The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

by Michael Lewis

  Once inside the engine room Robert’s face was transformed. His movements, usually lethargic, quickened. In a few square feet he performed a kind of dance with his machines. Clearly, he could have done it blindfolded. A few years ago, when Robert had sought to have himself certified to work on power boats, he’d done pretty much just that. He’d gone for the test, back home in England, and his interviewer had asked him detailed questions about the engine room of a supertanker. The test was designed for people who had worked on container ships. Robert, who had never seen the inside of a container ship, failed badly. He spent the next two weeks in a library; from books he built a three-dimensional model of a supertanker’s engine room. He committed the entire complex space to memory, and returned to the test center. The same interviewer fired questions at him—asking him to walk through the little steps of repairing various machines on board a supertanker—expecting him of course to fail. Robert recorded a perfect score. The man assumed Robert had spent the preceding two weeks on board a ship. He said, “It’s like a different bloke has walked in here.” At the end of the test he wanted to shake Robert’s hand.

  Now Robert moved around a space he knew from hard experience. On board he had 1,400 spare parts—$300 thousand of spare parts—and he understood where each of them went. Again he flushed out the sea chest and restarted the engine. The engine was busted in a way that permitted him to switch it back on easily enough. Once the engine started, he did not wait around to see if it would keep on chugging. Certain now that the problem was more fundamental than air in the sea chest, he went hunting for it. He pulled himself beneath the giant BMW engine and fiddled a bit. Then he popped up and removed a cap from the top of it, and fiddled a bit more. As he fiddled, Steve wandered in. From the discomfort on his face it was clear Steve hadn’t spent much time here. “It’s bloody hot in here,” he said. Although Steve’s title was “engineer,” he had about as much experience of low technology as I did. He was the new new engineer.

  “We don’t have an air-conditioned office,” said Robert, from under the engine.

  “No air-conditioned office with cappuccinos and dirty pictures on the Web twenty-four hours a day,” said Steve, looking around. Here they were, a pair of British engineers employed by the same American billionaire, ostensibly working on the same project, and their idea of “work” could hardly have been more different. Steve watched Robert tinker with the machinery with the same impotent expression computer illiterates wore when they watched someone like Steve write software. It was the expression of a man who has nothing whatsoever to offer to the problem at hand. Finally, Robert climbed up and out from under the engine and said, “I don’t think it’s the engine.”

  Which meant that the problem was the sensor, or the network linking it to the rest of the boat. A chain of information ran through Hyperion. To a great extent the boat had been reduced to information. The information had its own logic. The sensors measured everything that Clark could think to measure, including the pressure on the engine. They passed these measurements up to the programmable logic controllers. The PLCs in turn passed the data down wires to the high-speed Silicon Graphics computers. The computers organized and presented the data to the captain and crew. Somewhere along that chain was a kink. The question was: Where? It could be inside the sensor itself, or in the PLCs, or in the fancy Silicon Graphics computers. After prodding the sensor a bit, Robert said, “I don’t think it is the sensor.”

  Robert’s mind was working its way upstream. If it wasn’t the engine and it wasn’t the sensor, then the problem lay somewhere between the sensor and the computers. The closer Robert came to the computers, the less sure of himself he became. “I’ve got to work out how the system is getting its information—how the PLCs sends it to SCADA,” said Robert. SCADA was an acronym for the hopeful title they’d given to their software: Superior Control and Data Acquisition. SCADA was what Steve and Lance and Tim and Clark had spent most of their time writing. It picked up the digitized information from all over the boat and manipulated it in any way it needed to be manipulated. Steve and Robert left the engine room and made for the neighboring computer room, to find out what SCADA had to say.

  The twenty-five slender black machines were arranged lengthwise along a wall, which resembled a sales rack in a discount outlet for VCRs. Robert had little patience for what went on inside them. (“They just make my job more complicated.”) He had spent a great deal of the last year trying to explain the engine room to Tim and Lance and Steve to avoid problems just like this one. Of the computer people the only one who had impressed Robert as an engineer was Clark himself. “Take Lance,” Robert said, when Steve popped upstairs. I’d missed Lance on this trip, and his attempt to infuse computer programming with the romantic spirit. “Lance is an unusually intelligent man,” said Robert. “Yet the guy can’t remember where he left his shoes. And when he goes to Amsterdam for a visit, he gets ripped off. What you need to be a good engineer is a set of skills, in addition to a logical process. Some people have an aptitude for it; some people never will.”

  The programmers came at the boat from the top down. Robert came at it from the bottom up. Robert believed his approach led to a deeper understanding of the machine. While Steve was gone, he said, “One of the problems here is that the computer program is designed to control things that the programmers themselves do not understand.” Robert’s resistance to the computer was a resistance to abstraction. The computer engineer has a postmodern flavor to him—which is perhaps why it is so difficult for him to explain even to other computer engineers what he does for a living. The honest answer is that he gazes into a screen and thinks. He is a creator of concepts. Robert, by contrast, was a practical man. He wanted to see what he was fixing.

  At length Steve returned. Together, he and Robert hunted for the lines of code that concerned the engine. Steve pulled up one page of obscure-looking numbers, and Robert snorted, “That’s the first time I’ve even seen that bloody page.”

  To anyone who has not seen it before, computer code is meaningless. Robert had taught himself to program a bit, but he was nevertheless disturbed by the way it removed real-world problems from the real world. As Steve looked on, Robert complained. “The only way I can read the life functions of the engine is via the computer system,” he said. “The only way I can know what stopped the engine is this page here.” He hit a few buttons, and up popped a screen filled with numbers. “The old way I’d have gauges on everything that would let me interact directly with the engine. On this boat you have to go to a computer screen and go looking for it.” He paused. “On this boat if I want to turn on the light, I have to go to a computer screen.”

  “It’s the modern world,” said Steve.

  “There are a million lines of code in there,” said Robert, motioning to the twenty-five computers, “and nowhere in them will you find the word ‘boat.’”

  After an hour of digging around in the code, both Robert and Steve decided that the problem was beyond their grasp and would probably take a long time to repair. Given that they couldn’t find the break in the chain of information running from the engine to the computers, the only thing to do was to remove the chain. “My next move,” said Robert, “is to bypass the sensor. I can always fool the engine into thinking the sensor is not there.”

  And that is what he did, though he dreaded doing it. “It’s the very worst thing an engineer can do,” he explained, “to pull a plug and leave something unprotected.” He went into the engine and yanked out the sensors. By yanking out the sensor he yanked out the link between the engine and Clark’s computers, and thus prevented the computers from shutting the engine down arbitrarily. Unfortunately, it also prevented the computer from shutting down the engine when it needed to be shut down. Effectively, he removed the engine entirely from the computer’s monitoring system. This small rebellion against the new technology, staged at four in the morning, earned Robert the right to return to bed. But he did so uneasily. With the sensor gone the e
ngine could overheat without anyone’s noticing. It could catch fire, even blow up, without warning. The boat was suddenly a lot more dangerous.

  For two full days we motor sailed along without incident. The tedium exceeded even Clark’s expectations. Every hour or so I’d check the computer screen to see how far we’d gone; every hour we’d traveled a mere eleven miles more.

  The seventh night out there brought a new kind of trouble. Why the crises on Clark’s boat could not occur at one in the afternoon rather than one in the morning, I do not know. But they never did. At one in the morning an hour into his watch, Steve wandered out onto the aft deck, looked up at the sail, and saw what looked like a pillow coming off the side. The pillow was growing. Finally, the night sky was filled with a chaotic whiteness. The sail was collapsing onto the deck. Its billowy heaps collected at the base of the mast, a kite the size of a mansion struggling to take flight.

  The strange thing about the event was the silence that accompanied it. The main halyard had broken. The halyard was the rope that kept the sail hoisted. Clearly it was a bad moment. The world’s largest sail, containing more wind than any sail in history, was on the loose. Fifty-five hundred square feet of sail flapped violently in the wind, with only a rope at the bottom of the mast to hold it in place. Flap one way, and it would have sailed off the side of the boat; flap the other way, and it would have knocked Steve off the side of the boat. And the computer had nothing to say about any of it. No alarm. No sound of any kind. Steve sounded the alarm, inadvertently. He hollered.

  Up from the bowels of the ship came running the entire crew, Clark, and Louie. Barely awake, they threw their bodies recklessly on top of the sail in an attempt to take the wind out of it and to prevent it from flying overboard.

  It took the crew about fifteen minutes of pouncing on air pockets to remove the last trace of wind from the sail. Once they’d subdued it, they found another rope, replaced the broken halyard, and hoisted the sail. As they worked, Clark looked on with a curiously detached expression. It was not, as you might think, the look of a man distressed that his boat is falling apart in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. With all hell breaking loose on the foredeck, Clark was the calmest thing on board. Indeed, he wore an expression I hadn’t ever really seen on him: one of contentment. Clark often struggled mightily to fake a contentment he did not feel. When Fortune magazine turned up to take his picture for the cover, for instance, he’d leaned back with a big cigar in his mouth and offered them the picture they wanted, of a successful California entrepreneur. (He really did feel some strong impulse to meet other people’s initial expectations of him.) He did this without ever actually feeling contented. He was living disproof of the idea that California is home to people with a gift for relaxing. California was, at best, the place for people who wish to appear relaxed.

  At any rate, now that his boat was falling apart, Clark actually appeared to be happy. A few months earlier, at the boatyard, he had explained to me what was so unusual about Hyperion. “Everything on board is measured,” he had said, “everything.” Everything had to be measured, or quantified, for the computer to get its mind around it. Clearly that statement was not true: the rope that held the sail up was not measured. It had broken without the slightest reaction from the computer. Seeing this, Clark said, “You could probably figure out a way to put sensors on the ropes so that you can tell when they frayed.” That thought—he might have something more to tinker with—gave Clark a sense of purpose. He was perhaps the first owner of a mega-yacht who enjoyed his boat better when it was broken.

  Once they’d tamed the sail, the crew members, led by Jaime, threaded a new rope through the sail and hoisted it up the mast. Clark watched them work with a mixture of admiration (toward Jaime) and intrigue (that there were parts of the boat that his computers did not yet control). Finally, as the sail rose again, he turned to me and asked, “Do you ever get scared?”

  The moment he asked the question, I realized that I didn’t. Not really. I was the ideal recipient of his new technology. Technically inept, thoroughly lazy, I was quick to place my trust in people who professed to understand how the various machines on which my life depended worked. Of course, every now and then, say, when an airplane went bump in a storm, my stomach clenched and all assumptions momentarily were called into doubt. But those moments always passed.

  “No,” I said.

  “I do,” he said, seriously. He must have noticed the new uncertainty on my face. “On some fundamental level I’m astonished that any of it works.” Then he laughed and returned to his cabin. That was the burden of the technical man. He knew the many ways technology could fail. And he realized that he alone was responsible for its success.

  The next evening it was Jaime who first sensed something new was wrong: he heard a sound as he walked past the mast. The sound, whatever it was, was not something the computers picked up on; there was no obvious sign of anything wrong. But the mast did make a faint clicking sound that Jaime had never heard it make, and he made a point of knowing all the sounds on the boat. This one, so faint that it barely registered, was entirely new. Click…click…click. It bothered Jaime enough that he decided to climb the mast to see what might be causing it.

  This in itself seemed an act of madness. It crossed my mind that the computers had taken over so much of the business on the boat that the human beings strained their imaginations to remain relevant. The whole point of the computers was to reduce the sailing to a science, and to eliminate the dependency on human nerve and instinct or, at any rate, limit it to the nerve and instinct of computer programmers. Jaime was reasserting the need for nerve and instinct. The seas were rougher than they had been in days. The boat pitched and rolled with sufficient violence that you had to concentrate to remain upright on deck. The top of the mast was two hundred feet off the ocean, or about seventeen stories. The slightest sway on the deck was experienced at the top of the mast as a violent rock. Even in calm seas it was hurled back and forth like a particularly treacherous ride at an amusement park. Now, with each roll of the boat below, it swung hundreds of feet across the sky, with an ugly corkscrewing motion.

  Jaime was, in a sense, the most articulate expression of Allan Prior’s sailing skill. He’d been hired by the captain to be Hyperion’s first mate. He had sailed with Allan in around-the-world races and was generally acknowledged by the crew to have a special knack. Whatever it was that made a sailor a sailor, Jaime, like Allan, had it. He was one of those people who seem to have been born to their assigned role. Only he wasn’t. Jaime had come to sailing by circumstance and not choice. He’d started his career farming the Australian outback. In the early 1980s a drought drove him from the land and sent him seaward, looking for some other way to make a living. A friend told him about a job on a sailboat that was making an Atlantic crossing. Jaime knew so little about boats that when he was awakened at three in the morning for his first watch his first instinct was to punch the guy who had woken him up.

  That all happened fifteen years before, when Jaime was in his midtwenties. Now, on our seventh evening at sea, he’d heard a sound that no one else had heard. In response to that sound he donned a thin harness shaped like a jockstrap and asked Celcelia, who was making her first long sailboat trip, to belay him up in it. The comely Celcelia spent a large part of each day with her nose buried in books with titles like Sailing across the Atlantic Made Easy. Now Jaime’s life was in her hands. Up, up, up the mast he went, using his feet to keep him attached until he was a pale white dot in the dusky sky. By the time he signaled Celcelia to stop cranking, he was near the top of the seventeen-story building, clinging to its sides with his legs. One slip and he’d be finished. He would have been hurled out into space like a shot from a sling and then back into the mast. He’d have been crushed, and crushed again.

  At first Jaime had thought the sound in the mast might be the satellite dish. But he rose past the satellite dish on the second spreader, and the noise only grew louder. It grew louder, in f
act, all the way to the top. Only when he arrived at the top of the mast did Jaime find its origin. The rope that had been strung up in place of the main halyard—that is, the rope that held up the massive sail—had ripped the sail. A fresh tear nearly a yard long ran down from the top. That is, what Jaime had detected when he walked by the mast was the very slight difference in the sound made by a 5,500-square-foot sail that is fully intact and a 5,500-square-foot sail that has a slight tear in it, two hundred feet off the ground. As his body hurtled through the night sky, Jaime explained all this into a walkie-talkie. The entire sail was like a giant stocking on the verge of a run, he said. A strong gust of wind would rip it in two. One half would probably blow clear off the side; the other would flap crazily from its moorings at the base of the mast. The force of this event, on a sail of this size, might easily cause the mast to snap.

  The tear in the sail put an end to our sailing trip. The computers would learn no more about sailing on this trip. The only solution was to reel the sail back into the boom and to put ourselves at the mercy of the quixotic engine. After an hour of flying through the dark at the top of the world’s tallest mast, Jaime shimmied back to the deck. The rest of the crew members sensed they had just witnessed an extraordinary piece of seamanship, though no one said much about it. But the next morning I did hear one person say, “I’ve been on boats where the mast has broken but nothing like this. This is a whole ‘nother beast. Thank God he went up there.”