__ Is Silicon Valley ready for its close-up? Agents, producers, and publishers think so - and the writers are already hard at work. __
Denise Caruso is ambivalent. The technology columnist for The New York Times has been covering Silicon Valley since before the Macintosh Revolution. She's been there for the PC boom, the software boom, the networking boom, and the Internet boom. But this year was the first time she had to witness a culture boom. New York publishers and Hollywood execs have decided that the Valley is hot and are showering money on writers and directors who have taken it on themselves to explain their obsession to America. And Caruso feels, well, ambivalent about this new gold rush.
"I realized I was cranky because these guys wanted to do these books about the glorious Valley and I didn't," she says. "But now I think it's great. If someone's got the drive to get a hotshot NY agent and a million-dollar advance for a book about the Valley, well, that's as close as any of us are going to come to the kind of money that's made here every day. More power to them. I just hope they step up to the plate. And I guess I wish someone wanted to pay me US$1.2 million to write a book about the great failures of the Valley, but who wants to read that?"
Certainly, a newly starstruck American public doesn't. Although the Valley's most clichéd attribute is its tolerance for failure, the new-model Silicon Valley celebrity is all about success. Bill Gates is, well, a movie star for all intents and purposes, the kind of person whose face sells magazines. Andy Grove of Intel has become an éminence grise of American industry and Time's Man of the Year. And Steve Jobs's return to power at Apple has brought him back into the guru-huckster limelight. Then there are the various Internet wunderkinder and subluminary-tier Valley names, who may not be recognizable to readers of People but who have become heroes to the business class: Scott McNealy, John Doerr, Jim Clark, Jim Barksdale. Calling them celebrities would be pushing the word too far. But few outside of Hollywood have more name recognition and brand cachet.
Now the culture industry has become convinced that Silicon Valley (and siblings like Redmond) is the Wall Street of the '90s, and that you can make piles of money not only by building a better microchip - or a better portal site, whatever that means - but also by explaining the building of a better microchip to the rest of America.
In the last year and a half, we've seen a spate of books about the Valley. Most of these have been thoroughly forgettable as literary works, but a couple have appeared on best-seller lists, and many have been reviewed respectfully in the mainstream press. Among them: Mike Wilson's The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison; Tim Jackson's Inside Intel; Julie Bick's All I Really Need to Know in Business I Learned at Microsoft; Kara Swisher's aol.com; Michael Wolff's Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet (excerpted in Wired 6.06); Joshua Quittner and Michelle Slatalla's book about Netscape, Speeding the Net; Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, by Jennifer Edstrom (daughter of Microsoft's principal PR agent) and Marlin Eller; former Apple CEO Gil Amelio's self-exculpatory memoir, On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple; and Po Bronson's novel The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest (excerpted in Wired 5.03).
All these books, though, were in some sense just a warm-up for the second wave of the Valley's new culture boom, a wave that represents the first serious attempt to legitimize Silicon Valley as an object both of popular fascination and serious history. Best-selling author Michael Lewis and former Wired contributor and New Yorker writer John Heilemann both received reported seven-figure advances to do Valley books, while Newsweek's David Kaplan and GQ's Alan Deutschman have also come West to work on Valley-centered opuses. Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau are collaborating on a satirical soap opera, tentatively titled Killer App and based on a treatment by Fortune editor at large and Valley veteran Brent Schlender, about the start-up culture spawned by the Internet (see "The Wired 25," page 133).
Michael Tolkin, author of The Player, is directing 20 Billion, about a computer tycoon (with the initials BG, by any chance?) for Paramount, while 20th Century Fox has optioned Bronson's Valley novel, slated for writer-director Harold Ramis - of Groundhog Day and Ghostbusters fame - and Swingers scribe Jon Favreau. (Needless to say, if studio execs think people will fill the theaters to watch a satire of Valley style, they must think people understand that style enough to get the joke.) There's a film in the works based on New York Times technology writer John Markoff's book on cybercriminal Kevin Mitnick, and ER star Noah Wyle will reportedly play Steve Jobs in a made-for-TNT movie tentatively titled Pirates of Silicon Valley, while the tireless Michael Lewis, in addition to his book, is writing a screenplay, set in the Valley, that he sold on the basis of a single meeting. If an animated version of the history of the integrated circuit is in production somewhere, it wouldn't come as a bit of a surprise.
The bandwagon-jumping is hardly shocking. In the late 1980s, in the wake of the success of Oliver Stone's Wall Street and Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, publishing houses churned out books about every facet of the Street - a process that gave us a few tremendous books, including Lewis's Liar's Poker, Bryan Burroughs's Barbarians at the Gate, and James Stewart's Den of Thieves, and many mediocre ones. Hollywood, meanwhile, made several ill-advised forays, including Brian DePalma's mangling of Wolfe's book and the deadly Other People's Money. If your entire business depends on being in touch with popular taste, you don't want to be too far ahead of the curve. Acquiring a Wall Street manuscript in the late 1980s or a Silicon Valley manuscript today is like buying IBM used to be - no one ever got fired for it.
On the other hand, people did get fired for shelling out too much money for books about the O. J. trial, and the size of the advances and development deals for the new crop of Valley chronicles represents a really large wager on the belief that Americans will still be hungry for these works when they finally appear, sometime near the turn of the millennium. Considering that these are the people (well, not the actual people, but you know what I mean) who thought Newt Gingrich's meditations on the need to renew America were worth $4.5 million, it's tempting to interpret their discovery of the Valley as the best sign of a market top as we're ever going to get.
The Silicon Valley celebrity was a species that took its time evolving. Until very recently, in fact, it could be summed up in two words: Steve Jobs. Undoubtedly there were CEOs and CTOs during the PC boom of the early 1980s who thought they, too, could qualify as visionaries if someone would just pay attention, but Jobs was really it. He was the man on the cover of Time magazine. (Legend has it, in fact, that Jobs was supposed to be Time's 1982 Man of the Year, but the reporter disliked him so much that the magazine ended up giving the PC the nod instead.) Jobs was the one whose every pronouncement on the future of technology earned the rapt attention of the mainstream press. And though he wasn't ever really much of an engineer, he defined the very model of the engineer-entrepreneur star.
The attention lavished on Jobs was, of course, the result of the desktop revolution, which, along with the explosion of interest in videogames, brought the media to Silicon Valley for the first time. The microchip boom of the 1970s had passed without notice (even from the business press). But the PC's Man of the Year honor came in 1982, and a year later, Tom Wolfe - as good a zeitgeist-watcher as there is - came to the Valley to do a dazzling profile of Intel cofounder Bob Noyce for Esquire, which had named Noyce one of the 50 most influential people of the last half century. (Had Noyce - who said of himself as a kid, "I was drifting from flower to flower, trying to understand how the universe worked" - not died in 1990, he might have become a celebrity to rival Jobs.)
A wave of books followed, including Steven Levy's Hackers; T. R. Reid's The Chip, a history of the creation of the integrated circuit that also lionized Noyce; Michael Malone's The Big Score, a kaleidoscopic seminarrative; and Thomas Mahon's Charged Bodies, a kind of oral history of the Valley. There was also, unsurprisingly, a series of books about Apple.
But if these works managed to articulate the Valley's geek-in-the-garage self-image, none broke out to the mainstream. Despite the boom in hardware and software, the cultural focus of the 1980s was on the dealmakers of Wall Street. Manhattan, not Palo Alto, was the center of the world. Even as the Valley's products became more and more part of the fabric of everyday life, their cultural weight remained relatively insignificant. Audiences demand drama, and although it probably felt pretty dramatic if you were an American DRAM company watching your business get swallowed by the Japanese in the mid-1980s, it wasn't the kind of drama that gets you on a best-seller list. More to the point, entertainment requires characters. And - Jobs aside - characters in the Valley seemed to be in short supply.
The newly announced books promise to change all that, both in their scope and in their assumption that Silicon Valley is as important to American culture as New York or Los Angeles. GQ's Deutschman is writing a history of the computer chip that owes a lot to breakout books in the history of science such as Longitude and the books about Fermat's last theorem. Heilemann, who is simultaneously earnest, serious, and skittish, is the would-be David Halberstam of the group. He describes his book as "a narrative history centering on a handful of big characters, their relationship with each other, and the way they built the Valley," and if it works it could be definitive about the Valley in the way that The Best and the Brightest is definitive about Vietnam.
Lewis, who seems more interested in the cultural fabric of the Valley, is weaving together three different but interconnected start-up stories - including one featuring Netscape founder and general titan Jim Clark - into a book that should answer the question, "How is capitalism different when the engineers rule the world?" (Think Soul of a New Machine, but funnier.) Kaplan, meanwhile, has been reputed to be writing a Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous of the Valley. When we talked, though, Kaplan - who sounded like Alvy Singer talking about Los Angeles - described his book as both more historical and more interested in oddballs than Robin Leach would be (which is lucky, because they're about as common as plastic surgeons in Hollywood).
The important point is this: All of these books - and the movies - are predicated on the idea that people understand that the Valley matters, even if they don't exactly know why. They're symptoms of interest, not originators of it.
The culture industry obviously decided to bear-hug the Valley in some sense because of the Internet and in some sense because the Valley has witnessed the greatest creation of wealth in the history of the universe (or whatever). But just when the Valley crossed over from cool-but-esoteric topic to "guaranteed" source of best-sellers is hard to discern - at least from talking to publishing people, none of whom were ready to say what I wanted them to say, which was something like, "The Netscape IPO altered the world" or "When Bill Gates became worth more than $40 billion, that's when I knew it was time."
"The digital world is close to a national obsession," says Heilemann's editor and HarperBusiness publisher Adrian Zackheim. "I think this was kind of a no-brainer," says Henry Ferris, executive editor of William Morrow & Co., which is publishing Kaplan's book. But spending a million dollars on a book is, of course, more complicated than just deciding the topic is a good idea, and so all of the editors and publishers made it clear they're investing as much in the writer as in the subject matter.
Starling Lawrence, editor in chief of Norton, which is doing Lewis's book, says succinctly, "The book is worth it because Michael Lewis is worth it. I don't know whether I'd buy a book on Silicon Valley that wasn't connected to him. And I know I wouldn't have bought this book." (Knopf, which published Lewis's last book, made the same calculation and bid less than Norton - which makes the gambling aspect of the whole zeitgeist-watching endeavor clear. The Random House Trade Publishing Group, meanwhile, allegedly bid less than HarperCollins for Heilemann's book; the fact that no Random House Inc. imprint is publishing a big Valley book, in fact, is one of the weirdest parts of this whole story.)
And how does Lewis see it? "I thought that if I could pull it off, there was a chance that it could be a very big book," he says of his early calculations. "But who knows if it'll work? I think the commercial instincts of the publishers and the movie people are basically right. But I also think that they probably are overpaying."
The arrival of East Coast writers changes the Valley, or at least is one sign that times have changed. In part, it transforms the businesspeople by signaling that something like real fame may be around the corner and by making them think about questions they haven't ever thought about before. And by this I mean questions as banal (or profound) as, "Why do I spend all day writing code?" or "Where did I get my idea of what a company should look like?" or "Why do we all drive BMWs?"
In some cases, the result of those changes has been mostly amusing. When Clark, who has filed to take his new company, Healtheon, public this fall (see "Doctor Stock," Wired 6.10, page 122), brought Lewis into a meeting with reps from Morgan Stanley, one of the firms underwriting the IPO, he didn't anticipate the near panic-stricken reaction from the bankers, some of whom had actually been at Salomon Brothers with Lewis and had vivid memories of Liar's Poker. "Jim said, 'Just come along,'" Lewis recalls. "'You're with me - you're my friend. No one will care. No one will recognize you.' And I thought, 'Well, I'm not sure, but let's give it a shot.' And it was interesting, because when it turned out that they were totally freaked, Jim couldn't really imagine that people were living like this - that there was this much fear."
The story seems like a perfect parable of the difference between Wall Street's culture of secrecy and the Valley's still wide-eyed idea of itself, but then there's David Kaplan, who was barred from a charity auction at the Woodside School because of concerns about "possible press coverage," which was a polite way of saying that school officials thought Kaplan would make the donors look bad in his book. Warned that he would be forcibly removed if he showed up at the auction, Kaplan went anyway and was confronted by a security guard, who had a description of the writer in hand. "Hey, you look a lot like this guy," the guard said. "Let me know if you see him, OK?"
Still, and perhaps not too surprisingly, the news of million-dollar books and multimillion-dollar motion pictures has seemed to matter less to the subjects than to the journalists who aren't writing them. In a recent issue of Upside, Michael Malone, longtime Valley regular and author of an early history of the region, drew attention to the descent of "literary carpetbaggers" upon the Valley. Proprietary interest, cynicism about the ephemerality of the current boom, and doubts that any "outsider" could really understand what makes the Valley tick are all at work here - notwithstanding the fact that there's something odd about the idea that people can be outsiders in a culture as supposedly enamored of reinvention as the Valley and California are. "The reaction to these advances Heilemann and Lewis supposedly got is a mix of jealousy, bewilderment, amazement, and befuddlement," says Deutschman, who covered the Valley for Fortune before going east for a few years.
The real note struck by longtime Valley journalists may be that rarest of emotions: true ambivalence. Denise Caruso has it. So does John Markoff, who says of Lewis/Heilemann/Kaplan, "I wouldn't be in the shoes of these guys. They're really having to start from first principles, and I guess I would rather write stories about events, which unfortunately only come along in this place every half decade or so. As for the money, who really cares?" (Markoff, it should be noted, has presumably made a good bit himself from book publishing.) Fortune's Schlender says, "It's great that these guys are getting this kind of money. I just hope they don't think they've found El Dorado or that they've figured this place out in a few months."
Which raises the interesting question of what it would mean to figure Silicon Valley out, to truly understand what makes it different. It's not the wealth, which exists almost everywhere. Even if the rich are different from you and me, they're not really that different from each other. And it's not really geography, either. One of the most amazing things about the Valley, after all, is that there's nothing distinctive about it visually. It looks just like America, only more so. It's certainly true that the concentration of all this brainpower in one place has fostered a unique culture, and the proximity of Stanford has been important - as has, in a more prosaic way, the existence of a workforce more comfortable working for small companies than for IBM. But the Valley is more a state of mind than a physical location (which is why Amazon.com and Dell and Microsoft are part of this story). And what physical location does exist is the definition of nondescript: glass tower, parking lot, exit ramp, highway.
So wealth is just a sidelight, and place merely a (not very interesting) stage setting for the main show. Now the real problem: The main show is technology, and technology is notoriously difficult to explain, let alone dramatize. None of the new crop of writers has any kind of background in technology; the chance that these books will contain long riffs on the intricacies of Jini is pretty slim. "If you're going to dramatize the undramatic, you have to find metaphors," Lewis says. "You let other kinds of action stand in for the action you're actually trying to describe, which actually, in the case of coding or whatever, is a kind of absence of action. This is a huge dramatic problem, maybe not as much as it would have been in the days when everyone was making chips, but still ... I've found a metaphor I'm happy with. But we'll have to see if it works." (I don't know what the metaphor is, by the way, just that Lewis is happy with it.)
If the central problem for these writers is writing in plain English about technology, their most difficult task may be bringing to life people who are, as Markoff says, "basically boring engineers." For the people who make the Valley run, life is an exercise in postmodern representation. It's not just that the stories about start-ups and computer geeks are cliché-ridden, but that the lives themselves are cliché-ridden. If you're starting a company, you pull all-nighters and strew pizza boxes around your office not just because you have to, but because you know that's what start-ups are supposed to look like. In that sense, it's hard to separate what the Valley has become from what the media wants it to be.
And anyway, isn't there something deeply ironic about the "celebrification" of the Valley? To be a celebrity you have to think about yourself as a character in the drama of your life. You have to imagine yourself in a way that makes everybody else want to understand that imagination. Steve Jobs always thought of himself and imagined himself in this way, which is part of why he became and has remained a star. And Gates and Andy Grove now seem to be doing the same. But as Lewis points out, unlike politics, where it's de rigueur to think of yourself as a character - you don't actually become a politician if you can't - the Valley is full of people who lead incredibly undramatic lives (think of what a programmer actually does, or even what a CEO of a chip company does) that they are nonetheless perfectly thrilled about.
There's nothing wrong with this, of course. But it does make writing about these people difficult, and it also makes the incursions of celebrity into the Valley necessarily limited. And while this is probably a good thing for the American economy - it's better for our software makers to be worrying about making software than about their next appearance on E! - it makes the culture industry's gamble on Silicon Valley genuinely risky.
A year from now, we'll know whether a story that doesn't write itself is a story that America is interested in reading.
For now, we can only wait and wonder. And ponder a comment of Lewis's, offered up with a smile: "There will be no pizza boxes in my book."
