My Last Column

At dinner tonight, a high school senior was aghast at the idea of someone going to Europe on her own. “It would be like—like driving without a cell phone,” she said to me, between bites of a BLT. “So dangerous!”

Having both gone to Europe on my own and driven for years without a cell phone, I felt lucky to have lived this long. And I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I got my first ticket (for an illegal left turn) driving out of the cell phone shop parking lot.

Yes—I was playing with the buttons.

Only one person I knew had a cell phone in high school. His parents used it to track him down at night, thereby interrupting our breakfasts at Denny’s and our various exploits with the school keys. They made up for it by taking us out to sushi.

Now I carry my phone everywhere (though I’ve resisted PDAs and iPods, both of which are bound to eventually become part of our cell phones anyways.) When I graduate from the Kennedy School in two weeks, I’ll be traveling with it to Boston on a flight I booked at www.aa.com, staying with it at a hotel I pricelined™ and carrying a laptop with a Verizon wireless card on the same account, for broadband access anywhere in the city.

Nowadays, this sounds passé. But then I look back again, and remember that I didn’t even have an e-mail address until I got to college.

The first day of orientation week, I shot off a message to a friend at U.C. San Diego. We had been told that starting college meant losing touch with almost everyone in your past life. That wouldn’t happen to us, my friends and I figured: this new e-mail thing would keep us connected.

It mostly did. I think we remained more closely-knit than if we had gone our separate ways just a couple years earlier. I can only imagine how much more true that might have been if we’d had livejournals, free nights and weekends, and the Facebook.

I only discovered the World Wide Web at the start of my sophomore year. It was a barren place. No Napster, just a few pioneering class web sites, hardly any flaming. Amazon was two months old—and had been around several weeks longer than Internet Explorer. The term “cable modem” made us think of modems with cables sticking out of them, and DSL sounded like some kind of foreign shipping company. Hotmail was what happened when you sent a letter to Arizona.

But it wasn’t just the Internet that was different then. Californians had only recently discovered the appeal of blending fruits, yogurt and ice to make smoothies (to the delight of a fledgling company called Juice Club.) The SAT still had antonyms (I never understood why they went away.) Bookstores were places where people bought books. “Is” never meant anything but is, and an animated movie signified something hand-drawn, not Shrek but Beauty and the Beast. Airlines served meals and your parents could walk you to your departure gate. Buffy hadn’t slain any vampires yet—at least not on TV.

There were no TVs in Tressidder, let alone flat screens—and, alas, by the time they were installed, Buffy wasn't slaying vampires anymore. You had to file paper forms to get pretty much anything done, from transcript requests to selecting your classes. The parking lot didn’t take credit cards. And people who regularly snacked on froyo from the now defunct CoPo were busy founding companies with equally Stanfordish names—like Yahoo.

By now I probably sound primeval. But I graduated from Stanford not that long ago, in 2002 (true, I took two years off along the way.) Some of you were around then; you probably remember how poorly cell phones worked on campus even at the start of the 21st century. None of this was very long ago.

Still, there are times when I look back at my original Stanford days (because there are bound to be more) and miss that palpable sense of opportunity in the air, that feeling that tomorrow hadn’t been shaped yet—and that we would be the ones to shape it. Every few days it seemed another friend had left Stanford to join a start-up—or had come back post-IPO to recruit the rest of us.

Then I remember that Stanford’s probably always been that way and undoubtedly still is. Our "wind of freedom" continues to blow towards the future (though not always towards Washington) and from our place on the Farm (or the Arrillaga Alumni Center) we get to help make the weather.

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This fall, Daniel Berdichevsky will be traveling overland (on his own, but with a cell phone) from Malaysia to Madrid. For details, e-mail him at dan@demidec.com.