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The programmers and the ABCDEFG problem
A start-up company's online game project falls victim to a key coder's vacation schedule.
By Po Bronson
[06/25/99]

Space noise
Astronomers listening for distant stars and extraterrestrials are getting an earful of satellite buzz. What happened to heavenly quiet time?
By Frank Houston
[06/24/99]

Column
Who owns the New York Times bestseller list?
On the Net, fighting to hang on to every last chunk of intellectual property is a recipe for stagnation and failure.
By Scott Rosenberg
[06/23/99]

Silicon Follies
Silicon Follies
Chapter 29: Marketing mutiny and the magic love burrito
By Thomas Scoville
[06/23/99]

Antiques Netshow
Snooty Sotheby's dives into an online auction world shaped by scrappy eBay. How will its objets d'art fare amid the Furbys?
By Janelle Brown
[06/22/99]

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For writers, that very "no there, there" quality so intrinsic to the valley beckons with irresistible allure. The challenge for wordsmiths is clear: How do you capture the exotic appeal of a region where nearly everyone works in identically nondescript low-slung office buildings and speaks in identically vapid streams of freshly minted marketing jargon?

The easy answer is to simply count the change and dwell on the dollars -- money exudes an easy-to-grab exotica all its own. A very strong case can be made that the companies located in Silicon Valley -- the Suns and SGIs, Ciscos and 3Coms, Netscapes and Yahoos -- are a chain of locomotives pulling the entire U.S. economy forward. The phenomenal wealth bestowed upon the engineers of those locomotives is a natural draw, for better or worse. Journalists who cover the valley can be counted on to wax rapturous over the multimillion-dollar public offerings for Silicon Valley start-ups even as they sneer at conspicuous consumption in the town of Woodside, home to many of the valley's most prominent millionaires.

Also Today The programmers and the ABCDEFG problem A start-up company's online game project falls victim to a key coder's vacation schedule. The Nudist on the Late Shift The Silicon Boys

The much harder task is to avert one's eyes from the piles of moolah and strive to make sense of What It All Means. Is there real culture to be found in the land of stock options and microchips? How did this all happen, and where is it headed? For at least two decades now, writers have been tackling these questions with varying degrees of success. But today, now that the Net has pushed techno-culture squarely into the mainstream of society, the meaningfulness (or lack thereof) of Silicon Valley is more relevant than ever before. So it's not all that surprising that journalists, novelists and academics have been swarming the office parks of Mountain View and Santa Clara -- every bit as insatiable in their eagerness to pin down the essence of the valley, as venture capitalists are to see a 30 or 40 percent return on their investments.

What is surprising, or at least intriguing, is how different the various takes on the valley can be. Two new books, Po Bronson's "The Nudist on the Late Shift" and David A. Kaplan's "The Silicon Boys," offer up explorations of Silicon Valley that contrast so sharply with each other that at times one wonders whether the authors were even looking at the same continent. Bronson, a novelist and magazine writer (who has written for Salon in the past), delivers an impressionist work of art, a collection of snapshots of people in a particular place at a particular time, a series of set pieces loaded with nuance but devoid of historical context. Kaplan, a senior writer at Newsweek, takes the opposite tack. Kaplan lavishes context all over his subject -- to the almost absurd, yet delightful, point of delving as far back as the geological formation of the land mass that equates to the "valley." Both books are valuable contributions that bring us closer to an understanding of Silicon Valley. But neither one takes us all the way there.

Next page | Silicon Valley: "Smoothly working chaos" or "a citadel of greed?" Or both?