Apart from the domestic hurdles the proposed deal faces here, it could also be scuttled by America’s closest ally of all — Israel, which has formed a consortium with Russia to sell Turkey high-tech helicopters with no human rights strings attached.

The U.S. initiative reflects concern about the political and economic problems currently plaguing Turkey, which has served as a crucial Middle East staging post for the U.S. From Turkish bases, American warplanes patrol the skies over Iraq. Turkey is also the gateway to the oil-rich Caspian region of Central Asia, and is the geographical and cultural crossing point between the Islamic world and Europe.

While Turkey is one of the more democratic and economically powerful countries in the region, senior U.S. policy makers fear that the country’s progress is being undermined by its violations of human rights, especially toward its minority Kurdish population. It was this issue that prompted the European Union recently to slam shut Turkey’s entrance to the rich bloc of nations, prompting a sense of outrage and shame among Turks.

U.S. officials believe the attack helicopters may serve as a tempting carrot to induce Turkish Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz to implement long-promised human rights reforms, including a halt to torture, the release from prison of critical journalists and opposition parliamentarians and an end to the state of emergency in the southeastern corner of the country, where the Turkish army has been waging a fierce war against Kurdish rebels for the past 13 years.

Turkey, eager to buy the U.S. helicopters, has pledged to meet the administration’s criteria for the sale. Two weeks ago, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights John Shattuck, one of the architects of the initiative, flew to Turkey for further discussions with political and military leaders on the reforms and how the United States will monitor their implementation.

“There is a recognition on the part of everybody involved that Turkey’s human rights performance has got to be improved,” a senior administration official said. “It can’t be cosmetic.”

But some lawmakers, human rights groups and arms control experts are skeptical. Turkey has made such promises before, they say, only to ignore their commitments once they received American weapons. These critics are anticipating a bitter battle on Capitol Hill if American companies win the contract and the administration tries to push through the sale without substantive proof of human rights improvements.

As if to confirm their doubts, Turkish prosecutors recently ordered the
arrests of the popular mayor of Istanbul and the entire 57-member
leadership of the People’s Democracy Party, one of the country’s few legal
pro-Kurdish organizations, on charges of incitement. Late last year, the
courts outlawed the Islamic-oriented Welfare Party — which headed a
minority government for a while — as a threat to Turkey’s secular
tradition. Meanwhile, the army has continued its campaign against the
Kurds, imprisoning leaders and banning their political activities.

According to human rights activists, the military campaign in the southeast
has left more than 2.5 million villagers displaced from their
villages and thousands dead. The war also has drained the Turkish economy
and fueled the rise of anti-Western Islamic fundamentalism.

Administration officials do not downplay the risks involved with the
initiative. But they argue that a number of factors have come together to
make the administration’s initiative both timely and promising.

First, Turkey, a member of NATO and one of America’s closest allies in the
Middle East, has determined that it needs the helicopters to bolster its
aging fleet and already has issued its $3.5 billion tender, the largest
contract Turkey has ever offered.

Second, Clinton policy aides say, Turkey has indicated it would prefer to
buy the Super Cobra, made by Bell Textron of Fort Worth, Texas, and Apache,
produced by McDonnell Douglas/Boeing of Mesa, Ariz., partly because the
U.S.-made aircraft are considered the best, and partly because Turkey,
smarting over the rebuff from the European Union, does not want to give the
business to a European manufacturer.

Third, such a sale would deepen the political and strategic relationship
between Turkey and the United States, a development that has become more
attractive to Ankara since the E.U.’s rejection.
All these elements, together with Yilmaz’s public pledge to “bring human
rights in Turkey to the highest level,” have given the administration a
degree of leverage that it hasn’t had before, the officials say.

The administration first broached the offer last November, when Turkish
military commanders met in Washington with senior State Department and
Pentagon officials. Quoting Yilmaz’s pledge, the Americans said that in
exchange for improved Turkish performance in a dozen areas of human rights
concerns, the administration would permit U.S. companies to compete for the
helicopter tender. In addition to ending torture, restrictions on free
speech and the state of emergency in the southeast, the suggested list of
improvements also includes greater police accountability, reopening of
human rights offices, resettlement of villages and economic aid to refugees.

Within a matter of days, administration officials said, the Turkish
generals agreed.

Yilmaz followed up in December with a visit to Washington,
where the same list of concerns was presented to him. Pentagon officials
say the list was the only item on the agenda during Yilmaz’s meeting with
Defense Secretary William Cohen. When Yilmaz met later with President
Clinton, the Turkish leader went through the list again, pledging improved
performance in all areas. According to officials who were present at the
White House meeting, President Clinton replied, “We just want you to do
what you say you will do.”

On Dec. 23, the State Department granted a marketing license that allows
American companies to compete for the Turkish contract. Turkey is expected
to announce the winner in the spring of 1999.

That gives the Turks a year to prove they’re serious about improving their
human rights performance. Officials say the Turks have been made aware that
the final judge of their performance — and any proposed U.S. weapons sale
– will be Congress, which can signal its opposition to the sale within 30
days of its announcement. A two-thirds majority in both houses is needed to
override the president on the sale.

“The Turks tend to think our Congress is like their parliament, that when
push comes to shove, the government always can get a congressional stamp of
approval,” one official said. “That isn’t the case here.”

Indeed, opposition on Capitol Hill toward the administration’s initiative
is already building. One senior senatorial staffer questioned the sincerity
of the human rights component, saying it was “tacked on” to enable the
administration to give American companies the green light to bid on the
contract. “They’ll try to get the Turks to improve their performance, just
as they have in the past,” the staffer said. “But in the end, if there
haven’t been any improvements, they’ll just dream up some.”

Perhaps the strongest opponent of any arms sales to Turkey is Sen. Paul
Sarbanes, D-Md. In previous years, Sarbanes, who is Greek by heritage and
backed by the powerful Greek lobby in Washington, has held up several
proposed arms sales to Turkey, and congressional aides say he will fight
any helicopter sale as well.

“I can’t see any big weapons sales coming by that won’t encounter huge
opposition,” one aide said.

In an effort to garner support, Assistant Secretary of State for Europe
Marc Grossman and Shattuck held a briefing recently for human rights groups
and arms control experts, stating that Washington will be looking for
“significant progress in all areas over the next year.” But what, some of
the activists present wanted to know, constitutes “significant progress”?
Another major concern expressed by participants was how the administration
would enforce its pledge to monitor the use of the helicopters once
they were in Turkey’s hands. Administration officials admitted the details
had not yet been worked out and that some of the items on the list, like
the use-monitoring clause, could be “deal-breakers.”

Meanwhile, lobbyists for the aircraft industry are preparing to weigh in on
Capitol Hill, arguing that a rejection of the Turkish contract would cost
15,000 jobs and force companies like McDonnell Douglas and Bell Textron to
close down assembly lines. “If [the U.S] threatens to make them buy from
somebody else, then what they do is buy from somebody else,” says Joel
Johnson, a lobbyist for the Aerospace Industries Association.

Highlighting Johnson’s concerns, a new bid for the Turkish contract
recently came in from an unexpected quarter: a Russian-Israeli consortium
that is offering the Kamov KA-50 attack helicopter packed with
super-sophisticated Israeli avionics. Israel, which has won contracts to
modernize Turkey’s fleet of F-4 and F-5 warplanes, also offers financing,
which the United States does not. Some officials have expressed concern
that the Russian-Israeli bid could undermine the administration’s Turkey
initiative.

“You know they’re not going to bother the Turks about human rights,” said
Johnson, sounding wistful. “The Turks and the Israelis understand each
other.”

So here I am, with big silver Popeye feet (snowboots), attending the world clash of the athletic elite, the Global Family of Outstanding Physical Achievement’s big winter picnic days, the proudest three-legged sack races and egg toss events in human history. It is a frenetically paced, primary-colored, banner-driven, G-rated Japanimation with nonstop xylophone songs and a pathologically gentle infant jollyness reminiscent of “Barney.”

I have gravitationally swirled with the legions of multi-hued fans into enormous new landscapes of the Event, all in immaculate “Logan’s Run”/Neuremberg Rally proportions, and been bombarded with power-mad musical anthems and gripping Jungian insignia. You become a molecule in this context, a tiny cell in the living body of Man. We are all here to witness the deliberately remarkable in nature, and marvel at the evolution of a species, from the sprouting of legs and the slithering to shore to the flying into space. Nowhere, perhaps, is this outstanding progression more apparent than in such physically unthinkable sports as “aerial” skiing, which Gary Kamiya and I caught the main 10 minutes of in a ski lodge that was on our walk back from the women’s downhill and combination skiing competitions. Neither of us had any idea what aerial skiing was when we were trying to score other tickets from the red-faced Croatian scalper thugs, but we were completely flabbergasted to witness real adult human beings with skis on their legs shoot up a horrible Evel Knievel nightmare ramp and then turn 17 or 18 gyroscopic turns in the air, then make a couple more end-over-end turns for effect, and then land gracefully somewhere else. We have come a long, long way, you realize. We have made the great athletes of the 1930s look as adorably lame as Buster Keaton.

What is now wonderfully freakish about the Olympics is the strangely specific body types all of the athletes have deformed themselves with for the love of their sport. Women’s downhill skiers are thick, sturdy Valkyries compared to the fashionable smallness of most of today’s women, their lower bodies having been hewn from constant shock absorption. Hockey boys are squat, flat-nosed, indestructible types with small ears like fighting dogs, who fearlessly bash into each other with their eyes wide open at terrifying speeds.

For a non-sports enthusiast insider zealot like myself, the events become interesting and important for other reasons than the two-hundredths of a second that one guy in a neon bodystocking shaved off the other guy in a neon bodystocking, or the one point separating the team from victory in the last third. All that becomes just so much academics and randomica; the best athlete in the world might just be having a bad karma day here in Nagano; his biorhythms may be critical, her Mercury may be in retrograde. The time-fragment minutiae means very little about their true ability or contagiously inspiring heroism.

The personality cults are what make more sense here to me: The little pixie-faced Japanese speed skater who dedicated his win to his recently deceased “father in heaven,” Picabo Street’s stunning comeback after a ghastly knee injury and a seriously punitive stint of endless, grisly physical therapy. The guy who crashed yesterday winning the gold today. This is the kind of stuff that can create a narcotic buzz for someone like me, who doesn’t give a shit who held the world record or when the luge team got better shoes. Physical human greatness is a unifying thrill for everybody, which makes us all want to jump in the air.

I befriended the Russian mafiosi at the hockey game for precisely this reason: These were clearly bad people, morally dyslexic no-necked vulgarians with gold teeth and scars, loutishly frightening to the small-boned Czechs suffering with political dignity in wire-rimmed glasses a few rows behind them.

The scariest Russian bastard of them all was a 6-foot-7, ham-faced, pinky-ringed Frankenstein who looked like he would bite the head off a puppy for $10, but every time his team did anything productive, he would stand up and start singing with all of his heart and waving his arms in the air like the baby his mother once loved. We’re all beautifully, divinely innocent in that second when we’re jumping for joy in the air; even the murderers of the world.

Archived images are provided by Allsport Photography USA, Inc. all rights reserved, any redistribution, resale, re-print or other use is strictly prohibited without written consent from Allsport Photography USA, Inc. directly.

But this same anti-communist pope has also been a fierce critic of capitalism — particularly the cruelties and social Darwinism of the free-market economy.

The Polish pope belongs more to the communal East. After demonstrations against his papacy in Holland and Germany in the 1980s, one sensed his growing disdain toward the individualist and decadent West. Financially, the church worldwide is largely supported by the United States and by Germany, by dollars and deutsch marks. But the great strides for Catholicism are being taken in the Third World, in Africa and Asia and in a resurgent Eastern Europe. Not in the West.

Fidel Castro was raised a Catholic in a Cuba that blended Roman orthodoxy and Afro-Caribbean Santeria; he attended Catholic schools. Despite his murderous cruelty, there remains something almost Victorian about Castro’s Havana today, by comparison to the bawdy pre-revolutionary years.

If he were alive, Graham Greene, the great Catholic novelist, who flirted with left-wing causes in Latin America, would doubtless enjoy the spectacle of Castro and the anti-communist pope embracing. For all of their differences, these two men understand each other culturally. Castro is recognizable to the pope in ways that, say, President Clinton — a Protestant, individualist and capitalist — is not.

Last summer, John Paul was reported to be deeply moved by the large numbers of young Catholics who gathered in Paris to celebrate their religion. It was a surprising moment for European Catholicism, which has been in decline for decades — with the churches of Europe becoming little more than tourist attractions. And despite the seeming upsurge in religious feeling in capitals like Paris, priests in Rome tell me that the Vatican loathes the spread of Western hedonism. Rome expects the West to be saved by the East.

Meanwhile, a number of American priests and nuns I know voice an impatience with authoritarian Rome, the pope’s lack of collegiality. The American Catholic Church shudders from a growing split between traditionalists, attentive to Rome, and more individualist Catholics, who tend to shrug off the Vatican’s teachings on matters like birth control and the status of women.

So it will be interesting to watch them. The pope and the communist. Two men so different, but each surely recognizable to the other.

An authoritarian, like John Paul, gray-bearded Fidel is a figure of respect, even affection, through much of Latin America. He is admired less for his deflated Marxist ideology than for his ability, all these years, to have stood up to the gringo bully.

The pope, frail now with age and trembling, remains a giant in the world. In Cuba, we Americans will see him as the winning opponent of the godless Soviet empire. But we would do well to remember, as he stands just 90 miles away, that this pope is a critic also of us.

Although his recordings are now more widely available than ever before, “Slava” Richter himself still seems a mysterious, ambiguous figure of modern music. The hidden aspects of his personality and the reason why he remained a remote figure in modern musical history became clear only after his death, when friends came forward to state what had been whispered for so long: Richter suffered untold miseries in his private life and public career because he was gay, at a time when the Soviet regime considered homosexuality a punishable crime.

Noted piano teacher Paul Moor, who had known Richter for decades, wrote a memorial article for Piano & Keyboard magazine last year in which he recalled the pianist’s battles with depression. In 1958, at the time of Richter’s first trips to the West, he told Moor that he sometimes went months without touching a piano, but could not explain why. Moor writes: “The life which Soviet law, almost as draconian as in Nazi Germany, forced him to lead resulted in Stygian cyclic depressions that literally crippled him, pushing him perilously in the direction of suicide. The Soviet musical world regarded Slava’s homosexuality as common knowledge, and had no problems with it. But those laws deprived him, all his life, of really fulfilled personal happiness.”

Instead of living permanently with a male lover, Richter spent most of his adult life with soprano Nina Dorliak, who was an understanding mother figure as well as a steady friend to him. Dorliak, his elder by some 10 years, provided the stabilizing force and social front that Richter needed. When he began to travel abroad in the late 1950s, he did form romantic attachments, but even these had to be kept secret, as the freedom to travel — even for a virtuoso such as himself — depended on the approval of Soviet authorities. Despite the obvious political pressures, Richter did protest in his own way, refusing to perform in Moscow in the late ’50s.

In 1986, Richter toured throughout Russia for more than six months, playing in remote provincial towns of Siberia, some of which had not seen a pianist for generations. One wonders just how much of this obsessive performing in interior regions was motivated by Richter’s permanent sense of personal exile in his own homeland. Desperately clinging to a land that officially rejected his emotional and sexual identity was his personal alternative to the choice of exile made by other Russian gay artists like Rudolf Nureyev. Not long after the Russian tour, Richter had a total physical breakdown, necessitating a quadruple bypass that permanently weakened him.

More understanding of Richter’s emotional dilemma may be gained by
referring to certain recently released archival performances, like his 1953 reading of the Tchaikovsky Concerto accompanied by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra led by Karel Ancerl (Supraphon/Qualiton).
This somber reading is one of many Tchaikovsky concertos recorded by Richter that leave the listener with the odd feeling that he never quite identified with the music of the most famously gay Russian composer. By contrast, Richter’s frequent musical collaborations with Benjamin
Britten suggested an element of complicity, and a recent CD
reissue of Britten and Richter at Aldeburgh, England, playing a program of Schubert’s “Grand Duo” and Mozart’s “Sonata K.521 for Four Hands” (on Music and Arts 721, distributed by Koch) reveals something of this shared emotional discourse. Competing massive CD sets from BMG/Melodiya and Philips also spotlight the pianist’s great achievements.

BMG/Melodiya’s massive CD set of Richter’s greatest achievements includes his performance of the usually derided Saint-Saens concerto No. 5, accompanied by the Moscow Youth Orchestra led by Kiril Kondrashin. Whereas the 19th century gay Frenchman’s works are too often presented as kitsch and camp, Richter’s reading is sober, serious and human, inarguably real music performed with sobriety and a direct approach — by refusing to trivialize Saint-Saens, the pianist also refused to trivialize himself. Likewise, Richter’s identification with the song settings by Hugo Wolf to poems by Eduard Morike, a 19th century gay German pastor, may also be linked to his own emotional conflicts. (Richter accompanied baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in 1973 concerts, released on DG, and a fuller program of other Morike/Wolf songs from the same year is on Music and Arts.)

Richter will likely remain for all time one of the definitive performers of Prokofiev (as on DG 15119, where he unforgettably plays Prokofiev’s Fifth Concerto) and Schumann (on DG 47440, he likewise plays the Schumann Concerto). A multitude of other composers, from Grieg (a riveting concerto on EMI 67197) to Debussy (on Orfeo d’or 491 981), not to mention Beethoven and Scriabin, immediately leap to mind whenever Richter’s name is mentioned. To these previously known solid contributions may now be added the knowledge that his achievement came in the face of severe homophobia in Soviet Russia. Some of the great recordings made by one of the century’s mightiest musicians could not help but reflect that experience.

A lot of people see humanism and faith in technology as opposites, but you’ve clearly tried to combine them in “Release 2.0.” What’s your response to the humanist critique of the Internet offered by books like “Data Smog” — that the Net is corroding the quality of our daily lives?

I think second-hand smoke is a legitimate concept; second-hand data is not. You really don’t need to look at other people’s data if you don’t want to. People have to grow up and make their own decisions about how much time they want to spend on the Net. The fact that I don’t have a home phone is not a statement — but it is an example.

A rare one!

Yes. People think it’s really weird, but that’s what suits me. People just have to do what suits them.

Did you get rid of your phone once e-mail became popular?

No, it was long ago, the late ’70s. I don’t have e-mail at home either. I had this big black rotary dial phone a year after Harvard. Sometimes it would stop working for a day or two. And then I started getting billed because someone was tapping my line to call Jamaica (the island, not Queens), and the phone company wouldn’t reverse the charges. So finally I said, this is ridiculous — I don’t want this thing and I don’t use it. I asked them to take it out. And I’ve never missed it.

But you were constantly on the phone at work, presumably.

Yes, and so I had no interest in doing that at home. I mean, also, I spend most of the weekend at the office — it’s not that I’m sitting at home with no phone for days on end!

This, I guess, is what you mean in “Release 2.0″ when you talk about how the Net erodes the separation between work lives and personal lives.

It’s not just a matter of time. You know, when you’re in a steel mill, you make steel and you leave and that’s it. But when you’re online, if someone meets you downtown or someone e-mails you, let’s face it, if you’re a jerk, it affects Salon, in a way that it wouldn’t if you were making steel. This is a big social issue; again, the problem here is people.

You can’t be paternalistic and get upset if your employee goes drinking Saturday night, but at the same time, now, your company consists of the people. They’re much more visible. And so what do you do if your employee not only goes drinking Saturday night but says your company sucks on his private e-mail account?

Even when you try to keep a healthy separation between work and personal time, the technology of the Net encourages people to expect that you’re available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

In addition to that, it’s pretty sad if you’re working for a company doing intellectual work and you don’t identify with the company. Which is why I’m so cheerful about the notion of smaller companies. One way or another people are there by choice, and there’s more personality.

A lot of companies keep getting bigger, though. “Release 2.0″ argues that the Net is a great decentralizing force, yet today we’re seeing more power concentrated in the hands of companies like Microsoft and WorldCom.

These big things are getting more and more stuff, and obviously hardware is different from content. So yes, with hardware or the infrastructure or Microsoft — there are benefits there to size and economies of scale. But in content, in intellectual work, there are really disadvantages of scale. So you see these divergent trends. But I think the value is increasingly at the edges, even if the physical bulk is in the middle.

You mean, one reason the physical assets of the network get collected is that they’re worth less?

To some extent. They are commodities. WorldCom will tell you, “Our customer service makes us unique.” I’m just not sure about that.

So where do small companies fit in?

I don’t know the statistics, but if you took all the insects on the earth and weighed them, they’d weigh a lot more than all the people.

You’ve taken a lot of flak for your predictions about intellectual property — your argument that the value of content is declining, and that creative people are going to have to make their money doing consulting, personal appearances and so on.

Well, it’s calmed down a lot, first of all. It used to be, you just couldn’t even raise the topic without being accused of being a socialist by Bill Gates. Or, “We’ve already heard that, we don’t need to talk about that anymore.” But there’s still a lot more to explore. I think people are beginning to realize it’s happening. And books, God bless them, are going to be one of the laggards in all this.

Obviously in this case you’re still selling books, and yet you’re talking to me for free.

Right. It’s the other way around. Again, I’m not doctrinaire — if the old model works, use it. I could have written the book and put it on the Net, but it would not have been read by the people I wanted to have read it. And I don’t think right now the Net is the ideal medium for books: First, it doesn’t reach the broad masses; second, you really want someone to sit down and make a commitment to read it and not just glance at it on screen; third, in addition to the money they’re paying me and the expense it takes to produce this nice physical object, they’re spending another $50,000 to send me around the country talking to you for free.

And every time I get on some television show, hundreds of thousands of people see this not-very-scary-looking woman who doesn’t have a pocket protector — yeah, she may be weird and not have any kids, but she’s not very scary-looking — say nice things about the Net, that it gives them opportunities, it’s not a haven for child molesters. So the book publishing process gets the message even further than the book itself does.

It’s an interesting process of alienation, because in some ways I identify more with what I write on the Net and in other media. This is now a product, and so if someone wants to take silly pictures of me swimming, I say, OK, calm down, it’s selling the book. Because I’m really not about swimming — I swim every day the way I take a shower. It’s of no interest.

But it’s a photo op.

Yes, and it gets above the fold. And of course all the things you know abstractly about publicity, you get to experience. The commentary about you by people who don’t know you, about fantasies of who you are — which of course we’ve all seen happen to Bill Gates. Bill Gates is much more a figment of the viewer’s imagination than he is a reality in most of what’s said about him.

Isn’t that a function of the sheer volume of money he’s accumulated?

No, it’s a function of the sheer volume of obsession with him. It’s
their obsession with him, it’s not him.

At the same time that the Net is reducing the value of intellectual
property there’s a counter-move to lock it up: Gates acquiring the rights
to thousands of images for his company Corbis, or the entertainment
industry trying to stop the recording of music CDs.

And owning the intellectual property isn’t bad. The only question is,
how do you exploit it? And the way you exploit it sometimes is selling
copies of it or experiences of it, but a lot of the time it’s other ways –
doing co-sponsorships with Burger King, or giving a book away for free so
you can jack up your consulting rates.

The point I’m trying to make is not that intellectual property is
valueless, but that the price of copies is going down dramatically, so you
need to think of other ways to exploit the content. And a creator is now in
a much better position than a publisher. The publisher’s model is being
attacked — on the one side by Amazon.com, which is making the whole book
business more efficient, and on the other by people who are creating
content that markets itself. While some people are spending big bucks in
marketing budgets to get people to buy content, other people are just
putting the content out and it markets itself — and it takes people’s time
away from the stuff that gets marketed to them.

One of the big principles you subscribe to in “Release 2.0″ is the
importance of full disclosure. Markets need good information to work
properly. Yet you’re working in an industry that uses “non-disclosure
agreements” as a routine legal tool. Now they’re even an issue in the
Department of Justice’s battle with Microsoft.

I sign NDAs and observe them because I think that’s the honorable thing
to do. I don’t think they’re immoral; I think often they’re stupid. Because
nine times out of 10 it’s a much bigger problem getting people to take
your idea seriously than getting them not to steal it. But I also think
there’s a difference between a small non-disclosure agreement and an NDA
about a contract with a large company that has huge market power. The
propriety of these things really does vary according to the market power of
the people involved.

Technology companies have a hybrid psychology, with vestiges of the
old macho corporate culture but also commitments to openness. Sometimes it
seems companies are stuck selling products they claim are all about
individual empowerment and open networks, and then they realize, wait, do
we have to do this stuff ourselves?

It’s very easy to sit and talk about this. People are imperfect and they
don’t like to be reminded of their flaws. But the Net forces you to
confront them more, and I think that’s good.

How? Because you’re on public display?

You know that habit some men have of combing their hair over their bald
spots? And everybody knows there’s a bald spot there — yet they think
they’re hiding it. And so, in the same way, when people talk about you on
the Net, you can see it. When they talk about you at a cocktail party, you
can’t. It’s uncomfortable to get used to — and there are gonna be some
people who won’t ever look.

I screwed up on “Charlie Rose” last week — there was a long silence when
I was asked after the smartest people I knew, what about women? and I
finally answered with the name of a businesswoman. And so there was an
“Esther Dyson pisses me off” party in New York last night, that I saw an
invitation to on the Net. No, it’s not fun for me to see that — but it’s
probably better for me to see it than not to see it. You know, these little
eddies of contrary opinion become tangible — and then they dissipate. But
they’re there and they’re useful, if you take heed. They’re useful for
individuals, they’re useful for companies.

Where do you come down in the Microsoft/Department of Justice
dispute?

I have no problem with a browser being part of the operating system, I
think it makes sense technically. All these things happen over time. I do
have a problem with secret contracts when they’re engaged in by people with
monumental market power — and in this context the relevant market share
figure to look at is the 80 percent of the desktop Microsoft controls, not
the 36 percent of the browser market. I certainly think that Microsoft has
every right to put the browser in the operating system, but both OEM
customers [computer manufacturers] and end users have every right to take
it out. What that challenges people to do is to build components that can
flip in easily. Now that’s where the world breaks down, and the promise of
“friction-free markets” doesn’t quite work. Because let’s face it, it’s
easier if you’re over the wall with the Microsoft developers to make your
thing work seamlessly.

Gates’ response is that if computer manufacturers can take the
browser out, he can’t guarantee everything will work together.

You know, if all of Microsoft’s tools worked together perfectly in the
first place, that would be a more compelling argument. I’m having lots of
fun with my WinIP config file right now. Didn’t even know it existed a
month ago, now it’s an important part of my life.

In an interview a year or two ago you said you weren’t using Windows
95.

But I am now. We all progress. I used Word to write the book. The thing
that annoys me most is the smart formatting — it keeps doing things that I
didn’t ask it to do. That’s when I get anthropomorphic about my software:
Stop it! Stop it! Don’t be so smart. But for writing long texts it’s pretty
good. There was one file that kept crashing the machine. I sent it to
[Microsoft chief technology officer] Nathan Myhrvold, and they couldn’t
find anything wrong. I’d just open the file and it would crash. It was the
chapter on governance, for what it was worth.

With the Cold War over, most Americans seem to be paying no attention
at all to Russia, but you’ve dedicated much of your work to tracking and
helping build the high-tech industry there. What’s happening in Russia that
we need to know about?

Right now, I’m optimistic about it, just as I’m optimistic about the Net
– with perhaps not sufficient evidence to make the case. Russia really
hangs in the balance. It’s not going to go back to communism, but it’s
definitely not guaranteed that it’s going to go forward to freedom,
democracy, open markets. And that’s exactly why I’m there. If it were
decided, why bother? But if there’s some question as to what will happen,
you’ve got to be there. Both the Internet and Russia are two of the biggest
questions for the future. And to the extent that I have influence on the
outcome, how could I go relax on a beach?

The interesting thing about Russia is that this small group of people in
the software community had intellectual assets of their own — they never
had to acquire anything from the state through whatever means. They’re
honest, they’re to some extent globally minded, they see the Net as a
miracle that connects them to the rest of the world they so much want to be
part of, they’re getting good salaries so they can afford to pay other
people and trickle a little down through the economy, they’re educating
their children. They’re this growing organism in basically a pile of
decaying machinery and dirt and scum.

Growing things tend to take garbage and turn it into healthy plant
tissue. And the Net is bringing in the sunshine to make this vegetable
matter grow healthy. That’s what’s happening in Russia. The question is,
is that process going to be able to continue?