Dyson: What did you think back in 1969 when people were talking about the global village and there was this kind of -

Gingrich: The decisive break point for me is 1958. My dad’s stationed in Orleans, France, from 1957 to 1958. In the spring we go to Verdun, and I decide that civilization is important and leadership matters. And in the fall of 1958, I begin reading. The two major works that had a real impact on me were Arnold J. Toynbee’s The Study of History, which is important largely because he gives you this breathtaking sense of history. This is a guy who can write about six or seven civilizations in a paragraph. When we talk about the global village, it’s a good way to start reconceptualizing your sense of scale.

And Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, which has in it the initial sense of large-scale change and information systems, with the notion that, at some point, we’d figure out how to do this stuff. He could conceptually paint how it would work and what the Internet would look like, even if he didn’t have a clue what the technology was.

Gingrich and Esther Dyson, Wired, 1995

I keep rereading the above interview with Gingrich, and trying to figure out why it’s stuck in my memory. Is it because it was the moment that a teenage me realized that Wired Magazine represented the most insidious kind of libertarianism that seems to run rampant in the tech fields? Or is it because it was the moment that I realized that Newt was further out there than I’d ever imagined? Or was Newt crazy like a fox, and smart enough to drop the right references for the right audience?