“Y’know, there’s a story that when Rockefeller bought himself a yacht, he bought a pretty small one, like a seventy-footer or something. Small by the standards of the day. And when someone asked him why he went and bought himself such a dinky little yacht, he just looked at the guy and said, ‘What do you think I am, a Vanderbilt?’ Haw! Well, anyway, welcome aboard my yacht.”
L. Bob Rife says this while standing on a huge openair platform elevator along with the interviewer and the whole camera crew. The elevator is going up. In the background is the Pacific Ocean. As Rife is speaking the last part of the line, suddenly the elevator rises up to the top and the camera turns around, and we are looking out across the deck of the aircraft carrier Enterprise, formerly of the U.S. Navy, now the personal yacht of L. Bob Rife, who beat out both General Jim’s Defense System and Admiral Bob’s Global Security in a furious bidding war. L. Bob Rife proceeds to admire the vast, flat open spaces of the carrier’s flight deck, likening it to certain parts of Texas. He suggests that it would be amusing to cover part of it with dirt and raise cattle there.
Another profile, this one shot for a business network, apparently made somewhat later: Back on the Enterprise, where the captain’s office has been massively reworked. L. Bob Rife, Lord of Bandwidth, is sitting behind his desk, having his mustache waxed. Not in the sense that women have their legs waxed. He’s having the curl smoothed out and restored. The waxer is a very short Asian woman who does it so delicately that it doesn’t even interfere with his talking, mostly about his efforts to extend his cable TV network throughout Korea and into China and link it up with his big fiberoptic trunk line that runs across Siberia and over the Urals.
“Yeah, you know, a monopolist’s work is never done. No such thing as a perfect monopoly. Seems like you can never get that last one-tenth of one percent.”
“Isn’t the government still strong in Korea? You must have more trouble with regulations there.”
L. Bob Rife laughs. “Y’know, watching government regulators trying to keep up with the world is my favorite sport. Remember when they busted up Ma Bell?”
“Just barely.” The reporter is a woman in her twenties.
“You know what it was, right?”
“Voice communications monopoly.”
“Right. They were in the same business as me. The information business. Moving phone conversations around on little tiny copper wires, one at a time. Government busted them up—at the same time when I was starting cable TV franchises in thirty states. Haw! Can you believe that? It’s like if they figured out a way to regulate horses at the same time the Model T and the airplane were being introduced.”
“But a cable TV system isn’t the same as a phone system.”
“At that stage it wasn’t, cause it was just a local system. But once you get local systems all over the world, all you got to do is hook ’em together and it’s a global network. Just as big as the phone system. Except this one carries information ten thousand times faster. It carries images, sound, data, you name it.”
A naked PR plant, a half-hour television commercial with no purpose whatsoever other than to let L. Bob Rife tell his side of a particular issue. It seems that a number of Rife’s programmers, the people who made his systems run, got together and formed a union—unheard of, for hackers—and filed a suit against Rife, claiming that he had placed audio and video bugs in their homes, in fact placed all of them under twenty-four-hour surveillance, and harassed and threatened some programmers who were making what he called “unacceptable lifestyle choices.” For example, when one of his programmers and her husband engaged in oral sex in their own bedroom one night, the next morning she was called into Rife’s office, where he called her a slut and a sodomite and told her to clean out her desk. The bad publicity from this so annoyed Rife that he felt the need to blow a few million on some more PR.
“I deal in information,” he says to the smarmy, toadying pseudojournalist who “interviews” him. He’s sitting in his office in Houston, looking slicker than normal. “All television going out to consumers throughout the world goes through me. Most of the information transmitted to and from the CIC database passes through my networks. The Metaverse—the entire Street—exists by virtue of a network that I own and control.
“But that means, if you’ll just follow my reasoning for a bit, that when I have a programmer working under me who is working with that information, he is wielding enormous power. Information is going into his brain. And it’s staying there. It travels with him when he goes home at night. It gets all tangled up into his dreams, for Christ’s sake. He talks to his wife about it. And, goddamn it, he doesn’t have any right to that information. If I was running a car factory, I wouldn’t let workers drive the cars home or borrow tools. But that’s what I do at five o’clock each day, all over the world, when my hackers go home from work.
“When they used to hang rustlers in the old days, the last thing they would do is piss their pants. That was the ultimate sign, you see, that they had lost control over their own bodies, that they were about to die. See, it’s the first function of any organization to control its own sphincters. We’re not even doing that. So we’re working on refining our management techniques so that we can control that information no matter where it is—on our hard disks or even inside the programmers’ heads. Now, I can’t say more because I got competition to worry about. But it is my fervent hope that in five or ten years, this kind of thing won’t even be an issue.”