FIRST WORD

IDEAS THAT
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House of Bill

The lights go on, but is anybody home?

By Eric Nelson
The Free Press

Every mogul must build a mansion, and William H. Gates III is no exception. We've all heard about the $30 to $50 million price tag, the 40,000-square-feet, dining for 100, an underground 20-car parking garage, the underwater music system in the pool, and electronic pins that track occupants around the house. We've snickered over rumors of high-priced change-orders as the now-married Gates converts a tricked-out bachelor pad into a "family home." Clearly, Gates has not taken E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful to heart.

But Gates is building more than a house. He is constructing an image and placing an identity on his wealth. The House of Bill is the first chance us outsiders get to probe the mind of the man; the first public expression of Bill-culture. And Gates himself has helped us in this endeavor by promoting it as the house of the future in The Road Ahead, his paean to a techno-utopia.



Future Lord Bill
Almost a hundred years ago, the social theorist Thorstein Veblen examined the practice of "conspicuous consumption" and "waste." Ostentatious displays of wealth, Veblen noted, are the products of a "predatory culture" where moneyed superiors lord over their inferiors. As they schlep across the 520 bridge to the software mines every morning, the Microserfs can take this to heart as construction cranes tower above Lord Bill's lakeside property.

In this sense, Bill Gates "lords" over us just as surely as his pecuniary predecessors -- the Vanderbilts, J.P. Morgan, and William Randolph Hearst -- lorded over the 19th century masses with their own great temples of marble, stone and ego. Bill Gates has joined the tycoon class.
As an added twist, Gates has coordinated the gradual unveiling of his wealth display with a well-orchestrated marketing blitz to convey his vision of the future. However, in so far as domestic culture is concerned, Bill Gates' "Road Ahead" has been well-traveled. Take a look at Seattle's 1962 World's Fair, which featured a Space Age theme house of the future.
According to UW historian John Findlay, who recounts the fair in his book, Magic Lands, "The shape, color, and lighting of the house could all be changed quickly in order to meet shifting preferences, and the kitchen seemed 'a miracle of push-button efficiency.'" In retrospect, the 1962 fair was a middle-class vision of compliant housewives, maximized efficiency and the masculine thrust of the Space Needle into the future.
"At bottom," Findlay notes, "the fair's version of the future was not very imaginative; it seldom took into account the possibility of fundamental social and cultural changes."
Likewise, Gates' "vision" is disappointingly shallow. Frankly, the Road Ahead reads as if Bill is beginning to believe his own marketing bullshit.
Gates' house will be a palace of gadgetry. He writes, "When it's dark outside, the (electronic tracking) pin will cause a moving zone of light to accompany you through the house. Unoccupied rooms will be unlit." You get the idea, the information age means we can't be bothered to use light switches.
According to Gates, in the future your wallet PC will instantly tell you the location of the nearest Chinese restaurant, and later he explains how we will pay for things (presumably all those Chinese dinners) with an electronic debit card. Now that's progress!
Computer futurist Paul Saffo of the Institute of the Future noted recently in the Washington Post that, "If this really reflects Mr. Gates' vision of the future, then his vision can only be summarized as one of the bland leading the bland."
Money buys many things, but it has obviously not provided Bill with much perspective. Bill does not realize that many people are still concerned about a daily bowl of rice and have yet to go "on-line" for a diet of "electronic efficiency."

Brother Bill?
Whether Gates really believes in this future or not, there's something creepy about a guy willing to incorporate the dystopian aura of pin numbers, data banks, and electronic surveillance into his own home.

Gates achieves a striking effect with his electronic tracking pins. He writes: "The electronic pin you wear will tell the house who and where you are, and the house will use this information to try to meet and even anticipate your needs -- all as unobtrusively as possible."
"Someday, instead of needing the pin, it might be possible to have a camera system with visual-recognition capabilities, but that's beyond current technology," Gates notes. Don't swipe the towels at this house, Brother Bill is watching.
Sound familiar? "The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard." (From the opening pages of Orwell's 1984.)
The pins also illustrate a key theme in tycoon behavior: control. Gates and William Randolph Hearst are control freaks of a feather. At Hearst's epic San Simeon castle overlooking the Big Sur coast, guests could not drink in their rooms and had to wear costumes to a nightly procession lead by the publishing magnate and his mistress. Hearst maintained strict control on access. Nobody got by the gate without his approval.
In his book, Gates pointedly dismisses any similarity between San Simeon and his house. But like Hearst, he seeks the immediate: news, visual entertainment, or information on the whereabouts of his guests.

Patron of Virtual Art
Like all rich people, Gates is expected to be a patron of the arts. Traditionally, European nobility supported the arts through stipends and acquisitions. The American nouveau-riche just acquired, but with a vengeance.

Historian Stewart Holbrook, who detailed the rise and fall of the robber barons and tycoons in his 1953 classic, The Age of Moguls, described the Vanderbilt mansion as a mish-mash of treasures:
"The new impulse turned out to be glorious hash of styles and periods from much of the known world -- French tapestries, Florentine doors, African marbles, English china, Dutch old masters. These were mingled happily with Oriental magnificence..."
Bill has proven himself more discriminating.
For instance, Gates indulged himself to the tune of $30.8 million for the Leonardo DaVinci manuscript known as "Codex Leicester." (When industrialist Armand Hammer owned it, he dubbed it "Codex Hammer.") But this acquisition, representing a fraction of Gates' $13 billion in paper wealth, is an investment in symbolism. By aligning his image with DaVinci's, Gates casts himself as a renaissance man and seeks to enter the pantheon of great thinkers and tinkerers. "DaVinci, Jefferson, Edison, ...Gates."
But Gates' experimentation with virtual art in his own house -- really a test market for selling his licensed stock of images into your house -- reveals that he follows in the footsteps of another great inventor and marketer, Henry Ford.
Ford was a new kind of mogul who scorned art (and history for that matter.) Ford's middle class sensibilities prevented him from conspicuous consumption of art. But Ford knew a good idea when he saw one and refined mass production into an art.
As a "Fordist", Gates is concerned with product, distribution, and mass consumption. In his house, high resolution video screens mean that "your" art will follow you via your electronic pin as you move about the house. Tired of your unruly, chaotic Jackson Pollock day? Change it to a more peaceful French Impressionist day. Art becomes the object of immediate and coldly technical gratification. In Bill's house, empty signifiers replace the real thing.

Environmental Waste
Like the arts, Bill's house confuses the real environment with the imagined. Moreover, Bill does not tread lightly with his massively wasteful house. He pays lip service to environmental harmony, but there appears to be no effort at solar technology or energy efficiency. The house faces west to the sunset, not south to the sun.

Bill writes, "A small estuary, to be fed with groundwater from the hill behind the house, is planned. We'll seed the estuary with sea-run cutthroat trout, and I'm told to expect river otters." Otters, eh? Let's hope they don't have to wear electronic pins too.
The upshot of all this is that until now Bill Gates has been a cypher to the public. Now, through his house, we know him as we know Microsoft.
Both Gates and Microsoft have taken some heat for "dominating" the personal computer industry. Conservative prophet of profit George Gilder, writing in the Dec. 4, 1995 issue of Forbes, says we've got Gates all wrong:
"Blinded by the robber baron image assigned in U.S. history courses to the heroic builders of American capitalism, many critics see Bill Gates as a menacing monopolist. They mistake for greed the gargantuan tenacity of Microsoft as it struggles to assure the compatibility of its standard..."
The fact remains, Bill's business and Chez Bill share some unsettling characteristics: they are both big, unfriendly, sometimes threatening, and mostly concerned with image over substance. The fact that Gates chooses to live in the same way he conducts business is hardly surprising, but certainly disconcerting.

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Contents on this page were published in the February/March, 1996 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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