The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

by Michael Lewis

  Clark drove far too fast—in the car pool lane—through the lower half of the Valley to the San Jose Jet Center. The Jet Center is the place where they keep the growing number of private planes in Silicon Valley. Waiting for us, beside Clark’s new McDonnell Douglas helicopter, was a very large San Jose police officer. Clark had hired a local cop to teach him how to operate his latest acquisition. The cop had flown helicopters in the Vietnam War. He had been in combat. He hadn’t crashed or been shot down. It was a start.

  The first half hour Clark spent sluggishly running down a safety checklist. He wore a pale blue open-necked shirt, khaki slacks, and a pair of tattered and soiled sneakers with a tag poking off them that read MEPHISTO. Even when he headed out to start a new company, he looked as if he were dressed for a day of bait fishing. The cop barked out a list of parts, and Clark located each of them and ensured it was in the right place.

  “Anti-torque pedals checked?”

  “Checked.”

  “Anti-torque pins in?”

  “In.”

  The exercise could not have been more tedious; Clark could not have enjoyed himself more thoroughly. It was his own peculiar cure for a hangover. At one point he looked up and said it was such a beautiful machine that he thought he might buy the company that made it. He was perfectly serious. He’d already looked into it. He’d talked it over with his friend Craig McCaw, who had made his fortune in cell phones and had now moved on to putting enough satellites into geosynchronous orbit that a person could log onto the Internet by satellite modem anywhere on the planet. Clark and McCaw were thinking of submitting a private bid for the helicopter company—as a kind of hobby.

  Anyway, as he bounced around his new machine, pushing and pulling levers and buttons and blades, Clark was completely absorbed. His headache waned; he entered into a silent spiritual discussion with the shiny metal objects. The cop, perhaps sensing he was being ignored, offered a bone-chilling lecture on the perils of helicopter flight. The history of helicopters, he argued, is a story of mechanical failure. Not long ago the two finest helicopter pilots on the local police department lost the main rotor blade in flight. The whole mechanism for remaining aloft just flew right off the top. “When we got to the crash site,” said the cop, “there was nothing. There was nothing left of the helicopter. Just dust.”

  Clark yanked out the new back seat he’d just installed, and complained it was the wrong color.

  Once all the parts were checked, Clark and the cop climbed into the front seats equipped with the controls. We rose with a disturbing jolt. The helicopter lifted and swiveled toward the south end of Silicon Valley. Beneath us lay the salt pools and the sewage dumps that used to upset local environmentalists—back before environmentalists were priced out of the local real estate market. From a height of three thousand feet the waste was the most beautiful thing in sight. The cop leaned out the window to stare, leaving Clark to fly his new machine. It was his sixth hour of flying a helicopter.

  From where I sat, immediately behind Clark, I could see little of his expression beyond the pale yellow of the back of his head. But I could hear the cop shouting to make himself heard; he was singing the praises of the new helicopter. “We’re at 140 knots,” he hollered. “And we’re not even breathing hard.” Clark just nodded. “They say these things aren’t capable of more than a forty-degree turn,” said the cop. “That’s just wrong.” In a flash he resumed his grip on the controls and proved his point. The helicopter tilted over. We actually flew on our side, heads parallel to the ground. “You see,” said the cop, “we’re not even breathing hard.” Then, without fully letting go, he loosened his hands on the controls and said, “She’s all yours.”

  Clark looked down at the control panel. The gauges gyrated wildly. Dozens of circles and needles and lights and switches. About two people on the planet could know what it all meant. But the world breaks down neatly into people who can look at a control panel and know instinctively what it all means, and those who can’t. And Clark was the king of control panels. “Don’t even look at the little bastards,” shouted the cop. “Just fly by the seat of your pants.”

  The machine tilted and rocked as Clark pushed the pedals and pulled the levers to lower it. He wanted to practice his takeoffs and landings; he wanted to know everything at once. He was not satisfied learning to fly a helicopter at the rate the cop wanted to teach him. Clark was teaching himself. The cop was a mere formality, the instructor required by law.

  There’s not much to say about a man who insists on learning all by himself how to fly, other than he has a tendency to terrify his passengers. Essentially, Clark taught himself by trial and error. He’d poke buttons and push levers, seemingly at random, to see what happened next. Each time he did this I flinched and waited for the inevitable tailspin. There was nothing left but dust. Oddly, the man who’d just a few minutes earlier spoken those words didn’t seem to mind. While Clark poked and pushed, he just nattered on about the perils of helicoptering. “You have to be careful where you land a helicopter in Silicon Valley,” the cop shouted over the racket. “A while back I had a guy take her down on a golf course. Landed on a driving range. Dumb bastards kept wacking golf balls at us. It was like Vietnam all over again.”

  Down below us a few people wandered in shorts and T-shirts doing the things people do on the fifth of July: mowing lawns, shooting hoops, washing cars. The overwhelming impression made by Silicon Valley at a distance of three thousand feet is one of newness. The houses are new, the grass is new, even the people are new. And not merely new: designed never to grow old. With the exception of Stanford University no structure on the horizon had been built to last any longer than it took some engineer to think up a good excuse to tear it down. Everything in Silicon Valley, including the people, was built so that no one would find it tragic, or even a little bit sad, when it was destroyed and replaced by something new. It was one great nostalgia-prevention device. It ensured that the greatest wealth-producing machine in world history was never gummed up by pointless emotions.

  The McDonnell Douglas helicopter is supposedly known for its silence to those on the outside of it. On the inside, however, it makes a fearsome racket. Whop! Whop! Whop! it goes. I could only just hear the cop as he hooted with glee, “They don’t even know we are up here! None of this whop whop whop crap.” Whop! Whop! Whop! went the helicopter as we fell from the sky. Weekenders glanced skyward in terror. Somehow in the suburban sprawl Clark had found a field of alfalfa, and decided it was time to practice his landings. It was illegal for him to do it, but the cop bowed to the inevitable and said, “By the time they reach us, we’ll be out of here.” Clark set her down, sending alfalfa sprouts blowing every which way.

  Clark still hadn’t spoken much. From the moment we climbed into the helicopter, he had been perfectly silent, and concentrated on teaching himself how to fly his new machine. Now, for the first time, he turned his head slightly, and I had a glimpse of his face. His mouth was already in full pucker. He shouted over the whop whop whop to the cop, “Were you controlling it?”

  Clark had one of those faces that virtually screamed what he was feeling. The pucker was its way of letting you know he was irritated. Irritation, for him, was not an ordinary low-level emotional event. Along with its brother, impatience, irritation was the sensation Clark felt most keenly. He was rarely irritated by machines, but he was often irritated by people, especially when they stood between him and what he was after. His face would redden, and his mouth would twist up into a mouth-of-the-volcano pucker as if it were trying to suppress the inevitable lava. The mood in the air once his mouth went into its full pucker was a bit like the feeling you might get when, climbing what you thought was a mountain, you looked up and saw smoke billowing from the top. When you spotted the pucker, you froze, turned, and scrambled back down to safety. You found another place to pass the afternoon.

  The cop didn’t know about the pucker. He shook his head pleasantly. He attempted to engage the volcano in conve
rsation. The fool. “That was all you, Jim,” he hollered with a big friendly smile.

  “I felt you controlling it,” shouted Jim, sharply.

  “No, no,” said the cop, taken aback, “it’s been all you.” It was hard to know if he was telling the truth. Probably not. The whole time Clark had been flying the helicopter, the cop had kept his hands on his own set of controls. From the back seat it was impossible to tell who was in charge. Apparently it wasn’t much easier from the front.

  “This really pisses me off,” said Clark.

  It was all I could do not to lean forward and scream, “Of course, he’s been flying it, you idiot! You’ve been pushing buttons just to see what would happen! What, you want us all to be a pile a dust?” Instead, I sat quietly, sweat popping out of all sorts of unlikely holes, waiting for the conflict to reach its inevitable conclusion. I’d seen this too many times already to hold out any hope for the cop.

  “I think you’ve been flying it,” hollered Clark, unhappily. “I felt it.” His ferocity astonished the cop. He shook his head again, this time not in disagreement but in shock. He was a small furry animal that realizes too late it has wandered into the jaws of doom. With a soundless sigh he removed his hands from the controls and let them lie limply at his side. The veteran of Vietnam helicopter warfare gave the machine over to the man with six hours of flight experience. “Let’s go,” he said.

  In moments Clark had the helicopter back up at three thousand feet. There he stopped. The human mind—or my mind anyway—has come to associate flight with motion: as long as you’re moving, you can be sure that you’re not dead. There was no denying the fact that we’d stopped moving. We hovered three thousand feet above the earth, perfectly motionless. After a minute or so of just sitting there, drops of sweat ran down the backs of my legs. Then Clark began to twirl the helicopter, around and around. We pirouetted in the sky, like an ice skater at the end of a routine. “Good Jim,” said the cop, a bit uneasily. “Always think of your hands and feet as an extension of your brain. Like a robot.”

  Immediately the robot pulled the helicopter out of its spin and raced forward to God knew where. Somewhere…anywhere…so long as it was…new. It was pure impulse. The cop resigned himself to letting him go wherever he wanted, since he was going there anyway. We crossed over a highway and into the golden Tuscan hills that rise along the east side of Silicon Valley. The cop sat with his hands in his lap and his eyes on these dimples on the horizon. He had nothing better to do than to enjoy the view—and that is what he did. Then he asked, “What’s that shiny thing down there?”

  Clark said he couldn’t see anything. Neither could I. The cop pointed, “Take her that direction.” Thirty seconds later we both saw what the cop had spotted, a glaring reflection coming out of a stand of oaks on the side of a nasty gully. “It looks like a plane,” said the cop.

  It was a plane. More perfectly preserved than any plane that had ever landed upside down in a tree. It jutted from the giant oak as if it had been placed there by a large, sensitive hand. “Take her down,” said the cop. “Take her down low.” Clark circled lower until we were maybe one hundred feet off the ground. The terrain offered no natural landing pad, and we were unable to come close enough to peer inside the plane’s windows. But when it was clear beyond doubt that the shiny metal object was indeed a plane the cop phoned the tower at the San Jose airport.

  “We have found an aircraft in an oak tree,” he said. His tone suggested that an aircraft in an oak tree was perfectly normal, part of the guided tour.

  Once that message had been digested, a new voice came over the radio. “You think they could be alive in there?” it asked.

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” said the cop. “It looks like it could be a survivable crash.” He leaned over to Clark, apologetically. “We’re kind of stuck here,” he said. “We’ve got to save those people down there—if they are still alive.”

  Clark just nodded. Then he said, “This makes no sense.”

  “Okay,” said the cop. “Let’s make ourselves safe. Jim, take it up. We’re going to orbit until they arrive.” Clark lifted the helicopter off the gulley, all the while complaining that the plane crash made no sense. There were open fields less than a mile away. “It’s bizarre,” he said. “Why would they have come here to ditch instead of an open area?” It was as if he was unhappy rescuing people until he found how they came to be in need of rescue. “Who knows what people do when they panic,” said the cop. Soon we were high over the crashed plane and carving wide circles over the Valley. “It still doesn’t make any sense,” said Clark. “Well,” said the cop, reaching into the self-help playbook. “Everything happens for a reason. We took off at exactly a certain time. The sun was setting at exactly a certain angle, so that we could see the plane…”

  The control tower decided that we shouldn’t land, at least not right away, for fear that we too might end up in an oak tree, and that there would be no one to lead the rescue effort. There was nothing to do but to wait for whoever it was who cleaned up after plane crashes, so that we might lead them to the oak tree. “I’ll bet it was people up last night to see the fireworks,” said Clark, after a bit. “They got over here and ran out of fuel. If it was dark and they ran out of fuel that would explain why they came down here.” The cop shrugged and kept one eye on the plane below. It was small and white and fragile; it was hard to see how it hadn’t collapsed on impact. For anyone still alive inside that plane, I thought, there was good news and bad news. The good news was that you’d been spotted. The bad news was that the man flying the helicopter leading rescue units to your aid had six and a half hours of flight experience and a hangover. And he was growing irritated at how little sense you made.

  For the next hour Clark circled Silicon Valley, and I finally had a good look at the place from the perspective that Clark sought to maintain—the perspective of a man gazing down from a great height. It did not really look very much like a valley. It was more of a broad, watery plain, though if you drove far enough in any direction you eventually encountered some shy, self-effacing mountains. For that matter, it was as difficult to spot the silicon in Silicon Valley as it was to find the valley. The silicon had been Part One of the Valley’s story, and Part One was over.

  The Valley had a brief but curious commercial past, in which Clark showed no interest whatsoever. It ran something like this: The sunshine, the abundance of U.S. government research grants, the willingness of Stanford University to let its professors walk out the door with their inventions and start companies, the presence of a counterculture intent on arming the masses with new technology—all made the Valley the place to be for people with a knack for building new technology. Added to this was the absence of an Old World snobbery, still present back East, but nearly absent west of the Mississippi. Back East engineering had always been viewed as glorified manual labor. No one thought of Harvard or Princeton or Yale as a place you went to become an engineer.

  The Valley was at least in part an attempt to reinvent the old social order. Out here engineering did not have the stigma of manual labor. Engineering was respected, maybe more than any other profession, perhaps because the original economic prospectors were mining engineers, and the lawyers and bankers came as an afterthought. In any case, by the mid-1950s technically minded people were aware that the region offered them a chance to do better for themselves than they might back East. “In 1955, I attempted to start a transistor business in California,” a Nobel Prize winner, the co-inventor of the transistor, William Shockley, told a U.S. congressional subcommittee in the late 1960s. “One of my motivations was that I had come to the conclusion that the most creative people were not adequately rewarded as the employees of industry.” The engineers Shockley talked into moving to the Valley and joining his company soon quit in a dispute with Shockley and created Fairchild Semiconductor; from there several moved on to create Intel; and from Intel an industry was born. Intel invented the microprocessor; the microprocessor made
possible the boom in personal computing; the personal computer boom led inexorably to the Internet boom; where the Internet boom might lead nobody knew, though if Clark had his way, and history continued its trend, it would be bigger than the Internet. This mind-boggling chain of events had been triggered by the technical man’s desire to find a place where he could take what he felt was rightfully his.

  It wasn’t until we hovered at three thousand feet over the Valley that I could actually see Clark’s career. Unlike just about everyone else his age—fifty-four—Clark had made the leap from Part One to Part Two of the Silicon Valley Story. Part One had been about engineers building machines, cheaper, faster, and better. They built them so fast and so cheap that, commercially speaking, they made themselves uninteresting. Each new machine they built, sooner or later, became a commodity. Other people—usually foreign people—eventually figured out how to build it more cheaply. The companies that made the machines, such as Hewlett-Packard, remained viable. But they were as dull and plodding and predictable as any other big American company.

  Part Two of the Valley story was not at all plodding and predictable. At some point in the early 1990s the engineers had figured out that they didn’t need to build new computers to get rich. They just had to cook up new things for the computers to do. The thrill was in the concepts; the concepts were the recipes. The notion of what constituted “useful” work had broadened. All across Silicon Valley you found office buildings crammed with young technogeeks cooking up recipes that they hoped would turn the economy on its ear. The role model for this activity was Jim Clark. This was due not so much to Clark’s success as to his talent for self-reinvention. Most other fifty-four-year-olds in Silicon Valley had long ago been torn down and replaced. Not Clark. Other people grew old, he stayed new. His psyche was a magic show, and this was its favorite trick: no matter how long he’d been around, he could behave as if he’d just arrived.