(6) Money is more than a massively consensual IOU note. It is a piece of infrastructure and as artificial as Interstate 5, NutraSweet and season six of Mad Men. If money is not maintained, it can collapse like a bridge over Interstate 5, and fixing it could take years, during which time God only knows how much more financial damage will occur.
Me having photons faster than yours by a few millionths of a second is enough to make me appallingly rich—again, for doing absolutely nothing except hacking into money itself.
Puke.
It’s hard to have respect for this kind of system. Often the latency issue is presented to the public as a “Wow, isn’t this cool!” moment when, in fact, it’s sickening, and it’s partially why the world began to feel so one-percent-ish five years ago. Reasonably smart people who inhabit the Age of Latency are milking those still stuck in the pre-latent era.
(7) In 2007 and 2008 we came perilously close to killing money, exposing in the process how out-of-date the financial infrastructure has become. The very smart people who looted billions from the economy got a slap on the wrist and are doubtlessly, as you read these words, trawling through the graduate rosters of MIT and Caltech, looking for newer, fresher latencies. And there’s possibly a parallel universe out there alongside this one, where things didn’t go quite so well in the end, where money really was broken to the point of unfixability. It’s a Monopoly game where the game just sort of ended one day and nobody was quite sure why.
The Man Who Lost His Story
There was once a man who lost his story. His name was Craig and he looked just like you, and his life was quite similar to yours too—except that somewhere during his life, he lost his story. By this I mean he lost the sense that his life had a beginning, a middle and an end. I know, yes, we’re all born and we all do stuff and then we die, but somewhere in there are the touch points that define our stories: first love, a brush with death, a scientific insight, a yen to climb tall mountains—and then we die. The story of our lives is usually long over before we die, and we spend our twilight years warming our hands on the embers of memory. Craig’s problem was that he got to a point—thirty-eight, say—when he realized that none of his dots connected to make a larger picture: a few unsatisfying and doomed relationships; a job so dull a chimp could perform it; no hobbies that could be teased and stretched into larger, more vital ways of living life.
His lack of story seemed to be of the which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg variety. For example, he thought that if he learned how to hang-glide, then maybe his life’s story could begin there—an adventure! Perhaps there would be a mystical moment up in the sky! But wait—in order to have such adventures, Craig would have to be into hang-gliding to begin with. If he rushed out and chose an activity at random, would he now have a meaningful experience? As Craig wasn’t actually into anything, he was trapped in the chicken-egg loop. Where to start? And how? He felt that his attempts to generate a life story were futile.
Craig decided to go to the Learning Annex and sign up for hang-gliding lessons anyway, but the woman who took his application form looked at him and said, “You’re not really into hang-gliding, are you? You just want to do it so that you can imagine your life is a story.”
“How did you know that?”
“It’s pretty much all you get in a job like this: people like you walking in and hoping they can push a button and suddenly their lives become stories. You should hear my friend Phyllis, who works down the hall accepting forms for whitewater rafting excursions.”
Craig walked away, his shoulders slumped, once again troubled that his life had no narrative to it. He was back to being Craig, the Guy Who Merely Existed.
On his way back to his apartment, posters and billboards and light boards showed people being sexy and fun and charismatic as they enjoyed beaches and ski slopes and parties that were filled with people who looked much like Craig or his sister, Heather. The exciting lives of all these billboard people weighed heavily on Craig, and when he got home he called a few friends (who, it must be said, felt sorry for Craig, but not too sorry). One of them said, “I mean, Craig, let’s say you break a leg. Fine, that’s a real problem that you can fix. Or your wallet gets stolen—you can replace it. But losing the narrative of your life? Dude, that’s pretty sad.”
Of course, the moment Craig hung up from speaking with his friends, they all went online and trashed him behind his back. All 93,441 of Craig’s official online social networking friends and buddies sent disloyal texts along the lines of “Gee, I’m Craig—look at me! I’m so superfantastic and groovy that my life has to be a story,” or “Yessiree, that’s me, 168 pounds of animal magnetism in search of an empire to conquer, an empire without borders, a kingdom filled with endless new battles to be waged and won…not.
Craig went back to the Learning Annex the next day to sign up for Tae Bo, and the woman remembered him. “You’re the guy whose life has no story. How’s it going?”
“Not too well, thank you. I thought maybe Tae Bo would lend my life a unique narrative edge.”
The woman—whose name was Bev—said, “Craig, the hardest things in the world are being unique and having your life be a story. In the old days it was much easier, but our modern fame-driven culture with its real-time 24/7 marinade of electronic information demands a lot from modern citizens, and poses great obstacles to narrative. Truly modern citizens are both charismatic and can respond only to other people with charisma. To survive, people need to become self-branding charisma robots. Yet, ironically, society mocks and punishes people who aspire to that state. I really wouldn’t be surprised if your friends were making fun of you behind your back, Craig.”
“Really?”
“Really. So, in a nutshell, given the current media composition of the world, you’re pretty much doomed to being uninteresting and storyless.”
“But I could blog my life! Couldn’t I turn it into a story that way?”
“Blogs? Sorry, but all those blogs and vlogs or whatevers out there—they just make being unique harder. The more truths you spill out, the more generic you become.”
“All I want is for my life to be a story!”
“Did you read a lot of books growing up?”
“Yes.”
“Ah. Well, there you go. Books turn people into isolated individuals, and once that’s happened, the road only grows rockier. Books wire you to want to be Steve McQueen, but the world wants you to be SMcQ23667bot@hotmail.com.”
There was a fifteen-second patch of silence. Craig said, “Isn’t it weird that Hotmail accounts still exist?”
“It really is,” said Bev.
Craig stood there and finally said, “So, you know what? I’ll pass on the Tae Bo.”
“Right. How about Calligraphy and Menu Design?”
“Pass.”
“Okay. But keep us in mind.”
Craig walked away, angry that the modern world had conspired to force him into thinking in its manner rather than the other way around. How cruel that mankind was forced to conform to the global electronic experience. But all other options had vanished. There no longer existed a country to escape to (country—what a quaint notion) where people read books and had lives that became stories. Everyone’s life had become a crawl that dragged across the bottom of a massive TV screen in an empty airport lounge that smelled like disinfectant, bar mix and lousy tips.
When Craig got home, he had 243,559 emails from friends and links that gently gave him an epoke in the ribs about his selfish desire to have his life be a story. Some of the emails were serious, some were snarky and some were scammy, demanding that he sign a legal document before useful ideas on how to get a story were sent his way.
After he ate dinner, Craig’s doorbell rang and it was the Channel Three News Team, putting together a weekend think-piece, “The Man Whose Life Had No Story.” Craig thought, Maybe this is something hopeful in disguise. But mostly the News Team just asked him who he thought might play him in the movie
of his life and if he’d gained or lost any weight lately. He chased them out of his apartment.
Desperate, he went back the next day to see Bev. Surely someone in a position like hers would have insights and ideas he could apply to his situation.
“You again,” said Bev. “I was expecting this.”
“Really?”
“I’m assuming you want to take drastic action, then.”
“Yes.”
“Come with me.” Bev put a Closed sign in front of her window and beckoned Craig to follow her down the hall.
After making many left and right turns and after passing through above- and below-ground tunnels, they ended up at a large, hospital-ish door covered with warnings and a request that visitors use a sterilizing gel on their hands before entering.
“We’re here,” said Bev, opening the door; she and Craig entered. It was a lab of some sort that seemed to share space with a theatre department. Wires and pressure gauges and digital meters existed alongside caveman outfits, Sir Lancelot costumes and old coins. It was a mess.
Craig asked, “What’s this about?”
Bev said, “This is your one chance to get a good story going in your life.”
“Really? This? I’ve never acted before, and I was never good at science.”
“No need to worry. Neither skill is required. But if you sign this form here, we can get you set up.”
The form was a two-hundred-page document titled “Story-Capture via Anachronic Transference.” Craig signed the contract’s final page while Bev nodded. She then took the document away from Craig and issued a two-finger whistle. From the wings appeared three muscular goons. Bev said, “We’ve got another one, boys. And don’t go easy on him. He needs a story real bad.”
The goons proceeded to wallop the daylights out of Craig. They clubbed him with aluminum baseball bats, ripped off all his clothes, poured some sort of chemical into one of his eyes and then tossed him into a scientific device that resembled an Apollo space capsule.
“How far back are we going to send him, Bev?”
Bev said, “Let’s send him to the thirteenth century.” She twiddled a knob.
“Where?” Craig shouted, his voice riddled with pain.
“The thirteenth century. They’re running low on people there, so every extra soul we send them is a big help.” She looked to one of her goons. “Bartholomew, throw some peasant rags into the time chamber.”
Bartholomew tossed rags into the chamber.
“Shut the door!”
Bartholomew shut the door.
Craig was beating on the capsule’s little window. “Let me out of here!”
Bev smiled and shouted, “Craig, you’ll love it there! All they do is feed goats and wait for troubadours to pass through the village and tell them lies in the form of stories.”
“But what am I supposed to do there?”
“You’ll be a peasant! You’ve got a role to fulfill! Just be sure to worship and defend whoever owns you!”
“And the clergy!” added Bartholomew.
“Yes,” shouted Bev. “And the clergy. We crippled you a bit so that you’ll fit in better once you arrive! Your teeth are kind of nice, though—you might want to break one.”
“But I don’t want to—”
Whoosh! The time machine gleamed and Craig was whisked back to the thirteenth century.
A tear fell from Bev’s eye, and Bartholomew asked her why.
“I’m so jealous,” she said. “He gets to go back in time and be real and hang with real people having real lives. Us? We’re stuck here in this perpetual nothingness.”
“Not to worry,” said Bartholomew. “I’ll take you out for Japanese tonight. And afterwards I’ve got two new Woody Allen movies lined up. Oh, I forgot—have you got next week’s plane tickets for Hawaii confirmed?”
“You bet.”
“Ah, the modern world,” said Bartholomew. “So empty. So dreary.”
“If only our lives could be stories like Craig’s.” Bev sighed and looked at Bartholomew. “You’re smiling—why?”
“Because I thought you deserved a treat, so I had your Corvette detailed today.”
“Oh, Bartholomew, you’re the best.”
And thus our story has a happy ending.
The Valley
I’ve found that if you ask most anyone to locate Silicon Valley on a globe, they pause for about fifteen seconds, say umm, and then hesitantly put their finger down somewhere a little bit north of Los Angeles. They then apologize for being clueless and ask where it really is—and they’re often surprised that it’s up near San Francisco. I think for most people, Silicon Valley is largely a state of mind more than it is a real place—a strip-malled Klondike of billionaires with proprioception issues, clad in khakis in groups of three, awkwardly lumbering across a six-lane traffic artery with a grass median, all to get in on the two-for-one burrito special at Chili’s before the promotion ends next Tuesday.
I’ve many happy memories of the Valley. One afternoon, in a long-ago world called Before 9/11, I’d park my car just inside Menlo Park, the Valley’s venture-capital capital, on the other side of Interstate 280, just west of the Sand Hill Road exit. Walking through what seemed to be a Christmas-tree farm, I’d arrive at a chain-link fence with a Department of Energy warning sign, duck through one of its many breaches and sit beside the Stanford Linear Accelerator,* two miles long and operational until 1966. I don’t know what I was expecting to see, but it was nice to lie in the grass like Tom Sawyer and imagine baryon asymmetry and positrons committing suicide while a Cooper’s hawk soared high above, scoping out the 280 for roadkill.
I remember the month the Segway came out and an annoyingly rich Palo Alto friend (who lived in a massive apartment furnished only with a folding lawn chair, a card table and a $500,000 flight simulator) bought a fleet of ten. That night a group of us held a ride up Page Mill Road to the parking lot of the now closed Wall Street Journal printing plant, and then we started off-roading over the endless berms that define the Valley’s aesthetic. Talk about a dork-fest…but it was fun. What else?…I remember encountering, in Mountain View, one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. It was near the remains of an old shopping mall being bulldozed to make way for yet another mirror-walled tech HQ. The mall’s escalator had been removed and dumped onto the parking lot. A guy in a crane was picking it up in his machine’s teeth and flinging it around like it was a pearl necklace—a moment of pure joy, and in a poetic way, a metaphor for up and down class mobility in San Jose, Cupertino, Mountain View, Palo Alto and Menlo Park.
It’s the money that makes the Valley sexy, because there’s otherwise not very much that’s sexy about what goes on there. Tech is tech; cables and routers are cables and routers. But wait. Tesla is sexy. Xapo is kind of sexy. And Houzz is fun. But having said all this, my Bay Area friend Liz continues to write a novel titled Founderfucker, which is about the mothers and daughters of patrician East Coast families going through elaborate rituals to snag socially clueless Valley tech workers with vast amounts of stock—preferably company founders. Get in, have two kids, punch out and…you’re a billionaire! It’s cynical, but at the same time it’s a real thing, all those girls from Brown and Sarah Lawrence, in lambswool sweaters, bored witless, sitting at the kitchen counter, asking earnest questions about motherboards and retail data encryption as they wait for their ten-year stints to come to an end.
Last summer I enjoyed participating in a seminar at Singularity University, an unaccredited school founded in 2008 by Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis. Singularity U’s goal is to get the correct people fully informed about the transformative capacity of logarithmic technologies. It rests in an office building in NASA’s Ames Research Center, a building seemingly untouched since one foggy 1944 afternoon when The Andrews Sisters came in and sang for the boys. Ames’s runways are now used only a few times a day, by NASA, Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Air Force One, the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Department’s hel
icopters and Google staff. Yes, Google has its own airport, smack in the middle of one of the planet’s most insanely expensive real estate markets. Go, Google! Google is also currently adding more than a million square feet to its Googleplex, on property leased from the Ames facility. It’s as if the airport’s land is a sort of portal into ascendant technologies: aviation, NASA, search engines. Next? Teleportation. Time travel. Cold fusion. Flying donkeys.
People are a bit afraid of the Valley. We all now live on the vertical asymptote of technological history: every new day, God only knows how many powerful and transformative technologies are being dumped into the world—new inventions that simultaneously complicate and flatten our lives—and we’re all just barely managing to hold on as it is. When people look at that little bit of land just below San Francisco, they’re not just looking at a city or town; they’re looking at wizardry, transmutation and borderline magic. We all love our iPhones and laptops and GPS devices and everything else that defines modern life, but we’re spooked by the king’s magicians. Are they good or are they evil? And do they spend much time thinking about outsiders putting their fingers on the wrong part of the map?
* * *
* Now the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
3½ Fingers
When the former White House chief of staff Mr. Jack Lew was made US Secretary of the Treasury, his signature began to appear on American currency. Unfortunately, his signature resembles the loops we all make when testing a ballpoint pen and there was an uproar loud enough that Lew ultimately had to create a new signature that was more currency-friendly.
My signature is as bad as Lew’s was. Like most people, I invented a signature in my teens that I’m now stuck with for life. It’s a horrible glyph I barely remember creating. It bugs me that the gesture that defines me in the written world was designed by a self-absorbed fifteen-year-old sitting at the back of math class, bored out of his mind. With the general decline of cursive script, signatures are, along with graffiti, one of the few remaining personal gestures that remain in our culture.
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