It was a coincidence—and one that later was considered novelistic foreshadowing—that Hope’s meeting with Dr. Hart occurred during the same week that a new community just north of Trinidad, Colorado, was being dedicated.A farewell cocktail reception capping off the three-day event at the facility—which over time would be referred to as Damondville, The Compound, New America and, finally and legally, Compound City—was held that Wednesday evening.
There were last-minute concerns about the increasingly gusty winds and low clouds that had turned the late afternoon sky an ominous slate gray. Administrators crossed their fingers and didn’t change the plan, which was to take advantage of the unseasonably warm weather and hold the reception in a tent on the great lawn of the administration building.
There indeed was a storm. To the great relief of the planners, though, the rain and wind were moderate and only lasted about twenty minutes. The evening turned pleasant.
The officials and VIPs were in a celebratory mood. The construction phase that was winding down had brought significant business to southern Colorado and parts of New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas. The common belief was this was just a taste of things to come. This made Jayson Damond and Theo Pennimen—the men whose companies financed, fdesigned and built the facility—rock stars.During the previous three days, six tours of about thirty VIPs each had been conducted. The large open-sided people movers used to convey crowds at expansive venues such as zoos and amusement parks ferried guests around the campus. The tour had seven stops and took about three hours.
That there was so much where nothing had been before made the impact staggering. The relaxed and jovial mood with which the tours started gave way to surprise and finally awe as what had been created by J&T Industries became evident. It was stunning, especially when juxtaposed against the rolling plain on which it rested.
Damondville was Oz. People were handed a brochure as they entered the people mover. On one side was a map with sites indicated by number. The facilities represented by those numbers were on the facing page.
The list: Six four-story barracks, a state-of-the-art gymnasium, an Olympic size pool with a retractable roof, a greeting/administration center, a fifty-room hotel, three two-story office buildings, a social center, an old-fashioned village green with a gazebo, two dining halls, a sophisticated infirmary outfitted for emergency surgery, two industrial size greenhouses, a power plant, a water purification facility, a 3,000-seat theater/meeting hall, an art gallery, an outdoor theater, a mini-mall with a supermarket and space for eight shops (including two restaurant-ready units), an industrial laundry, three structures capable of supporting light industry, a man-made lake, schools from preschool through high school, guest and family housing, a security office, an airstrip able to land a medium-size jet and related support structures and garages. There were solar panel and windmill parks, a ranch and assorted athletic fields and playgrounds.
Much of the community was built along five semicircular streets: “Patriot Road,” “Founding Fathers Avenue,” “Citizen Soldiers Way,” “Constitution Boulevard” and—perhaps with tongue-in-cheek—”Henry Ford Drive.” The semicircle faced a dramatically backlit fountain that sent columns of recycled water forty feet into the air. Behind it, at least during the dedication, was a seventy-five-foot-high crucifix.
The crucifix had been the subject of intense debate within J&T. Some said it would attract evangelical and other Christian denominations, groups with lots of money and a tendency to hold large gatherings. Others argued that the crucifix would discourage secular groups from renting or leasing space.
The compromise was to build a portable crucifix that could be disassembled into three sections and loaded onto a one-car train that ran on a narrow gauge track between the pedestal and a big storage shed near the ranch, which was about a mile away. It therefore could be brought out or stored based on the group using the facility.
“You don’t want to give up on either the pious hypocrites or the godless atheists,” Damond joked at one planning meeting. “Everyone’s money is green.”
Henry Ford Drive was the furthest street away from the fountain, which was the nominal center of the campus. The street was bounded by an arcing 25 foot-wide grassy band that was sprinkled with picnic tables and barbecues. The farm and ranch were beyond. Still further away were windmills and solar panels. The design was modular, so land use could be shifted as population increased, energy generation grew more efficient and other changes occurred.
—
Credit for the project was diplomatically given to both Damond and Pennimen. Everybody knew, however, that Jayson Damond was the money and brains behind J&T as well as the majority owner. It was his project and he was the man of the hour. Indeed, Pennimen didn’t like the spotlight and hadn’t even made the trip. He was more than 1,600 miles away at the corporate headquarters in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
The attention paid to Damond bordered on hero worship. It came to a head during the climactic reception. He was surrounded by local residents thrilled to have a celebrity in their midst—especially one creating jobs and generating revenue for their community.
The reception began in the tent. People got their drinks and walked out into the comfortable night air. Damond’s handlers led him toward a small podium, mic and speakers. A tarp that had protected the electronic equipment from the rain was being folded by a workman.
Damond was a man of medium height. He was broad-shouldered enough that the extra weight of later middle age made him appear robust and healthy rather than fat and faded. He had wavy black hair that still was thick and only graying slightly. People often said that they hoped to look as good when they reached his age. Damond would smile and respond that he’d prefer to be a fat and balding thirty year-old. “You can work off fat on a treadmill. Years? Not so much,” he would say.
Though he dressed elegantly and in a manner that suggested wealth and status when necessary, his public persona stressed informality. When making an appearance he wore a hoodie and baseball cap embroidered with that community’s name. Afterward, the PR team would collect the used clothing, certify it had been worn by Jayson Damond and auction it off. J&T would then donate triple the winning bid—usually funded by corporations trying to curry favor—to that community for technology-related civic improvements.
In this case, both the cap and the hoodie said “Trinidad!!!” The exclamation points had not been used previously and indicated the occasion and location were special. The clothes raised a million dollars, which was donated to Las Animas County libraries and public schools. The funds were used to upgrade WiFi, enhance emergency communications and support science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) programs.
Damond greeted everyone with a “Hey! Howya dune, bro?’” in a good approximation of a New York accent. He extended his hand, palm up, to youngsters he passed. The child would try to “give him five,” only to see Damond withdraw the hand. The kid invariably laughed and tried again. Damond would do the same thing while asking the child why his friendliness was being rebuffed. The child would get the joke and struggle to stop laughing long enough to explain that he or she was trying, but Damond was withdrawing his hand. Damond would indignantly deny this while doing so yet again. After two or three more back and forths Damond would let the child connect and then blow on his hand as if to say that the slap hurt. “Why did you hit me so hard? I may start crying!” he would say to his new fan as he moved on.
The first item on the short program was a performance by the local middle school band and choir. Awkward and uncomfortable-looking kids toting trumpets, clarinets and other instruments filled the three-level bleachers adjacent to the small podium. The kids struggled through “America the Beautiful,” “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” by Fleetwood Mac and “Thank You” by Natalie Merchant. They finished and, with looks of great relief, shuffled off the stage.
Next came a video tribute. It was dusk, but the hi-def video monitors had such high resolution that it didn’t matter. J&T produced the slick video. It featured statements from five people whose lives had been touched by Damond’s technology: A veteran living far away from health services, a single mother of three young children who earned her degree from her basement, a man who worked from home in a call center while caring for his ailing wife, a formally isolated paralyzed woman who had established vibrant virtual relationships and an executive who didn’t have to choose between his dream home in Phoenix and dream job in St. Louis.
The first vignette set the tone. It began with a few seconds of archival combat footage from the Vietnam War. That faded into a video of a smiling eighty-four-year-old Tony Clarke. He was shown playing piano and singing with his wife, looking through old photographs, buying ice cream for his grandkids and laughing with buddies at his VFW post.
The audio:
My name is Tony Clarke. I was a Marine. I served three tours in Vietnam, including two weeks in the Battle of Hue during the Tet Offensive in 1968. After the war, I moved to a rural town in Arkansas. It’s a life I love. I hunt, I fish, I nap, I get on my wife Margie’s nerves. We’re lucky and comparatively healthy, but we do have some issues. Everyone our age does.
Just to get the most minor care—heart rate, blood pressure, that type of thing—we had to drive about forty-five minutes to a clinic. It’s most of a whole day between the driving and the visit. We get tired. If the doctors see something they want checked out, we’d have to drive to our regional center. That’s all the way over in Fayetteville. It’s at least a couple of hours each way. So we’d have to pay for a hotel.
Well, the telecom equipment that we’ve gotten through insurance that J&T developed has changed things for the better. That’s putting it mildly. There’s a lot of stuff that would require a trip in the past that now can be done remotely right from our kitchen table. We can talk to the doc face to face. He can see our records, take remote readings and tell us how to do things in front of the camera that can help him figure out what’s going on. It’s 8K high definition, so he can see things almost like being there.
He then tells us we’re okay, prescribes something—or says he needs to see one of us and we book an appointment. So in that case, we go. But now it’s a last resort. And they are adding new features all the time. like alerts to tell me to take my meds. Every time I have a checkup there seems to be something new.
And on top of that, we’re monitored 24/7. If there is a dangerous reading they would call 911 immediately and have an ambulance dispatched. If it’s important but not an emergency, they would try to reach us for a day or so and use 911 as a last resort.
Nothing like that has ever happened, thank god. But it’s great knowing that somebody is watching out for us. There’s a plan in place, like a battle. And think about it: Using Jayson’s technology means we are being tracked more fully and efficiently than somebody living down the street from the hospital who isn’t.
I understand that J&T is not the only source of this great technology. It’s a big industry. But he’s developed a lot of it and has been as responsible as any one person over the years for pioneering the stuff and for making it such a big deal— and affordable enough for insurance companies to offer. Mr. Damond is a good man. He has helped a lot of people lead longer and happier lives. And I’m not a jealous man: He deserves to enjoy his life as much as he seems to.
I’m not a writer or public speaker. The folks at J&T helped me with the language. I insisted we be clear about that. But I jumped at the chance to make this video. Every word of what I’ve said is true. God bless Jayson Damond. He’s been a godsend to my family.
All the stories were compelling and unique but at the same time shared a common theme. What Damond had developed had improved people’s lives. In some cases, the improvements were breathtaking and transformative. This combined with a raffish image made him a folk hero.
When the video ended, everyone stood, turned toward Damond and clapped. It became an extended standing ovation. The man of the hour waved meekly and wiped away tears in a way that everyone present, including his many detractors, knew was heartfelt and genuine.
The next item on the program was Las Animas County Executive Tom Garcia’s introduction of the man of the hour. It now was fully dark. Garcia walked to the lectern and spoke:
Just over seven years ago, early in 2022, representatives of J&T called our offices to speak about the prospect of building what would turn out to be a new town in our county. To say we were floored is an understatement. We were not even sure at first it wasn’t some sort of prank or scam. Well, of course, it wasn’t. We checked and saw that Jayson owned this huge tract of land and that the contact was real. We quickly agreed to work with J&T and felt like we just hit the jackpot. It was the wisest choice in Trinidad’s civic history.
Slowly, the process moved on. We pinched ourselves every day. We knew what Jayson had done. We heard stories—dozens of stories—along the lines of those you just saw. We are in the presence of a man who has made a difference, a real difference, in people’s lives.
As time passed, Trinidad and the surrounding communities in Las Animas County got to know Jayson Damond and Theo Pennimen. Not just as universally respected giants and pioneers in their field. Not just as men who bring business to our region. But as men. Men who believe in giving back. Men who see our families and think of their families, when they weren’t so rich and influential. We love what Jayson and Theo are doing. We love the good it will bring. But it starts with the fact that we love Jayson and Theo.
So, gentlemen, thank you. We look forward to working with you both, men with special places in our hearts, for decades to come.
Damond walked over and embraced Garcia as the crowd clapped. He complimented the young musicians on their “wonderful performance” and said how honored and proud he was to help a hero such as Tony Clarke and the others in the video. Damond thanked Garcia and the community and said how much he looked forward to continuing to work with Trinidad.
Damond’s remarks mostly were perfunctory. The man who spent years and more than a billion dollars building the campus only came alive toward the end of his brief remarks when he described “the amazing and unique human ability to work together to build things that are permanent.” Those who followed him closely knew that the public Damond truly engaged only when that topic was discussed.
The crowd was divided between locals who saw Damond as a celebrity and savior and those who actually knew him. While those in the latter group acknowledged that the innovations he pioneered did a tremendous amount of good, they knew the avuncular public image was a small piece of a complex and less flattering whole.
Damond’s awful reputation was not a result of his main business, which was investing in and nurturing telecommunications companies. He was a legend who was respected, admired and even liked in that field.
His image problem began when he was between his fifth and six billion dollars in net assets. At that point, Damond decided to reinvent himself and launched real estate, architectural and construction-related firms. He was rich and powerful and no longer needed to pay attention to fair business practices, his reputation or the law. He adopted the Trump strategy, which he thought was brilliant: Renege on promises to subcontractors and vendors and invite them to sue. The victim inevitably would reach the painful and humiliating conclusion that the lawyers Damond had on retainer would use every crack and crevice of the legal system to delay and waste their time and money. To them it would be a game. The fight, they came to understand, was futile and self-defeating.
The cornerstone of Damond’s strategy was that being right, just or fair is meaningless. The only things that matter are money, leverage and power—and the willingness to use them ruthlessly. Damond was a contradiction. Though he didn’t blink an eye at cheating those with whom he did business, he was big hearted and sentimental in his human interactions.
Damond was at heart a worker who periodically visited the compound and joined a work crew. The billionaire would be incognito. He would grow his beard and pull his hat down as far as possible. The foreman would tell the crew that “the new guy” didn’t know much about the job at hand because he was part of a special program that integrated the unemployed into the workforce. The man had experienced hard times and should be treated respectfully and helped when necessary.
If Damond had fun and the workers were industrious and reasonably friendly, an assistant would show up the next day with a $2,000 check for the foreman and $1,000 checks for each crew member. Any worker who revealed that the mysterious worker was Jayson Damond would be terminated. Damond “dropped in” six times while the community was under construction. He would have done so more but his beard grew slowly and he had to wait for enough workers to cycle out to ensure secrecy.
Word circulated that this was going on despite the termination threat. It led to strange situations in which every arriving worker was intensely scrutinized. Workers eagerly looked for any hint that the newcomer was a billionaire. Not knowing anything about sports was a good sign, for instance. What self-respecting billionaire would waste time watching baseball? Conversely, a well-worn lunch pail was a bad sign. How many billionaires even own a lunch pail, much less one that’s been used?
Newcomers were treated with a level of tenderness not generally associated with construction workers. When it became clear that a new worker was not Damond, frustrated coworkers would glower ferociously as if it was the man’s fault. In one instance, an unsuspecting soul who committed the sin of being an authentic steel worker had three toes broken when an indignant window installer “accidentally” dropped a fifteen-pound drill on his right foot.
—
The spark for the massive project was Damond’s desire to pay homage to Henry Ford, another imperfect giant. Damond won many of the original plans for two Ford projects at auction. One was Fordlandia, a city in the Brazilian Amazon built in the 1920s to supply rubber to Ford’s burgeoning automobile empire. The other was Greenfield Village in Michigan, a living museum Ford opened in 1933. Many of the aging brown pages had notes scribbled by Ford.
Honoring an icon who had been dead for about 80 years was a poor rationale for a project that would cost more than a billion dollars to build. The reality was that there was no plan. Ideas came and went: Hosting religious retreats, leasing to the military as a training site, renting to huge groups for weeks or months at a time (sort of a massive Airbnb), creating a biosphere to study self-sufficiency, establishing a temporary home for refugees from disasters, housing underprivileged and/or troubled youths or creating tech incubators.
The lack of a clear mission—or even a cloudy one—was a challenge to J&T’s public relations department. The group planted the idea on social media that the purpose was set and would be divulged at a time and place of Damond and Pennimen’s choosing. Insiders—including high-level J&T executives—whispered that spending so much without outlining the project’s purposes and goals was narcissistic, arrogant and wasteful. That hubris was the closely held secret, not the plan.
—
Jayson Damond finished his surprisingly brief remarks and, unable to think of a better way to show that he was done, hugged Garcia again. The reporters in attendance knew the program was over and hors d’oeuvres and an open bar awaited them in the tent. They began walking towards it. The rest of the crowd took their lead and headed back as well.
Among those headed for the tent was Allen Arthur Simmons, a familiar figure in conservative political circles and a candidate to be the compound’s chief operating officer. He and Damond had shaken hands and chatted at several conservative political functions but never exchanged more than pleasantries.
A headhunter from an executive search firm suggested to J&T’s Vice President of Human Resources that Simmons would be a good fit. Simmons, the headhunter said, was a long-time Republican operative whose views aligned with those held by Damond. He was an able, no-nonsense administrator and a team player who shunned the spotlight and didn’t make waves. Said one former co-worker: “Allen’s idea of pushing boundaries is casual Fridays. That’s only a slight exaggeration. He worries about stuff like that. He thinks that the first step guarantees the last. The idea is that Frank Sinatra made Iggy Pop, Marilyn Manson and whatever is beyond inevitable.”
Damond told HR to have the headhunter sound out Simmons about his interest in the job. If he seemed intrigued, they should suggest that the two spend some time together at the event. J&T shouldn’t pay for his flight, though they should offer accommodations at the compound. Damond said that whether or not he paid his way to Trinidad would be a barometer of his interest.
Simmons booked his flights within ten minutes of hanging up with the headhunter.
That Damond and Simmons had even crossed paths showed how much Damond’s politics had changed over the decades. He was a vague liberal when he was young and drifted rightward as he battled labor unions and accumulated wealth. That trend continued over ensuing years. Damond followed Liberty First News—commonly referred to as LFN—Newsmax and OANN, as well as right-wing AM talk radio. Damond made significant contributions to libertarian and Republican candidates, blogs and political action committees.
Damond accepted the right’s ideas and the demagogic and reductionist ways in which they were presented: The leftists are taking over. The minorities are running rampant. White people are being marginalized and discriminated against. Half of Democratic voters are illegal immigrants and dead people. Elected officials are corrupt. Political correctness is robbing people of their ability to express themselves. Women who have abortions and the doctors who perform them are murderers. Democrats favor abortion even after birth. New laws are unnecessary if those on the books are enforced. Critical race theory is ruining the educational system. Taxes are too high and were financing a Marxist agenda. Current GOP office holders are Republicans in name only (RINOs) and quislings.
Simmons, a functionary in the huge PR machine that cultivated this fabric of carefully chosen and deeply interconnected messages, had arrived the day before. He was in the back of the tent tracking Damond’s movements through the crowd while chatting with an amateur local historian who entertained him with trivia about Trinidad.
Simmons learned that Bat Masterson was the city’s marshal for a short time in the 1880s. It was the home of Ina Eloise Young, the first female sports editor in the country. She covered baseball’s championship (not yet called the World Series) in 1908. The city was briefly the home of Damon Runyon (author of Guys and Dolls), where he managed a semi-professional baseball team. Trinidad was the final home of musician Ronnie Lane, a member of The Faces and The Small Faces. It also was the home of Dr. Stanley Biber, the pioneer of sex reassignment surgery. The town was known during the 1970s as “the sex change capital of the world.”
Damond had spotted Simmons and walked toward him and the historian. He listened for a moment, smiled and nodded politely to the woman and said, “Let’s walk” in a low tone to Simmons. Damond started toward the exit flap of the tent nearest to the road down which the people movers had driven earlier. He did not bother to check if Simmons was following.
Simmons was, of course. The historian smiled graciously as Damond passed and said, “The boss calls, I see.” Simmons almost responded, “From your lips to God’s ears,” an expression a Jewish friend often used, but simply said “I hope so,” a less poetic way of saying the same thing. He said Trinidad certainly is an interesting place, thanked the woman and followed a few feet behind Damond.
Simmons was the antithesis of Damond. He had recently spent a month in therapy discussing his deep identification with Fredo Corleone, the weak brother in the Godfather saga. Being hired by Damond as the compound’s chief operating officer would be akin to Michael Corleone, the Godfather, selecting Fredo to be his consigliere, or main counselor. It would be a vindication, a dream job and an end to his financial insecurities all rolled into one. Simmons yearned to be at the center of things, not a hanger-on wracked by chronic and corrosive self-doubt. And he felt he was close.
After a few years of working with Damond and Pennimen, Simmons would retire and become a respected LFN or Newsmax talking head. All he wanted was to be hired, do a good job, not offend anyone important and ride the wave. So if Damond told him to wash his car and drop off his laundry, his only question would be if he wanted wax and starch.
The two walked in silence for about a minute. “Almost everyone I’ve spoken to has been upbeat,” Simmons said to break the ice. He carefully modulated his enthusiasm to sound savvy, not forced. “This one guy from New Orleans I spoke to can’t wait to get involved. He seemed like a high roller and was genuinely excited. I think he’s good for some business down the road.”
Diamond smiled, said, “Great,” and fell silent for a few more minutes. Finally, to Simmons’ relief, Damond spoke. “Allen, I’ve reviewed many candidates for the COO position, and you’re the front runner. It’s obviously an important hire. It will be a high-profile and challenging job. I wanted to have an informal chat with you before making a final decision. You know, to make sure we can play together nicely.”
Simmons was aware of Damond’s notoriously duplicitous and untrustworthy nature. But he couldn’t resist parsing what he had said. Being “the front runner” was good, but more qualified than if Damond said “the job is all but yours” or something equally conclusive. But it was far better than “somebody we’re looking at,” “a front runner” or nothing at all. Overall, it felt like a pro forma final sign-off conversation, which was by far the best for which Simmons could hope.
Simmons reminded himself to not walk ahead of Damond, who was notoriously slow. He often took subordinates on long walks around the 45-acre corporate campus because he felt that the sights, sounds and smells stimulated his thought process. Something would interest him—a plant, a small animal, an abandoned structure—and he would stop to examine it. His natural sense of entitlement had been compounded by his great wealth. Damond didn’t care that simply ceasing to communicate and leaving a companion standing alone is rude and causes resentment. Staffers were informally told to bring memos or reports on such trips. Doing so enabled the time during which Damond was distracted to be used constructively.
“Let me ask you a question,” Damond said after a few minutes of silence. “Why do you think we decided to build this facility? Obviously, the COO should understand our goals.”
Simmons had heard through the grapevine that Damond and Pennimen couldn’t figure out what to do with the compound. Insiders thought it was a riot. What brand of knuckleheads spend so much money building something so grandiose without having tenants lined up years into the future?
The common wisdom was that Damond built the compound simply because he liked to build things and he had the money and ego to do so. Many happily looked forward to its failure.
Damond knew what people thought and was concerned about his image. The COO therefore was an even more important hire than it would have been under normal conditions. The person selected must be willing to say that Damondville was initially conceived for whatever purpose eventually was settled upon. The COO had to accept the faux history as the real history.
Simmons was savvy and knew he would be eliminated as a candidate if he asked about the indecision or signal resistance to being a messenger of the fake history. The challenge he face was conveying his understanding without overtly saying so.
“I believe you are building it to establish a central focal point for our…for your…goals and aspirations,” he said. “Its existence makes what you long have advocated tangible. It’s a real place. People can come and visit. They would be outside the grasp of those who doubted you.”
If Simmons had misread the situation he already was out of the running. So he went all in.
“Jayson, what you’ve done is far more compelling than promises and artists’ renderings,” he said. “You have a plan in place, and we’ll know the details when it’s time for us to know the details. At this point, the key is that you’ve created. This magnificent place is not vaporware. You had a vision and you brought it to life, just like Henry Ford and the Founding Fathers did.”
It was performative nonsense. Simmons even managed to include the term “vaporware,” a pejorative commonly used in tech circles to describe a supposed innovation or idea that exists only in diagrams and slide decks. Simmons had spent the three most important minutes of his career quite convincingly articulating something that had no relationship to the truth. Indeed, it was the exact opposite: Simmons was saying in code that he would be willing to lie.
Damond was impressed. The unspoken message was that Simmons had no core, which was the main job requirement. A COO who cared about the truth would be a disaster. The candidate’s administrative skills were important, but secondary.
Simmons did not yet know it, but at the moment he became Damond’s consigliere.
—
Simmons had studied hard for the meeting. It was a fascinating story. Damond began amassing his fortune in the late 1980s and early 1990s as an investor in telecommunications. He was in his early thirties when he founded TechVestments. Prescient, savvy and fearless early bets led to billions of dollars and iconic status.
The firm made those billions advising on deals between big companies and nurturing startups that eventually were sold to these big players. TechVestments was small, agile, creative, responsive and narrowly focused. Damond had a very precise idea of what telecom would look like. His goal was to develop the pieces that would make that vision a reality.
To gain TechVestment’s support—even its attention—proposals had to be precursors or building blocks of platforms supporting multi-gigabit bidirectional communications over residential grade networks. In essence, Damond was advocating bringing high capacity corporate networks to people’s homes. It was audacious and made TechVestments a boutique—even oddball—firm in the early years.
TechVestments and a small group of competing entrepreneurs, investors and engineers were determined to make it happen. Damond often said that compared to what NASA scientists and engineers had to figure out, squeezing enough data through copper, fiber and coaxial cable to enable interactive two-way audio/video communications was “pretty close to a no-brainer.”
The developmental curve started with core technologies such as digitization, data compression and more robust modulation schemes. It assumed the gradual transition of all or most of the network to fiber. The advances contributed to an array of technologies that directly or indirectly helped realize Damond’s dream. They included cloud and edge computing, the Internet of Things, content delivery networks, passive optical networks, mesh networking, virtualization, software-defined wide-area networks, virtualization, cloud architectures, 5G, 6G, fixed wireless access and WiFi. The research set the stage for generative artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The details were complex but the bottom line was simple: The growth of computer power doesn’t make dramatic progress possible. It makes it inevitable. Damond summed it up at a 1992 investment conference in response to a question from an industry veteran and friend named Ted Ritovski. He asked why Damond was investing in technologies that were speculative and decades away at best or, he said with a chuckle, “quite possibly impossible.”
Damond’s response was legend. “It’s possible, Ted. It has to be, if we listen to history. What wasn’t possible in the past is routine now. What isn’t possible now will be routine in the future. History screams that at us. The only real limit is the speed of light and the only real gating factors are our minds and imaginations. The future happens, and it happens a hell of a lot faster than people expect. We all are programmed to think we’ve reached the end of history and are confused when we find out that we haven’t.”
Simmons had sensed something in his research that became tangible as the men strolled through the campus. Damond clearly was a shrewd investor with a sense of entitlement and questionable ethics. But he was more. There was savviness and intuition and a bit of brilliance in how he saw the future. Linear predictions about the potential of current technology were just the first step. Damond worked backwards from his ambitious goals and thought deeply about how each tool and its descendants could help reach them and how long it would take. For him, it was a giant jigsaw puzzle depicting a scene that was in constant flux.
They walked down Citizen Soldiers Way. Damond paused for what seemed to Simmons to be at least the tenth time. “It’s funny how things evolve,” he said. “Nuclear weapons and atomic energy are cousins. Both involve messing around with the nuclei of atoms, which is the ultimate high risk, high reward business. It was a common thought after World War II that atomic energy would be a fixture in our lives, for better or worse. It would either save us or kill us. The good future would be the clean powering of cities. The bad future would be leaked radiation and the U.S., the Soviets and a little bit the Chinese lobbing atomic bombs at each other.”
Damond slowed and half turned toward Simmons in a way suggesting what he was about to say was important. “It played out a bit differently, however,” he said. “Atomic weapons have not been used since 1945. Nuclear power has become a useful complement to other sources of power, but hasn’t displaced them. It hasn’t kept solar and wind energy from emerging.”
Modern telecommunications has turned out to be far more consequential to how we actually live, Damond said. But it is thought of fundamentally differently than atomic energy. Atomic energy has been carefully managed because it is so dangerous. Telecommunications is the opposite. Ever more powerful tools are welcome. Society has “only nibbled at the edges” of control with legislation about the First Amendment, the fair delegation of spectrum and how to bridge the gap between those with full access to these tools and those without it.
“In the 2020s there were some moves made to protect children from social media sites,” Damond said. “But they basically flopped because of the general paralysis of government. That paralysis, by the way, was in part caused by savvy use of advanced telecommunications by those who no longer wanted government to work effectively. It’s sort of circular.”
The result is that telecommunications dominates our lives. “We say that we live in the ‘atomic age,’ “ Damond said. “That’s wrong. We live in the ‘telecommunications age.’ Seeing everything through that lens is the one real creative insight I had. The other ideas—what I call the ideas that built the mansions and bought the Jags—were about getting an increasing number of bits and bytes from point A to point B quickly, predictably, securely and without losing too many along the way. They were remarkable advances made by brilliant people. My success is that I chose and bankrolled the right folks. Their ideas were profound, but not in the same way. They were process advances.”
“How does that relate to the compound?” Simmons asked.
“Patience, my friend,” Damond said with a smile. “People pay forty grand to hear this spiel. Plus dinner. That you’ve gotten to this point means that you are doing well. We’ve reached a point that people who want to sound smart—and many of them actually are—call an ‘inflection point.’ Multiple incremental advances in hardware and software add up to massive, society-shifting change. These happen gradually and then all at once. We’re at the all at once part.”
Simmons realized that Damond was not kidding. His comments felt like they came from a speech or presentation. And he was reaching the climax.
“There comes a point at which a change is so drastic that it constitutes something new. Not just better. New. For the past decade or so we’ve been at one of those Rubicons. Today’s communications tools and technologies are so advanced that the world is different. It’s not black and white to color. It’s smoke signals to trans-Atlantic cables. These incremental advances have coalesced to create a truly new world, not just a marginally better or tweaked version of the old one.”
The comment that he was doing well relaxed Simmons and enabled him to concentrate on what Damond was saying instead of worrying about the impression he was making.
“Another important thing that happened is that communications and technology fused. It’s a bit in the weeds, but important. Of course, you always needed technology to communicate electronically. But the two things were distinct.”
Damond was talking about a topic he clearly loved. “Now, high-level communications technology is embedded deeply within everything. Loudspeakers have broadband connectivity built in from the start. Doorbells do too. Cars. Factory equipment. Everything. That the communications functionality is a core component—not an add-on—is a big deal. It’s a water main self-reporting that there is a 90 percent chance it will burst within two weeks and the public works department should get its ass in gear. It’s an irrigation system saying that the proper saturation level has been reached and turning off the water. It’s the metal in a plane wing saying it is fatigued and needs to be replaced. We’re actually communicating with the inanimate elements of our environment. You couldn’t do that unless the communications was within the thing. It can’t be bolted on.”
Damond stopped for a moment and inspected a rotting log. He kicked it gently, looked momentarily at the frightened creatures that scurried away and refocused on Simmons.
“That level of innovation stretches to us humans, too,” Damond said. “We now live in a world in which communications is horizontal. By that I mean a world in which everyone has very powerful communications capabilities—words, images, document networking, extraordinarily clear and crisp ultra high-definition video and all the rest. I knew this is where we were headed way back, when most people still were amazed to be able to send a tiny bit of data signifying ‘yes’ upstream to the cable company to order a movie on pay-per-view.”
The goal was networks with equal upstream and downstream—send and receive—capabilities, Damond said. “It’s happened. They are called symmetrical networks. Telecommunications used to be a one-way lecture. Now it’s a two-way conversation. And there is enough bandwidth for people to shout at each other.”
It is a new era. “Historically, people have been passive receivers of information from authority sources with far superior capabilities. The anointed ones could reach the masses. But the masses couldn’t reach the masses. I can’t think of a bigger change.”
“So now everyone’s got a publishing platform,” Simmons said.
“Or printing press,” Damond said. “Think about Ben Franklin. His success wasn’t only due to his brilliance. He also owned a printing press and published a newspaper. He essentially blogged as Mrs. Silence Dogood, Poor Richard and others. Owning the press was as important to his success as his brains. Arguably more. How many Ben Franklins died in obscurity because they couldn’t reach the public?”
The two had stopped in front of one of the almost completed barracks. Damond leaned against a fence he had helped erect with one of the work crews weeks earlier. Simmons was in front of him, with one shoe resting on a spool of fiber optic communications cable that had not yet been installed.
“Since everyone is Ben Franklin and has a printing press, doesn’t it sort of mean that we’re living in a post-technology era?” Simmons asked.
“In a sense. We are in an age of democratized communications. Anyone can get very powerful and potent capabilities,” Damond said. “It’s liberating, but it’s risky. Horizontal communications—my shorthand for people in Florida, Wyoming, Paris and Moscow using all these advanced capabilities for a few bucks per month—easily becomes the blind leading the blind. Do they actually know what they are talking about on any given topic?”
“Some will and some won’t, I guess,” Simmons said. “Though I suppose the answer is no more often than it’s yes. I’m starting to get it. But I’m still not clear on what role, specifically, the compound plays in all this.”
Damond and Simmons had begun walking back toward the reception a few minutes earlier. The two now were within sight of the great lawn and saw that it was winding down. They stopped for the last time. Damond looked at Simmons.
“That’s still a work in progress,” Damond said. “We will become a huge technology and content provider. That I know. J&T will invest in that. The compound will play a role. Both a real one and a symbolic one.”
Simmons now firmly believed Damond was a visionary and what they had been discussing would in some way determine the mission of the facility. Building it before figuring this out was unorthodox. But genius is not linear.
“I want to leave something substantial behind. I want to help people. I want to be remembered like Henry Ford. He still, to this day, dominates how we live, the way we work and play. He shaped our world. Somehow, these sandy streets we’re walking on right now will play a similar role in the future.”
Damond’s final pause was not out of arrogance, grandiosity or to examine something that caught his eye. It was for dramatic effect. “Molding the future in the same way is one of the two goals of this community. The other is making a shitload of money.”
Click to Order “Surviving New America: Hope Thomas and Her Enemies”