outside, right?”
“Right.”
“If you had a puppy that wasn’t housebroken, would you give him a treat for shitting in the living room?”
“Course not,” I said.
He nodded. “It would be teaching him the exact opposite of what you want him to learn. And when it comes to commerce, Craig, most people are like puppies that need to be housebroken.”
I didn’t much like that concept, and don’t today—I think the punishment/reward thing says a lot about how Mr. Harrigan made his fortune—but I kept my mouth shut. I was seeing him in a new way. He was like an old explorer on a new voyage of discovery, and listening to him was fascinating. I don’t think he was really trying to teach me, either. He was learning himself, and for a guy in his mid-eighties, he was learning fast.
“Free samples are fine, but if you give people too much for-free, whether it’s clothes or food or information, they come to expect it. Like puppies that crap on the floor, then look you in the eye, and what they’re thinking is, ‘You taught me this was all right.’ If I were the Wall Street Journal . . . or the Times . . . even the damn Reader’s Digest . . . I’d be very frightened by this gizmo.” He picked up the iPhone again; couldn’t seem to leave it alone. “It’s like a broken watermain, one spewing information instead of water. I thought it was just a phone we were talking about, but now I see . . . or begin to see . . .”
He shook his head, as if to clear it.
“Craig, what if someone with proprietary information about new drugs in development decided to put the test results out on this thing for the whole world to read? It could cost Upjohn or Unichem millions of dollars. Or suppose some disaffected person decided to spill government secrets?”
“Wouldn’t they be arrested?”
“Maybe. Probably. But once the toothpaste is out of the tube, as they say . . . i-yi-yi. Well, never mind. You better go home or you’ll be late for supper.”
“On my way.”
“Thank you again for the gift. I probably won’t use it very much, but I intend to think about it. As hard as I’m able, at least. My brains aren’t as nimble as they once were.”
“I think they’re still plenty nimble,” I said, and I wasn’t just buttering him up. Why weren’t there ads along with the news stories and YouTube videos? People would have to look at them, right? “Besides, my dad says it’s the thought that counts.”
“An aphorism more often spoken than adhered to,” he said, and when he saw my puzzled expression: “Never mind. I’ll see you tomorrow, Craig.”
* * *
On my walk back down the hill, kicking up clods of that year’s last snow, I thought about what he’d said: that the Internet was like a broken watermain spewing information instead of water. It was true of my dad’s laptop as well, and the computers at the school, and ones all over the country. The world, really. Although the iPhone was still so new to him he could barely figure out how to turn it on, Mr. Harrigan already understood the need to fix the broken pipe if business—as he knew it, anyway—was going to continue as it always had. I’m not sure, but I think he foresaw paywalls a year or two before the term was even coined. Certainly I didn’t know it then, no more than I knew how to get around restricted operations—what came to be known as jailbreaking. Paywalls came, but by then people had gotten used to getting stuff for free, and they resented being asked to cough up. People faced with a New York Times paywall went to a site like CNN or Huffington Post instead (usually in a huff), even though the reporting wasn’t as good. (Unless, of course, you wanted to learn about a fashion development known as “sideboob.”) Mr. Harrigan was totally right about that.
After dinner that night, once the dishes were washed and put away, my dad opened his laptop on the table. “I found something new,” he said. “It’s a site called previews, where you can watch coming attractions.”
“Really? Let’s see some!”
So for the next half hour, we watched movie trailers we would otherwise have had to go to a movie theater to see.
Mr. Harrigan would have torn his hair out. What little he had left.
* * *
Walking back from Mr. Harrigan’s house on