The youth of the 1950s had Beat poetry and jazz, and the 1960s generation had the Beatles and flower power, while 1980s youth culture had MTV.
Today's younger generation embraces its own staging ground for unsettling the mainstream: the Internet.
"I think it is a counterculture," Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker and The New New Thing, says of the Internet.
In his latest book, a survey of the Internet entitled Next: The Future Just Happened, Lewis examines how Internet fault lines have rattled society.
Most of the subjects in Lewis' examination are teens who take on different identities before their computer screens.
There is Jonathan Lebed, a New Jersey youth who at 14 earned US$800,000 within six months of trading stocks. The Internet masks Lebed's age and identity, allowing him to promote company stocks from his bedroom.
Lebed's actions provoked the ire of the US Securities and Exchange Commission -- humorously detailed by Lewis -- and the teen stock jockey was allowed to keep most of his profits in the wake of an investigation by regulators.
Lewis's Net teens also include 15-year-old Marcus Arnold, who manages to fool other users with his knowledge about legal matters and provokes anger from legal professionals when his identity is unmasked. And, in Oldham, England, 14-year-old Daniel Sheldon reads pirated books downloaded from the Internet and runs into problems when he starts up a fan Web site devoted to children's book character Harry Potter.
All this is what Lewis believes is part of the erosion of hierarchies by the Internet's easily-manipulated information canals. And, as is often the case with youth culture, the Internet catapults young people into adult roles.
"It is coming at an earlier age, but it's for a particular kind of a kid. And it's a kid who feels the need to be counterculture. It isn't just young people against old people. These kids are defining themselves on the Internet in a way to set themselves apart from their peers," Lewis said.
There are parallels between earlier generations' initial reactions to rock 'n' roll -- - Congress debated a bill to ban the music in 1955 -- and anxieties induced by the Internet today, such as attempts to control what Web sites young people can access.
"They [the Internet teens] are the equivalent to rock 'n' roll and the Beat poets in the way I think they are doing things that are actually threatening to grown-ups," said Lewis, who predicted the Internet's shock value will wane in a decade.
"Rock 'n' roll is not threatening to grown-ups any more and the Internet probably won't be frightening to grown-ups 10 or 15 years from now because grown-ups will have grown up with it. But, for this moment, a lot of grown-ups find it alien."
That inability to understand what their teens do on the Internet comes across in Lewis' recollections of discussions with Lebed's, Arnold's and Sheldon's parents. A lack of familiarity with the Internet and computer technology among their parents only attracts teens. "It becomes a weapon and part of the appeal is because it is alien," said Lewis.
At the same time, teens like Lebed appear to have skipped over a part of their childhood because of the Internet and its technology.
In an e-mail to Lewis recounted by the author, Lebed acknowledges the importance of his teen years, but he doesn't feel he has missed much by growing up sooner with his involvement in stocks. "I feel that it is very important to focus on the future right now," Lebed writes to Lewis.
Lewis closes his book with Lebed's note highlighting the teen's single-minded focus on tomorrow. For the author this note from the New Jersey teen illustrates a trend already well-documented -- "the intrusion of the market into childhood."
"He went on the Internet and became a financial adult. And, that became his reason for being. So all of his life is about adult financial matters now. He doesn't play. He would argue that is not a big thing to have given up [but] he doesn't know what he gave up."
Lewis' Next: The Future Just Happened, is a perfect bookend to The New New Thing, the author's chronicle of venture capitalist Jim Clarke who, like a Beat poet, operated outside of orthodox constrictions when building businesses such as Healtheon Corp and Netscape Communications Corp.
The Internet, said Lewis, "is a playing field where the status game takes place. A lot of nobodies trying to take the place of somebodies. The kids are cases in point. They are playing these status games."
And, while the Internet technology bubble has been burst, Lewis believes it has has contributed to radical changes in the way small businesses are financed.
Today, venture capital firms invest money on behalf of pension funds and endowments in private start-up companies. The hope is that these start-up companies will be taken public allowing investors to harvest generous profits.
As a result of the change in appetite for risk in the wake of the Internet dotcom wave, entrepreneurs now can readily find financing for their ideas.
This ability for the small business owner to get access to capital that may not have been as readily available is part of a theme for Lewis. The Internet, its technology and the firms created by it have helped wash away traditional roles in society.
Before the last decade and its mighty stock rally, Lewis recalled, the world of venture capital "was a little backwater of a handful of people. That's a fundamental shift in capitalism."
The jump into venture capital by pension funds, insurance firms and university endowments signals a change in the way investors view risk.
Lewis likened this revolutionary change to the junk bond market that was -- to a great extent -- engineered by Michael Milken and his debt group at Wall Street's Drexel Burnham Lambert in the 1970s and 1980s.
"It's kind of similar to the insight Michael Milken had in the 80s when Milken realized that highly risky debt was undervalued and the returns more than justified the risk," said Lewis. Venture capital investors, he said, "know this kind of equity risk is an important part of the portfolio. That is a fundamental shift in the attitude many have toward highly risky things."
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