Silicon Valley rushed up under the plane like a startling green apparition. Even thousands of feet up, the aura of money hung over the Valley.
I was curious to see the mythical Valley, but mostly I couldn't wait to get to Hyatt Rickeys , the next stop on my book tour and the stuff of digital legend.
Few people online have ever heard of it, but Hyatt Rickeys on El Camino Real is the closest thing to hallowed ground there is in the digital nation.
It was in the bar at Rickeys that the wizards, entrepreneurs, maniacs, geniuses, and thieves who founded the computer culture came night after night and drank themselves and us into the digital age.
I'd heard stories about Rickeys for months, primarily from Jeff Goodell, a friend who was born a few miles from Rickeys - in a place called Sunnyvale, honest - and is writing a book about Silicon Valley. It was in the bar there that the deranged scientist and Nobel Laureate William Shockley and his fellow engineers and nerds hung out and helped set in motion the computer era. Shockley, says Goodell, was the primal, ultimate nerd. He was brilliant enough to change the world before he slipped away into the dark side of the Force.
Shockley was the co-inventor of the transistor. He lured all sorts of geniuses to Palo Alto, including Robert Noyce, founder of the giant chipmaker Intel, who hung out at Rickeys too. The rest, they like to say, is history.
Sun Microsystems is around the corner from Rickeys. Stanford is just a couple of miles up the road, and the streets, cars, shops, and people for miles around fairly reek with health, money, and prosperity.
"Are there poor people around here?" I asked one of my hosts. "Sure," she said. "But not right around here."
I'd been invited to come there by the Churchill Club, an organization of Silicon Valley business people.
Publishers have traditionally passed over the San Jose area while scheduling book tours. The idea of the Valley back east is fuzzy. When it's thought of at all, it's seen mostly as a small, sprawling place with some high-tech companies and a small town called San Jose. In New York, California names like San Jose suggest the small mission towns that Steinbeck wrote about, quaint and picturesque. Publishers send writers to Dayton, Ohio, all the time, but almost never to Silicon Valley.
Despite the precedent, my publisher decided to accept the Churchill Club's invitation and send me there. (I thought it was deliciously ironic that a Silicon Valley business organization would name itself after Winston Churchill, who almost surely would have driven his walking stick right through any screen he could reach.)
The men and woman I asked about the hotel history had only a vague idea who Shockley was, or none at all. None knew that the hotel itself was a historic landmark of the digital culture.
Shockley is not known as the godfather of the Internet, although, in many ways, that's exactly what he is. He is not a father whose children are eager to embrace his memory or claim his lineage. A brilliant scientist, he ended his career known more for his loopy and racist theories on race and genetics than for the cultural tidal wave he had helped set in motion.
But for me to be speaking at Rickeys at all was charged, almost eerie. You don't often get to talk in places where people launched whole cultures.
More than 100 Silicon Valley business people came to talk about media and morality.
In Silicon Valley, I encountered my first libertarian capitalists (the people who run Wired, by contrast, are capitalist anarchists). The men and women sitting in front of me were an exotic mix of business people, entrepreneurs, academics, scientists, and venture capitalists - free speech advocates all. There was little mediaphobia here.
Many appeared astonished to hear that folks in Washington hated them and everything they were doing and making. They seemed a bright, curious but self-contained culture, preoccupied with the business of making stuff and not especially plugged in to the intense responses - rage, hysteria, mediaphobia, fear - the stuff itself is generating all over the country. Although the machinery they make connects individual people all over the world with one another, the Valley itself seemed a place removed, insular, and preoccupied.
Although they talked a lot about freedom and censorship, the declarations had a hollow, reflexive and capitalistic ring. It was impossible to miss the rows of Mercedes, Range Rovers, and sports cars that filled the parking lot outside. These were not the legions of online hackers fighting for information to be free. These people had many millions of reasons for not wanting government or anyone else to control the Net or the Web.
The computer industry has the worst image and public-relations instincts of any industry in America, with the possible and close exception of drug cartels, and deservedly so, I said. It refuses to see itself as a political community rather than a prosperous industry, so how could Washington possibly see it as a political force to be reckoned with?
From the insane way computers are sold to the hostile climate of the Internet's public spaces, Silicon Valley seems to be working day and night to frighten and alienate the people who aren't on it or don't understand it, much in the same way mainstream journalism works relentlessly to alienate and offend the young.
The audience smiled pleasantly, and some nodded from time to time. Some dozed.
After my talk, the first person to come up to me was a man in a brown suit who introduced himself as a venture capitalist and said he represented people who wanted to invest a lot of money in the "right thing." He whipped out a pen and notebook and demanded to know what I thought that might be. Me, I thought. Invest in me. Write a check right now so I can fix up that basement that Slate has been complaining about.
Why would he think I knew what to invest in, I wondered? I have tried to save several newspapers, a magazine, and a TV broadcast, and failed each time. Nobody, I said, only half joking, knows more about what doesn't work in media than I do. What does is trickier.
But that isn't a marketable skill, aside from media criticism. "You're asking the wrong person, believe me," I told him. "I'm just a writer." He nodded, but pressed on.
A small crowd gathered around him, waiting for my reply. Some of them took out pens and paper.
"Just try," he said. "Really. I want to hear."
He was stubborn. "If it were me," I said lamely, "and I were a business person, I would probably open up a chain of computer centers where people could buy computers in a rational and friendly way, and talk about them, sort though carefully explained options and have somebody come to the house and set them up - the computer, ISP, Web browser, email, Web site. Everything. Every single thing. And then be available to help out until they got set, no matter how long it took. The antithesis, I said, of those nightmare discount warehouses."
This fantasy didn't sound very impressive or original to me, but then, I've never made any money at anything. It was time for him to chuckle and walk away.
"Great," he said, "great." He scribbled furiously. "Has it been done?"
"Not that I know of," I said. He took more notes, then started to rush off. "Hey," I said, alarmed. "Don't spend any money on my recommendation." Nobody who knows me would ever do that. He left. So did several of the men behind him.
When I got back to my hotel in San Francisco, there were messages from members of the Churchill Club, most thanking me for coming, offering comments, agreements, and disagreements.
And to my amazement, there were several job offers. I hadn't had a job offer in years, and had certainly never gotten one as the result of a book signing.
But appropriately enough, Rickeys was different. And this was, after all, Silicon Valley. I wasn't really a writer, but a potential source of market development.
One offer was for a part-time consultancy. "We are a new start-up that wants to reach a young audience. Name your price. You can consult privately. Nobody need know."
"I've checked out your writing," wrote a man named Jim. "You were one of the first people to write about new media, weren't you? I'll pay you to spot the next thing and tell my company about it. To be our guru. You can do it part time, a sort of consultancy. We've got five or six people aboard from the creative sphere. You can come from wherever you live, you can visit here a few times a year, you can move here if you want. Money isn't a problem."
"Maybe not for you, pal," I muttered out loud, reading the email. But I liked the guru idea. I could get behind that. I'm always telling my daughter she should listen to me. Maybe if I were a guru she would, instead of yawning, making faces, or rolling her eyes. Maybe I could hole up in a big office and send smart email around, like Bill Gates.
And I could stay at Rickeys and commune with the brilliant, tormented, and forgotten ghost of William Shockley. One more message suggested that I come back and "explore possibilities." Maybe kick around a possible vice-presidency in the "idea and content area." Vice-president Katz. This too, gave me some pause. I could escape the tyranny of my editors at HotWired! And not have to ever again read anything about the end of the postindustrial era.
But the truth was I was anxious to get back to brooding in my basement in New Jersey. And I still had at least two more weeks of book touring to go. I didn't really have time to lead the computer industry.
