In its heyday, any Southern black family coming to live in Detroit could live from a single breadwinner—guys that stood on the front lines of the United Automobile Workers and made it possible for the first black kids to go to college. General Motors was the largest employer in the country, three-quarter million. Now Walmart is the largest, with over a million employees, 1.3 or 1.4. They don’t make enough money for themselves, let alone to send anybody to college.
Yet here, in San Francisco, kids staring at a screen are making six figures a year and don’t have a clue what the world is about. That word, “individual,” took the place of a two-syllable word, “person.” They use it more and more and more, and I’m trying to figure out why five syllables is better than two.
Years ago, kids were really bright. They knew how to root a tree, save the sap, build a cabin, shoe a horse, save a seed, feed a garden, feed themselves. They’re perfect idiots now, perfect idiots. Maybe a fucking satellite gets hit by an asteroid. What the fuck are you gonna do now? (Excuse the adjective.)
It is because they are no longer in touch with the source. History is who we are. It’s not to be discarded. It needs to be studied again and again and again and taught and shared with our lineage. We don’t have to get so profound that we overlook the obvious. Technology can’t make us forget something as elemental as a baby laughing. Who teaches that baby to laugh?
We need to go back to the Natives—Cherokee, Navajo, Iroquois—they were here before Columbus arrived. The Ohlone people here knew how to do controlled burning, they did it for thousands of years. Archaeological digs on the Ohlone shell mounds show that they lived in relative peace with the other fifty-one native peoples in the central portion of California. In an uninterrupted artistic lineage, from the top of the shell mound down almost five stories and forty miles long, the dig told the same story.
Our ancestry has much to teach us. We need to go back. We need to look. If we don’t, lunacy. Doing the same shit that don’t work, over and over and over, doing the dumbest thing with the worst outcome, and then repeating the process over and expecting something new. It will get worse and prove that sound we hear—the fist thumping on our chest, proclaiming we are the top of the feeding order—is a hollow drum.
PART I
THE NEW GOLD RUSH
The Gold Rush had the Big Four. Silicon Valley has the Traitorous Eight—men who broke away from Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in the ’60s and formed Fairchild Semiconductor. Fairchild eclipsed Shockley and became the soil from which the industry grew, with companies like Intel and Hewlett-Packard tracing their origins back to that early rift. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted that the speed and efficiency of integrated circuits would double each year, accepted wisdom now known as “Moore’s Law.” So these companies had simple goals: to make the chips smaller, make them faster, make them more powerful, shrink the world inside our devices and expand their reach.
As the industry evolved, commerce fused with the counterculture in San Francisco. Psychedelics, dreams of free love and world peace, and science fiction gave the industry something it had been missing: spiritual ambition. Suddenly, through technology, engineers saw the future, new ways of connecting the world, sharing information, flattening hierarchy, shrinking not just microchips but the world. It was no longer enough to make calculators or the computers that ran the space program. People like Steve Jobs saw a world with a “hobby” computer in every home. The inventors of the internet imagined virtual libraries holding infinite information immediately accessible to all.
So the action moved online. “Businesses” became “start-ups;” hardware was replaced by software; storefronts became websites. Yes, tech had its stumbles—the dot-com crash in the early 2000s was a shot to the industry’s solar plexus—but it never fell. There always seemed a new horizon. Google brought the world “search,” Facebook brought “social,” and the era of big data began. The iPhone put a computer in every pocket, and the age of the app arrived. And throughout there have been investors eager to fuel the action. It may seem foolish from the outside, but once the Great Recession arrived in 2008, where else in the world were you going to put your money? Venture capitalists turned small ideas, dreamed up in college dorms, into “unicorns” valued over $1 billion.
And now new names ring out: Jobs, Thiel, Musk, Zuckerberg, Kalanick. Some villains, some heroes, some yet to be defined. Some dreaming of connecting the world, of optimism, opportunity, and a new global harmony; some smelling only youth, ambition, and the Darwinian churn of great ideas mixed with money.
REGIS McKENNA
“Pittsburgh was dying.” So he came to California. It was the ’60s, and he witnessed the semiconductor boom from ground zero—working for a number of companies that launched from the mother ship that was Fairchild Semiconductor. There he started his own marketing and PR firm, serving the giants of the new industry, like Intel, Apple, Microsoft.
His office has the feeling of a library, or an unfinished exhibit chronicling the history of the tech industry. The conference table is covered with containers of small metal sprockets, arranged like unique species of bugs in a natural history museum. A large silicon ingot is suspended in acrylic glass, like a silver missile hanging in the Smithsonian. Stacks of pamphlets and history books fill the shelves, alongside trophies, old devices, trinkets from around the world, and an antique clock. There’s art on most of the walls, leaving no room for a large poster of the original Apple II logo, which lies in a corner, next to an Impressionist oil painting.
They grew the ingots. They grew the ingots, and they sliced them. They did everything on the premises. None of this stuff was done by suppliers, because there were no suppliers at the time. I watched the ingots come out of molten silicon. I watched them slice them. I watched them build the cameras and cut the patterns on light tables.
All this was done with less than a few hundred people in a room. Everything was under one roof. The line workers, a little assembly group in the back, were hand-doing all these things. From ingot to calculator, all in the same room.
The designer would take a circuit board and lay it out on paper first, sort of sketch it out and draw his electrical diagrams and so forth. And then he would take these different components, pick them out, and lay them on the paper. That would become a circuit card that had some functionality, some performance level. And then they would test the circuit card. Designers were like Renaissance sculptors. They had two or three top-notch technicians who put the boards together and knew the quirks of their design.
You hear about these eccentric people in the Valley, like Jobs or others, but that goes back to the beginning. There were always people like that.
When I worked at National Semiconductor, there was one guy who did the design. He was one of the strangest people you would ever want to meet. He sort of looked like the Wolfman. He had odd, beady eyes, and he kept an ax in his office. He would show up when he wanted to show up. He would sometimes disappear for weeks at a time. He would go to rodeos in Idaho and just disappear. He wasn’t sober half the time. He gave a better talk when he was drinking gin than anytime else. And he was a brilliant designer.
His partner never said three words. But he was so clever with his designs that he would put errors into the data sheet so that nobody could copy them.
The semiconductor business was really rough-and-tumble, really hard-nosed. Because Moore’s Law was in effect from the first time you put two transistors together. Getting your product designed and increasing performance became a competitive battle. “Doing it first” meant your survival. So these guys had a different mind-set: Take no prisoners. Get out there. Everybody works. Everybody is productive. Like warriors.
Companies didn’t raise a lot of money. They worked on cash flow. You got your hands in everything, you learned on the job. People today in a similar position, they would be lucky to leave their cubicle in five years.
The PC industry changed everything. When the industry started out, ever
ybody knew each other—we were all contained within, literally, fifty square miles. The PC created an international market. It drove a trillion-dollar marketplace. It offered something that everybody was looking for, they just didn’t know it. The computer became a social entity. You went to these conferences and you found people from all over the world, sharing a common conversation.
Today, there is this misnomer about Silicon Valley, that it is a “start-up community.” There’s about—I’m guessing—thirty thousand companies in Silicon Valley. Every imaginable technology: fundamental technology, software companies, biotech companies, medical companies. And I’ve worked with all of them. They always liked ads, because—I don’t know—there is something macho about an ad. And they think it says more than it does. I always said, “The ad is the last thing you do.” I had this little quote, “The more you advertise a bad product, the faster you go out of business.”
We represented so many first-time technologies. We repped the first low-powered laser that was under $100, essentially the first scanners for supermarkets. We worked on the first microprocessor, the first solid-state memory, the first personal computer—I could go on and on. People didn’t know what these things were. They were creating new categories of activity, new ways of doing work, new forms of productivity. You can’t promote something people don’t understand.
So, we did things a little different. We couldn’t operate like just any ad agency or PR firm. I hired writers, journalists, not admen. And we saw ourselves as translators for the technical community to the broader public. We focused a lot on market education.
My philosophy was—I’ve said this my whole career—you have to keep moving backwards, backwards into the organization. You can’t stay outside. You can’t be on the periphery. You have to move inside and drive it from where the original decisions are being made. With management. That’s what we did with Intel, with Apple, with all our clients.
When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak came into my office, they had Birkenstocks and cutoffs. Steve had a Ho Chi Minh beard and hair down his back. That actually never, ever bothered me, because I had worked with a lot of crazy people in the semiconductor industry.
They were making “hobby” computers. Things people could tinker with at home. But Steve had this instinct. He wanted to spread out, go well beyond what anyone else had done. He wanted teachers and students. He wanted a computer in every home. Steve had the vision and Wozniak could build it.
Wozniak had an article that he wanted to place in a magazine, Byte magazine in fact, and it was a design for this next new product. And I basically said that the article had to be rewritten because it read like he was talking to himself. It was hobbyist talking to hobbyist, and if he wanted to get the schoolteachers, the students, and beyond that, he’d have to write it to make sense to them. Make English out of it.
Wozniak objected and said something like “I’m not going to have any marketing guy rewrite my stuff.”
So I said, “Well, there’s the door,” and I threw them out. I was up to here anyway. [He holds his hand to his neck.]
Steve came back. He just kept coming back. He called. He would sit on my doorstep. Steve was relentless. Relentless. We spent a lot of time together. We went for walks. We talked a lot.
The Apple logo, by the way, I sold to him on the kitchen table upstairs—showing him the layouts. His retort was, “Can we print it on metal?” Because even getting paper to hold the register of all those different colors was quite a task. He made sure he saw it printed on metal before he accepted it. That was for the Apple II, so that was the first logo to appear on their products.* His sense of aesthetics, he had that innately. He was much broader than most people think he was, in terms of literature, in terms of art.
He had a sort of melancholy view of this world. He used to call and tell me about these products coming, but he would doubt himself—and whether they would work or not. People focus on his being sort of an ogre in the workplace. But his intolerance was, I think, because he anticipated that he had this little window to make an impact.
When Steve died, throughout the world, people put flowers in front of Apple stores. The Economist did an article, saying that Apple was going to decline: “We haven’t seen anything revolutionary out of them since the iPhone.” I happened to know the guy who wrote the article. I had lunch with him, just to kind of educate him. So I laid out all of these on the table . . .
He starts laying out devices: a Sony Walkman, a Sharp organizer, a Palm Pilot V, an early generation BlackBerry, a Motorola Razr (one of the first flip phones), a DoCoMo phone, and a lineage of iPods and iPhones stretching from 2002 to the present.
Now, if you look at this whole thing—and I said this to the journalist—“Is this incremental improvement? Or is it revolutionary?”
We learn; each generation, we build on the last. And so, none of these on its own is really revolutionary. This one’s a music player. This one’s a phone. This one is both. This one does everything that is done in here, just with an app.
He holds up a set of vials of water with colorful sediment at the bottom.
And today, these are quantum dots. Each of those vials contains about three or four billion quantum dots, suspended in liquid. They are nanotechnology, “nanodots.” You can make transistors out of them. You can make medical devices out of them. Right now, those particular quantum dots are used as crystals. Each crystal can be tuned to a different color—you can create light—and through the quantum dots create a dispersion of true RGB color. These are what Samsung is using in all their new TVs. They make that stuff by the ton now.
I went from the first transistor to this vial. And now I’m on the board of that company!
This is how it works. You pursue the technology. That is the driving force. Everybody is pushing that edge, moving the tech, seeing where they can take it. And then that technology moves into our society. They call it “the tipping point.” The only problem with the tipping point is you can only see it in the rearview mirror.
HENDRIK DAHLKAMP
He specializes in teaching machines how to see. Born and raised in Germany, he came to California to study computer science and landed a job at Google working on the self-driving car. He left to launch his own start-up out of his apartment in SoMa. The living room is flanked on two sides with floor-to-ceiling windows. You can look out in 180 degrees and see nothing but sky and city, like you are floating above San Francisco. You can see all the way to the highways—which are jammed solid with cars inching their way east to the Bay Bridge and south toward Google, Facebook, and the peninsula.
“Disruption.” It’s a good buzzword, right? It sounds great, and people here love saying it. But it also responds to the optimization function, which I think is exactly right for society. It implies that there is an openness to actively think about how could you improve things, make things more efficient, better in some ways. It also implies some kind of fairness—that you have a meritocracy where the best idea or the best execution of something wins.
As an engineer, I have the luxury to think like a computer and not feel goofy about it—because if I would feel goofy about that, I would feel goofy about myself all the time. We’re trained to think in math, to quantify things, to think in terms of systems, to design system mechanics. So we are like the best of computers and the best of humans. We appreciate a good user interface from a bad one—and sunshine and nature and human interactions and whatnot. It’s just for work, we are trained to ignore those things.
I’ve known from a very young age that I wanted to do something with computers. I think I was eight: my uncle had a computer, and he went on a long vacation and left it in the basement. It was 100 percent English, and it had a text-only interface back in the day. That was 1987, and I spent all my free time in front of it. I had no idea what any of the words meant on the screen, but, when I typed this, then something happened. I managed to write a very short program, to play around with the word processor, print a letter. I wa
s always trying to figure out how to get new things from it, because I wanted to see it all.
Then, when I was twelve, Christmas, I got my own, a Commodore Amiga 500, and spent a lot of time in front of it. My parents put a time limit on it. I only had an hour a day, but that made it even more interesting to squeeze the most out of it.
I arrived here in September of 2004 to get my PhD, and by October, I was in the Mojave Desert. The research group I joined had started a really cool project, building a car that drives itself. There was a race called the DARPA Grand Challenge, 150 miles, autonomous cars racing through the desert.†
I built the computer vision: using a combination of lasers and cameras to figure out what the road looks like and to decide when we could drive faster and slower. In the desert, you just had to drive straight ahead, but on real roads, you had to look all around you for other cars, for lane markers and so on.
So we decided to just play with it. We drove every single street of Palo Alto. The sensors recorded everything. We put all of that data on a map: you could just click on any point and you saw the panorama of the street. The tech wasn’t all that complicated, but it made for a pretty cool demo because you click on any address and get immersed. You could hit a button and travel along the road.
Larry Page, the CEO of Google, he loves self-driving cars. He’s a big alpha geek in technology. He actually came to the DARPA Grand Challenge. Half my team joined Google and quickly built up a fleet of these cars, not just one. We had a hundred cars in the country and four hundred worldwide. We turned the mapping function into a product that became Google Street View.
The vision always was to have cars take over driving—that you don’t have to worry about it at all. You can sit in the back and relax and read or get on with your life. You get your car to drive you from A to B and then the car does something else: picks up your kids or gets rented out or whatever.
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