New New Thing?: Good Book For A Good Life?

Is Jim Clark’s life a good human life? The presumption is not mine, but rather Michael Lewis’ who details many aspects of the life in question in his well-received book, The New New Thing, A Story of Silicon Valley.ⁱ In this bildungsroman, Mr. Lewis attempts to give us a great and panoramic view of Silicon Valley, the current engine of world change and Jim Clark is Lewis’ lens for the story of the Valley.ⁱⁱ

O caution, a much-feted writer thinks he comes to us with a philosophy! Lewis wishes to write well by holding back: He doesn’t want to lay it all out for the reader, but to tell the story so well that a "hole" remains for the reader to fill herself. Thereby, he usurps his place: The novel is a deep answer to a question left unasked, it is for the Philosopher to ask the clear question left unanswered. And what a question Lewis presses! A good life or no? That folks, is surely the territory of not just the Philosopher, but the Philosopher par excellence nonpareil, the Philosopher of Morality. Lewis will ask the Philosopher’s question and with simultaneous disingenuousness let the "hole" shield him from the charge of Philosophy (remember, they killed Socrates for that) by an answer the reader is to give, not dare he.

Not so easy, Mr. Lewis. You do answer the question you claim you left null. The author selects and in selection raises into prominence the subject of which he writes. Lewis searched to make the selection: No less than John Doerr recommends Clark as the man to follow. Finding the lens, Lewis "moved into Jim Clark’s life", watched and built the story, asked the "impolite" question. New new, we have the record of a man’s greatness, good quality after good, marvelous achievement, sealed finally with the touch of an adverse past bringing a quiet tear for the freighted soul in the center of technology’s upheaval.

Can I lambaste Mr. Lewis while every reviewer gives accolades for the best best thing yet on the new new Valley? For a marvelous prose-master whose every sentence floats on the scanning eye? For the descriptive power of a man suddenly rich metamorphosing into an earthquake - the shock of currency! Oh, I’ll go ahead and be brash.

Mr. Lewis’ panopticon of Silicon Valley is indeed skewed. We do not yet have the real, real thing. The case for my discord? The Truth is not yet the truth without the whole truth. Mr. Lewis studiously avoids the whole story.

First, he skips half of the human race in the story’s telling. We had the warning sign in his earlier article, The Little Creepy Crawlers That Will Eat You In The Night.ⁱⁱⁱ In his telling, this is a world made and fashioned by men. Men with a capital "M". The article may have as well posted a sign, "No women need apply. Women, don’t pass Go. Gender not matching?: Go to Jail."

Do I exaggerate? Lewis is indebted to the secretary who boxed Clark’s personal papers. Lewis searches the mawing past directly from Clark’s mother. Clark’s wife, we learn, has a profession. The cook in the yacht keeps the gang fed. Yet, I fear I do not exaggerate. No woman in Lewis’ telling of Silicon Valley is at the center. None is the fulcrum of change, none the burning intellect and impossible striving in re-making of the world as it is really being re-made this moment. Does the author record the awful truth or had he just held the lens in a shaky hand? Bacon would remind us of the peril of observation and preconception. Not moving in on a person’s life, not even dedicating your bestseller to one of the unspoken gender can rectify the panopticon’s shaded vision.

It is not my style to raise the matter of gender and center analyses around the topic - it can be a confinement to breath a stridency too fiercely. But one must set the record straight. Women -- glorious, smart, wonderful, brilliant women have been all along at the center of our marvelous information-revolution. Take that first contested computer programmer Ada Lovelace.^iv Or, take the first woman to earn the doctorate in electrical engineering from San Jose State. One half hour alongside her dignified presence would show Lewis that a voice at the heart of the rawest science is missed in his new new thing. Or take my aunt.

There’s a woman who arrived when the place was lovely, who lives every aspect of her life in cohesion with the Valley’s lingering loveliness. Yet as a lovely woman, she still manages every workday in partnership with the Nobel prize winner of her laboratory. You may say my aunt is no celebrity (that’s part of her very loveliness) and John Doerr doesn’t know of her. But she has spent forty years around the corner of his offices and in the heart of the research enterprise: Living in the Growth of Knowledge is the revolution of the age and my aunt arrived then at the revolution far earlier than today’s VCs and the young men in Lewis’ lens.

Let me take my claim further, for there is no time for gender quarrel in the stratified social arena of the Sundeck café. One does not first see gender: In my lens, class is far more etched on the surface ritual. Waitresses, secretaries, young new women associates, wives - the class division is as distinct as any to be witnessed in America.

Should we grant that Lewis takes the class hierarchy to be wrought asunder in the dynamo of revolution? He does explain that Indian boys made Healtheon, the CTO having old haunts in New Delhi. But is it unease Lewis feels with curry (smelly) though his sentences are carefully honed (i.e., engineered) not to give offense?

Here’s the point better put. Lewis professes to deliver a definitive take on the very "ground zero"^v of the immense societal force which Silicon Valley is to the world now and for the future. We are on the very first tip of a revolution beyond what any can imagine. Whatever we imagine, the future will outstrip us. None of us, not the man with the tallest mast, know how profound the impact of this century’s science and technology for the next to unfold.

Once granted, it is then wise to take a sliver of humility on it all. It is a common wisdom that each person’s life has a novel in it. Jim Clark’s life as given to me by Michael Lewis is an extraordinary, wonderful, and good life that makes me happy. I hope he has five more new new things and wouldn’t it be great fun to find two or three with him. But the acme of achievement is not the needed tool of the great novelist. Else, we would have no Oliver Twist to writhe wondering over his extra porridge. Perhaps Lewis’ infatuation with Clark, in part a non-technical man’s awe of technology, explains his master-prose writer’s writing in The New New Thing.

Lewis is perhaps too taken in recounting a set of amusing anecdotes to remember what a writer gives. The language and picture of a great novel (even in the masters of true life genres) offer a style all their own and new new themselves. But Lewis does not accomplish the singular voice of the writer with this awaited work. His language is precise, clear, smooth and written so close to the ideal of business prose that it cannot be offset by his collected sublime sentences of which there are fine cases. It is all a matter of something written to emulate the style of the Valley itself I suppose: A washed out culture where the main drag is lined with tacky motels and plastic people over-awing all others correspondingly overawed. Several tenured professors have had to flee the place for its astounding lack of the life of the mind and more than one graduate student has become inured to it more so for its country clubs than its vigor of inquiry.

Unfortunately, Lewis does not convey the gloried good life of the Valley. Yes the place is filled with solid Midwestern values, but life in the Midwest includes modes of gracious, or at least jovial, relaxation and ceremony. Lewis fails to capture the exceeding beauty and fine leisure of the Valley - he misses the dimension that makes life here worth leaving a place where folks have real roots like New Delhi or Springfield, Illinois. So Jim Clark spends a handful of tens of millions on his boat and more so awaits big skyscrapers on Sand Hill Road. What Lewis doesn’t achieve is the explaining the profanity of wrecking the extraordinary vista from Sand Hill. We don’t smell the biting eucalyptus, or taste the white California morning before the sun burns it off in its promise of startling blue clarity. We do not really understand by Lewis’ hand that the hills look like molten gold in the summer, the gardens unlimited, the food exquisite. The materiality of the place is all of the sad office buildings in a place where architecture rates low, as though it were an afterthought in light of a bounty of Nature.

I’ve complained over a book I readily enjoyed. I have not yet even gotten to the matter of whether myCFO and the collection of Clark’s projects are new new. Something, the real, real story, the True True thing, is left unsaid yet about Silicon Valley. Perhaps the person to write it is the one so bold to explain why Jim Clark’s life is actually a good good thing.

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i) Lewis, Michael The New New Thing: A Story of Silicon Valley W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 2000.

ii) Summarizing here Lewis’ explicit comments on his project and its purposes as discussed in his appearance with Rich Karlsgaard, the publisher of Forbes for The Churchill Club, October 20, 1999.

iii) Lewis, Michael, "The Little Creepy Crawlers That Will Eat You In The Night" The New York Times Magazine March 1, 1998, p.40 and following.

iv) Toole, Betty Alexandra Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers, Prophet of the Computer Age Strawberry Press, Mill Valley, California, 1998.

v) Lewis has said imprecisely that "ground zero" is Mountain View and also said it is Sand Hill Road and others have said it is Stanford. So, there is a matter for analysis - what and where is the true, true ground zero of Silicon Valley?

December, 1999