The Man Who Built the Backend of the Bush Era

Whatever good he actually contributed to the world of personal computing, its a relief to hear that Bill Gates has finally retired. No one better epitomized the marriage of the market and of technology more than the man from Redmond, a symbol of high-tech ruthlessness on a par with the most archetypal American robber barons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His desire for market dominance, and his inability to tolerate competition, were that bad.

Even if Gates was never to have achieved the level of success that he ended up realizing, there would have been other iconographic executives just like him. Witness the more vulgar excesses of characters like Oracle's Larry Ellison as but one example. Compared to his brash California colleague, Gates was an exemplar of Victorian modesty, typical of moneyed persons from America's Pacific Northwest. However, that doesn't make the example that the Seattle multibillionaire set any less deplorable.

Microsoft's former chairman had the effect on the world that he did because of his remarkable ability to convince people to use his second-class software. Gates' applications may have become instinctual to many, but their relative instability and visual impovershment made for a computing experience that was of a far lesser quality to many other superior, if not equally functional applications that had already been brought to market.

To wit, even though most of his applications barely worked, computer users the world over obsessed about compatibility, about adopting the hard and software standards promoted by Microsoft, as though they spelled out the most basic and necessary forms of societal conformity. If you didn't buy in and stay updated, you were an outsider, alien to the economic and cultural forces shaping the world in the post-Cold War era.

That this emphasis on compatibility was so flawed, yet so rich, in terms of what it suggested, is what makes Gates' legacy so fascinating. Especially in light of how the ethos marked the era immediately preceding the War on Terror, and how Americans rolled right over when their government took them to war. Though there were other factors which contributed, obviously, to their acquiescence, the notion that Americans must conform, and be compatible, is ironic, in hindsight.

That's one of the main reasons we should hate Bill Gates and everything his computing platform continues to stand for. The reason why he named his operating system Windows is because of the illusion of a view that it has provided its billions of users. When you peel away the OS to its core, you realize that it's not so much a vantage point for yourself, but rather, for someone else, and their endless layers of spyware and digital rights management software, watching you, instead.

Bill Gates is the architect of the backend of the Bush era. He may vote Democrat, but his source code will always be authoritarian.