few days after he appointed himself a legal
expert, Marcus recounted, he was logging onto the Internet solely to go
to AskMe.com and deal with grown-ups' legal problems.
What sort of legal problems? I asked him.
''Simple ones,'' he said. ''Some of them are like,
'My husband is in jail for murder, and he didn't do it, and I need to
file a motion for dismissal, how do I do it?' I have received questions
from people who are just, like, you know, 'I am going to be put in jail
all of a sudden, can somebody help me plead before they come cart me
off?' And it's just, like, well, come on, that's a cry for help. You're
not just going to sit there. But most of them are simple questions.
'What's a felony?' Or 'How many years will I get if I commit this
crime?' Or 'What happens if I get sued?' Simple questions.'' He said all
this in the self-conscious rapid-fire patter of a television lawyer.
Once he became an expert, Marcus's career took on a
life of its own. The AskMe rankings were driven by the number of
questions the expert answered, the speed of his replies and the quality
of those replies, as judged by the recipients, who bestowed on them a
rating of one to five stars. By July 1, Marcus was ranked No. 10 out of
150 or so experts in AskMe.com's criminal-law division, many of whom
were actual lawyers. As he tells it, that's when he decided to go for
the gold. ''When I hit the Top 10, I got some people who were like,
'Congratulations, blah blah blah.' So my adrenaline was pumping to
answer more questions. I was just, like: You know what? Let me show
these people I know what I'm doing.'' He needed to inspire even more
people to ask him questions, and to reply to them quickly, and in a way
that prompted them to reward him with lots of stars. To that end, he
updated the page that advertised his services. When he was done it said:
I am a law expert with two years of formal training
in the law. I will help anyone I can! I have been involved in trials,
legal studies and certain forms of jurisprudence. i am not accredited by
the state bar association yet to practice law. . . . sincerely, Justin
Anthony Wyrick Jr.
''Justin was the name I always wanted -- besides
mine,'' Marcus said. Justin Anthony Wyrick Jr. -- a pseudonym on top of a
pseudonym on top of a pseudonym. Justin Anthony Wyrick Jr. had a more
authoritative ring to it, in Marcus's opinion, and in a lot of other
people's too. On one day, Marcus received and answered 110 questions.
Maybe a third of them came from the idly curious, a third from people
who were already in some kind of legal trouble and the final third from
people who appeared to be engaged in some sort of odd cost-benefit
analysis.
q: What amount of money must a person steal or gain
through fraud before it is considered a felony in Illinois?
a: In Illinois you must have gained $5,001+ in an
illegal fashion in order to constitute fraud. If you need anything else
please write back! Sincerely, Justin Anthony Wyrick Jr.
q: Can a parole officer prevent a parolee from marrying?
a: Hey! Unless the parolee has ''no marriage'' under
the special conditions in which he is released, he can marry. If you
have any questions, please write back. Sincerely, Justin Anthony Wyrick
Jr.
The more questions Marcus answered, the more people
who logged onto the boards looking for legal advice wanted to speak only
to him. In one two-week stretch he received 943 legal questions and
answered 939. When I asked him why he hadn't answered the other four, a
look of profound exasperation crossed his broad face. ''Traffic law,''
he said. ''I'm sorry. I don't know traffic law.'' By mid-July, he was
the No. 3 rated expert in criminal law on AskMe.com. Beneath him in the
rankings were 125 licensed attorneys and a wild assortment of ex-cops
and ex-cons. The next-youngest person on the board was 31.
In a few weeks, Marcus had created a new identity
for himself: legal wizard. He now viewed school not so much as
preparation for a future legal career as material for an active one. He
investigated a boondoggle taken by the local school board and discovered
that it had passed off on the taxpayer what to him appeared to be the
expenses for a private party. He brought that, and a lot more, up at a
public hearing. Why grown-up people with grown-up legal problems took
him seriously was the great mystery Marcus didn't much dwell on --
except to admit that it had nothing to do with his legal training. He
had had no legal training, formal or informal.
On the top of the Arnold family desk was a thin
dictionary, plus stacks and stacks of court cases that people from AskMe
who had come to rely on Marcus's advice had mimeographed and sent to
him for his review. (The clients sent him the paperwork, and he wrote
motions, which the clients then passed on to licensed attorneys for
submission to a court.) But there was nothing on the desk or in the
house even faintly resembling a book about the law. The only potential
sources of legal information were the family computer and the big-screen
TV.
''Where do you find books about the law?'' I asked.
''I don't,'' he said, tap-tap-tapping away on his
keyboard. ''Books are boring. I don't like reading.''
So you go on legal Web sites?''
''No.''
''Well, when you got one of these questions did you research your answer?''
''No, never. I just know it.''
''You just know it.''
''Exactly.''
The distinct whiff of an alternate reality lingered
in the air. It was just then that Marcus's mother, Priscilla, came
through the front door. She was a big lady, teetering and grunting
beneath jumbo-size sacks of groceries. A long box of doughnuts jutted
out of the top of one.
''Hi, Marcus, what you doing?'' she said, gasping for breath.
''Just answering some questions,'' he said.
''What were you answering?'' she asked with pleasure. She radiated pride.
''I got one about an appellate bond -- how to get
one,'' he said. ''Another one about the Supreme Court. A petition to
dismiss something.''
''We got some chili-cheese dogs here.''
''That's cool.''
Priscilla nipped into the kitchen, where she heaped
the doughnuts onto a plate and tossed the dogs into boiling water.
Strange new smells wafted out over the computer.
''Where did you acquire your expertise?'' I asked.
''Marcus was born with it!'' Priscilla shouted. Having no idea how to respond, I ignored her.
''What do you mean?'' Marcus asked me. He was genuinely puzzled by my question.
''Where does your information come from?''
''I don't know,'' he said. ''Like, I really just don't know.''
''How can you not know where knowledge comes from?'' I asked.
''After, like, watching so many TV shows about the
law,'' he said, ''it's just like you know everything you need to know.''
He gave a little mock shiver. ''It's scary. I just know these things.''
Again Priscilla shouted from the kitchen, ''Marcus has got a gift!''
Marcus leaned back in his chair -- every inch the
young prodigy -- pleased that his mother was saving him the trouble of
explaining the obvious to a fool. It was possible to discern certain
lines in Marcus's character, but the general picture was still out of
focus. He had various personas: legal genius, humble Internet helpmate,
honest broker, ordinary kid who liked the Web. Now he cut a figure
familiar to anyone who has sat near a front row in school -- the
fidgety, sweet-natured know-it-all.
What he knew, exactly, was unclear. On the Web, he
had come across to many as a font of legal expertise. In the flesh, he
gave a more eclectic performance -- which was no doubt one reason he
found the Internet as appealing as he did. Like Jonathan Lebed, he was
the kind of person high school is designed to suppress, and like
Jonathan Lebed, he had refused to accept his assigned status. When the
real world failed to diagnose his talents, he went looking for a second
opinion. The Internet offered him as many opinions as he needed to find
one he liked. It created the opportunity for new sorts of
self-perceptions, which then took on a reality all their own.
There was something else familiar about the game
Marcus was playing, but it took me a while to put my finger on it. He
was using the Internet the way adults often use their pasts. The passage
of time allows older people to remember who they were as they would
like to have been. Young people do not enjoy access to that particular
escape route from their selves -- their pasts are still unpleasantly
present -- and so they tend to turn the other way and imagine themselves
into some future adult world. The sentiment that powers their fantasies
goes by different names -- hope, ambition, idealism -- but at bottom it
is nostalgia. Nostalgia for the future. These days nostalgia for the
future is a lot more fashionable than the traditional kind. And the
Internet has made it possible to act on the fantasy in whole new ways.
Priscilla shouted from the kitchen: ''Marcus had his gift in the womb. I could feel it.''
Now Marcus had his big grin on. ''Welcome to my brain,'' he said.
''What?''
''Welcome to my brain.''
He had said it so much like a genial host offering
his guest the comfortable chair that I had to stop myself from saying
''Thanks.'' Behind him was a long picture window overlooking the
California desert -- the view was the reason Priscilla loved her house.
Beyond that, brown mountains. In the middle distance between white
desert and brown mountain, a parachute ripped open and a body jerked
skyward.
''Let's try this again,'' I said.
''O.K.,'' he said, cheerfully.
''Basically, you picked up what you know from watching 'Court TV' shows,'' I said.
''Basically,'' he said.
''And from these Web sites that you browse.''
''Basically.''
Priscilla shouted out from the kitchen, ''How many dogs you want, Marcus?''
''Two, and some doughnuts,'' Marcus hollered.
''What do you think these people would have done if
you weren't there to answer their questions?'' I asked.
''They would have paid an attorney,'' he said. But
as he said it, his big grin vanished and a cloud shadowed his broad,
open face. All of a sudden he was the soul of prudence.
He may well have been recalling the P.R. fiasco that
followed the discovery by a hundred or so licensed attorneys on
AskMe.com of the true identity of the new expert moving up their ranks.
In any case, he lifted his giant palms toward me in the manner of the
Virgin Mary resisting the entreaties of the Holy Spirit and said:
''Look, I'm not out there to take business away from other people.
That's not my job.''
''But you think that legal expertise is overrated?''
''Completely.''
Once Marcus attained his high AskMe.com rankings, a
lot of people he didn't really know began to ask for his phone number
and his fee structure. For the first time, for some reason he was unable
to explain fully, his conscience began to trouble him. He decided it
was time to come clean with his age. To do this, he changed his expert
profile. Where it had read ''legal expert,'' it now read ''15-year-old
intern attorney expert.''
A few hours after he posted his confession, hostile
messages came hurtling toward him. A few of them came from his
''clients,'' but most came from the lawyers and others who competed with
him for rankings and publicity. A small war broke out on the message
boards, with Marcus accusing the lawyers of ganging up on him to
undermine his No. 3 ranking and the lawyers accusing Marcus of not
knowing what he was talking about. The lawyers began to pull up Marcus's
old answers and bestow on them lowly one-star ratings -- thus dragging
down his average. Then they did something even worse: they asked him
detailed questions about the finer points of the law. When he couldn't
supply similarly detailed answers, they laid into him.
Marcus's replies to the e-mail lashings read less
like the work of a defense lawyer than like those of a man trying to
talk his torturers into untying him:
''I am reporting your abusive response, for it hurts
my reputation, and my dignity as an expert on this board.''
''Please don't e-mail me threats.''
''Leave me alone! I am not even practicing law!''
''Please, I beg of you, stop sending me letters
saying that you'll be watching me, because you are scaring my parents.''
''I really just want to be friends.''
''Let's try to be friends, or something?''
To which Marcus's wittiest assailant replied: ''In
your last two posts you've ended by asking that I be your friend. That's
like the mortally wounded gladiator wanting to be friends with the
lion.''
On the one hand, the whole episode was absurd --
Marcus Arnold was a threat to no one but himself and, perhaps, the
people who sought his advice. To practice law, you still needed a
license, and no 15-year-old boy was going to be granted one. At the same
time, Marcus had wandered into an arena alive with combustible
particles. The Internet had arrived at an embarrassing moment for the
law.
The knowledge gap between lawyers and nonlawyers had
been shrinking for some time, and the Internet was closing it further.
Legal advice was being supplied over the Internet, often free -- and it
wasn't just lawyers doing the supplying. Students, cops, dicks, even
ex-cons went onto message boards to help people with their questions and
cases. At the bottom of this phenomenon was a corrosively democratic
attitude toward legal knowledge, which the legal profession now simply
took for granted. ''If you think about the law,'' the co-chairman of the
American Bar Association task force on ''e-lawyering,'' Richard S.
Granat, said in an interview in The New York Times, in an attempt to
explain the boom in do-it-yourself Internet legal services, ''a large
component is just information. Information by itself can go a long way
to help solve legal problems.''
In that simple sentence you could hear whatever was
left of the old professional mystique evaporating. The status of
lawyering was in flux, had been for some time. An anthology that will
cause elitists to weep will one day be culled from the long shelf of
diatribes about the descent into mass culture of the American lawyer at
the end of the 20th century. Separate chapters will detail the advent of
the billable hour, the 1977 Supreme Court decision permitting lawyers
to advertise their services and a magazine called The American Lawyer,
which in 1985 began to publish estimates of lawyers' incomes. Once the
law became a business, it was on its way to becoming a commodity. Reduce
the law to the sum of its information, and, by implication, anyone can
supply it.
That idea had already traveled a long way, and the
Internet was helping it to travel faster. After all, what did it say
about the law that even a 15-year-old boy who had never read a law book
could pass as an expert in it to a huge audience? It said that a lot of
people felt that legal knowledge was accessible to the amateur. Who
knows? Maybe they were right. Perhaps legal expertise was overrated.
Completely.
By its nature, the Internet undermined anyone whose
status depended on a privileged access to information. But you couldn't
fairly blame the Internet for Marcus Arnold, any more than you could
blame the Internet for Jonathan Lebed. The Internet was merely using
Marcus to tell us something about ourselves: we doubted the value of
formal training. A little knowledge had always been a dangerous thing.
Now it was becoming a respectable thing. A general collapse in the
importance of formal training was a symptom of post-Internet life;
knowledge, like the clothing that went with it, was being informalized.
Casual thought went well with casual dress.
And so the situation in which Marcus Arnold found
himself in the late summer of 2000, while bizarre, was revealing. Marcus
had been publicly humiliated by the real lawyers, but it didn't stop
him from offering more advice. He clung by his big mitts to a lower
ranking. Then the clients began to speak. With pretty much one voice
they said, ''Leave the kid alone!'' A lot of people seemed to believe
that any 15-year-old who had risen so high in the ranks of AskMe.com
legal experts must be some kind of wizard. They began to seek him out
more than ever before; they wanted his, and only his, advice.
Marcus wiped himself off and gave it to them. In
days his confidence was fully restored. ''You always have your
critics,'' he said. ''I mean, with the real lawyers, it's a pride issue.
They can't let someone who could be their son beat them. Plus they have
a lot more time than I do. I'm always stretched for time. Six hours a
day of school, four hours of homework, sometimes I can't get online to
answer the questions until after dinner.''
Despite this and other handicaps, Marcus's ranking
rebounded. Two weeks after he disclosed his age, he was on the rise; two
weeks later he hit No. 1. The legal advice he gave to a thousand or so
people along the way might not have withstood the scrutiny of the finest
legal minds. Some of it was the sort of stuff you could glean directly
from Judge Judy; more of it was a simple restating of the obvious in a
friendly tone. Marcus didn't have much truck with the details; he didn't
handle complexity terribly well. But that was the whole point of him --
he didn't need to. A lot of what a real lawyer did was hand out simple
information in a way that made the client feel served, and this Marcus
did well. He may have had only the vaguest idea of what he was talking
about and a bizarre way of putting what he did know. But out there in
the void, they loved him.
Marcus's father, Melvin, worked at a furniture
retail outlet two hours' drive from home and so wasn't usually around
when his son was handing out advice on the Internet. Not that it
mattered; he wouldn't have known what Marcus was up to in any case.
''I'm not the sort of person who gets on the computer,'' Melvin said
when he arrived home and saw Marcus bashing away for my benefit. ''I
never get on the computer, as a matter of fact.'' And he said this
matter-of-factly, in a spirit in no way defiant or angry, just gently
resigned to the Way Things Are. ''When I need something from the
computer,'' he also said, ''I ask Marcus.''
''It just gives me more computer time,'' Marcus said and resumed his furious typing.
What with the computer smack in the center of the
place, the Arnolds' house didn't allow me to talk to Melvin without
disrupting Marcus. When Marcus realized that he was about to be forced
to listen to whatever his father might have to say about his Internet
self, he lost interest. He called for Marc, and the twin bear-boys
lumbered out the front door. On the way out, he turned and asked me if I
knew anyone in Hollywood he might talk to. ''I think what I really want
to do,'' he said, ''is be an actor.'' With that final non sequitur, he
left me to cross-examine his parents.
The first thing that was instantly clear was that,
unlike their son, they were aware that their lives were no longer what
anyone would call normal. The Lebeds had proved that if your adolescent
child was online, you didn't need to leave your house to feel uprooted.
The Arnolds were already uprooted, so they didn't prove anything. They
had moved from Belize to South Central Los Angeles. They had moved from
there to Perris for a reason, which Melvin now calmly explained to me.
At the family's Los Angeles home, Marcus's older brother had been
murdered. He had been shot dead in cold blood by an acquaintance in the
middle of a family barbecue. The man who shot him was up for parole in
2013. ''Marcus didn't tell you about that, did he?'' Melvin asked
rhetorically. ''In my opinion, that's how Marcus got interested in the
law. He saw that it wasn't fair.''
The Arnolds moved to Perris shortly after their
son's murder. Not long after they arrived, Marcus asked for a computer.
He had waited until he crashed the Top 10 on AskMe.com before he let his
parents know why, suddenly, he was up at all hours bashing away on the
family keyboard. His parents had had radically different reactions to
the news. His mother nearly burst with pride -- she always knew that
Marcus was special, and the Internet was giving him a chance to prove
it. His father was mildly skeptical. He couldn't understand how a
15-year-old boy could be functioning as a lawyer. The truth is, Melvin
hadn't taken Marcus all that seriously, at least not at first. He
assumed that he was reacting to the grief of his older brother's murder.
Then the phone started to ring . . . and ring. ''These were grown-up
people,'' Melvin said, still incredulous at the events taking place
under his roof. ''They call this house and ask for Marcus. These people
are like 40, 45 years old, and they're talking to Marcus about their
legal problems, but they're not including the parents. That's where I
get scared, because it's not supposed to work like that.''
''Well . . . ,'' Priscilla said. She scrunched up
her big friendly face in what was clearly intended to be disapproval.
''They're not acknowledging the fact that he's 15. They're acknowledging
the fact that he can give them some legal advice.''
''But the phone,'' Melvin said. ''It is always
ringing. These people want Marcus to give them legal advice. I mean,
really, it's like what he does people do as a job. And he's doing it
right here. I get so frustrated. I always say, 'Marcus, you're talking
too much, you're talking too much.'''
''But that's what attorneys do,'' Priscilla said. ''They talk a lot.''
Melvin gave up on his wife and turned to me. ''I
tell him to stay off the phone, stay off the computer. This is the thing
I keep on saying to him. Nobody else in this house can ever use the
phone. There's no way I can stop him, but still--.''
''But attorneys talk -- that's what they do,'' Priscilla said.
''I don't use the phone anyway, really,'' Melvin
said. ''The calls come, they're never mine, you know. It's always
Marcus, Marcus, Marcus -- people calling him from everywhere.''
They were off and running on what was clearly a
familiar conversational steeplechase. ''I don't understand,'' I said.
''How do all these people have your phone number?'' But neither of them
was listening. Priscilla, having seized on her main point, was now
intent on spearing Melvin on the end of it. ''But that's what he's got
to do,'' she said. ''That's what attorneys do! Talk!''
''Yeah, but he's not an attorney,'' Melvin said. He
turned to me again in a bid for arbitration. ''He drives you nuts with
his talk. Nuts!''
''How do they get your phone number?'' I asked again.
''But he will be one day,'' Priscilla said. ''He has that gift.''
''He's a kid,'' Melvin said.
''How did they get your phone number?'' I asked for the third time.
Priscilla looked up. ''Marcus puts it on the
Internet,'' she said. To her, it was the most normal of things.
Melvin took a different view. Maybe it was the
distinct feeling he had that a lot of Marcus's ''clients'' had had to
stand in line at a pay phone to make their calls. Or that they always
seemed to prefer to wait on hold rather than call back later. Or their
frantic tones of voice. Whatever the reason, he didn't like it. ''I told
Marcus,'' he said wearily, ''that we don't even know who these people
are -- they might be criminals out there -- that you're not supposed to
give them our phone number, our address.''
Priscilla furrowed her brow and tried to conjure
concern. ''What really scared me one time,'' she said, less with fear
than in the spirit of cooperation, ''was this lady that he was assisting
with her criminal case. The lady sent him the whole book of her court
case. I said: 'Marcus, why would you want to take this upon yourself?
You've got to tell this lady you're just 15 years old.' But he didn't
listen to me. The point came that the lady actually wanted him to go to
court with her, and I said, 'No, we've got to stop it here, because you
don't have a license for that, you don't study law.' He said: 'Mom,
you've got to drive me to the court. I know what I'm doing.' I said: 'No
way. You don't have a license to dictate the law.'''
I could see that her heart wasn't in this soliloquy.
She stopped and brightened, as if to say she had done her best to meet
her husband halfway, then said, ''But I think all of this Internet is
good for Marcus.''
''Do you think Marcus knows what he's doing?'' I asked.
''Oh, yes, very much,'' she said. ''Because there's a
lot of times that we would watch these court shows, and he would come
up with the same suggestions and the same answers like the attorneys
would do.''
That appeared to settle the matter; even Melvin could not disagree. Marcus knew his ''Court TV.''
''Can you see him charging for this advice?'' I asked.
''At what age?'' Melvin said. A new alarm entered his voice.
''Thirty.''
''I hope,'' Melvin said with extreme caution, ''I hope he will do well.''
''He's supposed to have his own law firm by then,'' Priscilla said.
