The success of the Apple II enabled the firm to open an automated factory in Fremont in 1981, where labor counted for exactly i percent of costs, and to begin working on the Macintosh (Mac). Jobs and designer Jerrold C. Manock wanted something that looked like a Cuisinart, the newnew kitchen accessory then, so suddenly the computer was in an upright case, a small monitor imbedded in the top, with a detached keyboard. Most of the activity consisted of clicking on icons with a mouse, moving things around the high-resolution graphics screen, playing games, and drawing pictures; the memory was so capacious that the Mac needed a brand-new 3.5-inch disc from Sony, instead of the ubiquitous 5.25-inch floppies. The new factory meant the Mac cost only $500 to build, but a $15 million advertising blitzincluding the fabled Super Bowl commercial attacking IBM not just as Big Blue, but as the realization of Orwell"s -984 (in January of that year)-bid up costs. So the Mac came out very high at $2,495-and sold 72,000 in the first 100 days.49 It was that rarest of consumer products-entirely novel, does what it says, way ahead of the field, and thus capable of creating its own cult of worshippers. As in: "There are occasionally short windows in time when incredibly important things get invented that shape the lives of humans for hundreds of years": the Macintosh "was one of these events" (Steve Wozniak talking).S0 Also-Ran Billionaires.
Larry Ellison"s big break came from a CIA-funded database management project code-named Oracle at a company called Ampex. It never got off the ground, so Ellison left Ampex in 1977 with two other employees, started a company, and bid on another CIA contract to build a "specialized" (to say the least) database. The new company, founded in Santa Clara, was dubbed Software Development Labs. Its grubstake was small (Ellison put in $1,200 for a 6o percent stake, and his two friends put up $400 each), but the most sheltered market of all was waiting with baited breath in Langley, Virginia. They began working furiously on "relational database" technologies that IBM had pioneered and which had been around for several years, trying to make them fast, reliable, crash-proof, and small enough for minicomputers. As Ellison"s firm developed newer and better ways to make this software "portable"-able to interact with any hardware or operating system-the business took off. Ellison purloined the CIA"s code name and became chairman and CEO of Oracle in 1982; sales doubled annually in the 198os, but when Oracle went public in 1986 the stock price increased only 45 percent-because Microsoft went public on the same day (March 12). Ellison kept his hands on every share he could grab, however, and soon became the most flamboyant and profligate billionaire in the Valley-and as a notorious recluse and martinet, the one with the least interest in "the HP way." What the CIA did for Ellison is clear: it subsidized Ellison"s first commercial project for relational database software in 1979. No information is available on what he did for the CIA, but the CIA, the National Security Agency, Navy Intelligence, and the air force kept his work going (Ellison had only twenty-five customers in 1981), buying database management packages at $48,000 a crack."
We have seen that the wizards running Xerox pa.s.sed on commercializing many of the innovations developed at PARC, but one of their biggest hallucinations came when senior staffers irritated DARPA (ARPA had changed its name, adding Defense) by setting too high a price on the many PARC Alto workstations it wanted to buy, so DARPA found out about Stanford University Network (otherwise known as SUN) workstations and sought to buy those instead-but Stanford wasn"t selling. Other companies like IBM and 3Com couldn"t or wouldn"t fill the order. So with two other Stanford grad students, Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy (the latter a Stanford MBA recruited at a McDonald"s in Palo Alto), plus Bill Joy from Berkeley, Andy Bechtolsheim founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 to build workstations, using off-the-shelf hardware and the Berkeley UNIX system that Joy had helped to develop, and began selling them to DARPA. Sun gave away much of its software, like Network Filing Systems, which then became the industry standard-whereupon Sun would have hardware built to the new standard and license it out. Conscious that he was in a business with maddeningly short product cycles, Bechtolsheim relied on a myriad of small Silicon Valley suppliers to keep making Sun machines better. With constant improvements to RISC (reduced instruction set computing) and SPARC processors, Sun kept ahead of giants like IBM and DEC from the mid-198os into the late 199os, by which time it was a flagship Silicon Valley behemoth.52 Jim Clark was born in Plainfield, Texas, and studied computer science at Utah before moving to Stanford. He always loved airplanes and was mesmerized by figuring out how they could be displayed using three-dimensional graphics. In the summer of 1979 he moved in next door to Lynn Conway"s office at PARC, took graphics technology that she and others had developed, combined it with what he and his students had been doing on an ARPA contract, worked like a dog for four months, and came up with the "Geometry Engine," a 3-D graphics chip that became the core technology of his startup, Silicon Graphics.53 But it was Netscape that made him a billionaireor more particularly, Marc Andreessen and six other students at the University of Illinois.
The technology for Internet browsers now in such wide use barely existed in 1992, when Andreessen was a twenty-one-year-old Illinois student working at its federally funded (that is, ARPA-funded) National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), writing UNIX code for $6.85 an hour. His older buddy Eric Bina, a programmer at this center, thought An- dreessen"s rudimentary ideas for a browser were good enough to take off three months so they could both work night and day amid empty Mountain Dew bottles and Skittles wrappers, until they had written 9,000 lines of code for a simple graphical program that would overlay the World Wide Web, display photos and other multimedia, and have commands anyone could master: they called it Mosaic and offered it to Web users for free. I still remember the day in 1994 when I watched a colleague download it and begin using it. Mosaic was an instant sensation, doing for the Internet "what Vatican II did for Roman Catholics," in David Kaplan"s words, by putting UNIX into general vernacular usage. Now anyone could point a mouse toward an icon and click and connect to "a universal, boundless library of information," without paying someone, getting government permission, or requiring any knowledge of the quarter-century of hardand software development making it possible.54 Soon Andreessen was off to Silicon Valley where Jim Clark had bright ideas about how to commercialize Mosaic"s success.
At the peak of the bubble Clark was the genius-protagonist of Michael Lewis"s best-selling The New New Thing (Clark had "a new form of power," he wrote-Clark-power: "if anyone was going to predict the future it was him"), but more interesting is how he became a billionaire by taking the brains and the money to be found at the Stanford-Pentagon-business nexus and running away with it, with no apologies and no look back; most interesting of all, he can"t keep his mouth shut when he clearly would be advised to do so, because he has an ego the size of Alaska ("only Alaska?" he would say). Clark was a smart computer scientist in the right spot at the right time, "chance favoring the prepared mind," as the saying goes, and little more. But to hear him tell it, it was all his genius and anyone who disagrees is an idiot. He convinced Michael Lewis and many others that any number of other people"s inventions and ideas were his. In fact Clark founded both Silicon Graphics and Netscape by grabbing other people"s ideas and taking credit for everything. At Silicon Graphics he was "the technology visionary, business leader, organizer, and founder," according to him; at Netscape he went one better, he was everything-"the monarch."55 Clark"s first prophetic vision came to him on an ARPA contract to develop "tools for computer-aided design." He set several doctoral students to work on the project, and soon he and one of them, Marc Hannah, had created the Geometry Engine-with a lot of help from PARC and Lynn Conway (but neither merits the slightest mention in the book Clark wrote). Of course he wanted to take his chip "public," and Stanford-being Stanford-was entirely accommodative: "If you did the thinking, you deserved the credit," the university believed; "If you started a company, you deserved a profit." Stanford unquestionably benefited mightily from its many accommodations, since Valley billionaires know how to give back.56 But the system seems to be this: you get a secret contract from ARPA and put students (funded by Stanford or themselves) to work, migrate over to PARC to see what"s going on at Xerox"s expense, pick brains and codevelop a new-new thing, and then take off with barely a thank you: Clark"s self-described "revolutionary" discovery abruptly "ended my academic career and began my business career," where he was soon producing "dazzling machines." To paraphrase Mel Brooks, it"s good to parlay a Stanford professorship and a top-secret Pentagon contract into becoming a wealthy monarch-or Lawrence of Arabia meets the Valley, or Alexander Graham Bell, take your pick from his book.57 When Clark departed Stanford and PARC with his "Geometry Engine" under his wing to found Silicon Graphics, he became an instant millionaire. But he nonetheless felt that Sand Hill venture capitalists had screwed him, taking the lion"s share of the income-so now he wanted to found his own company with his own capital. In early 1994 he had yet to hear of Mosaic (it appears that I learned about it before he did) and ultimately made no technological contribution to it, but a young employee told him about it, and about Andreessen. "I knew a good thing when I saw it," Clark wrote, and so he decided to bankroll a "Mosaic-killer." Andreessen felt he hadn"t gotten enough credit for his work at Illinois, so he and Clark flew to ChampaignUrbana amid a snowstorm and made pitches to six others in the Mosaic group. Clark offered salaries of about $65,ooo to $8o,ooo each and a quite generous i percent of the company"s stock-but by then he didn"t have to worry about "vulture capitalists" (he also called them "velociraptors") controlling things. Instead he went over to Sand Hill Road and made offers most of them could refuse: put up $5 million and get a quarter of Netscape, which Clark valued at $zo million (when it had three employees), about three times what Clark had put up: but the canny John Doerr bit and soon watched his $5 million turn into $765 million. There was the trifling problem that Illinois owned the rights to Mosaic, which the group got around (or so they say) by writing all new code from scratch in another shambling night-and-day mosh pit of crushed soda cans, crumpled candy wrappers, and dirty underwear. Mosaic-renamed Netscape-launched one of the great stock openings in American history in August 1995. The underwriters expected to sell 5 million shares for twelve to fourteen bucks each, but interest was so high that it opened at $28 on August 9 and quickly hit nearly $75 before settling back to $58-and making Clark half a billionaire overnight."
There you have it, again: Illinois"s National Center for Supercomputing Applications was yet another ARPA project, Mosaic was a new-new thing built there and teleported to Palo Alto where it was re-created "from scratch" and then taken public with a reward of billions. True, Andreessen and his cohort created Mosaic in the first place: "created it" by taking three months to add graphics and user-friendly items to an existing Web browser invented in Geneva, Switzerland, by Tim Berners-Lee, who gave it away free. The University of Illinois gave it away free, too, providing fantastically expensive Cray supercomputers on taxpayers" money so students like Andreessen could use them (virtually for free) at a great public university that always has given enormous value to Illinois and the nation. Larry Smarr, director of NCSA, had the antediluvian idea that since the university had provided the expensive framework and paid for the work, it owned Mosaic.59 Clark says that "armies of the young" have made this revolution, just like teenage combat marines fight the great battles: stamina, "near-trancelike focus," a mild insanity combined with a belief that you"ll live forever, working in the present but thinking only about the future-"the future, Mr. Gitts." It is true, but then it"s also true of millions of other teenagers fanatically flailing away at computer games, who resemble Bob Newhart"s infinite number of monkeys banging on an infinite number of typewriters (who will eventually write all the world"s great books). The laser-like focus gets us closer to the kind of method Einstein touted, which is to work on a problem with as much concentration as one can muster over a long enough period of time, waiting for an intuition to appear out of nowhere-accidentally, blindly, like a natural mutation. But all Einstein needed was chalk and a blackboard, not a Cray supercomputer. So maybe Larry Smarr had a point? The Pentagon"s ARPA and the ARPANET cost taxpayers a lot, too, as did the CIA"s Oracle project, but Clark sees it all as free goods, wrapped up with "sixties altruism" about giving things away for free. The University of Illinois had the gall to imagine profiting by "producing software with public money": "I didn"t want them dead," Clark wrote, but he certainly wanted the profits from Mosaic in his own pocket-and of course, altruist that he is, the pockets ofAndreessen and his group. After an intellectual property lawsuit, in the end Clark and the university reached a still-secret settlement that cost Netscape $3 million.60 Clark also thought the sunny Valley had a lot to do with his Mosaic coup: it barely took him a day to tire of Champaign-Urbana, the lousy University Inn, the "typically mediocre" Italian food with "Chianti-in-a-basket," and snowy Illinois more generally. Vast reaches of the Middle Border no longer attracted chic masters of the universe born in Plainfield, Texas. "Mosaic glinted like gold in the stream at Urbana"s very own Sutter"s Mill," and this pathetic university expected the profit to come to it, rather than to "the best and brightest of the university"s students who had done the work." In the relative nano-moment between Netscape going public and getting sold to America Online, Jim Clark was the master of the Silicon Universe. Venture capitalists flocked around him like Labrador retrievers, according to Lewis, and one of them, Glenn Mueller, even committed suicide when he couldn"t get in on a particular deal.61 Jim Clark was a cla.s.sic entrepreneur in Schumpeter"s sense: building firms based on others" innovations. Soon, however, he was just another Valley billionaire.
While Clark was romancing Andreessen, Jerry Chih-Yuan Yang was working on a doctorate in electrical engineering at Stanford and beginning to make inroads into the WASP leadership of Silicon Valley that soon became a flood, as Asian-Americans made up between 3o and 40 percent of the Valley population in the late 199os and about a quarter of Valley executives.62 Yang, who came to California from Taiwan at age ten and was raised by his widowed mother in San Jose, spent his elastic quota of grad-student spare time in an office trailer with his friend and fellow grad student with nothing better to do, David Filo, playing fantasy basketball-and winning the league. Mosaic, however, had turned them into that new-new thing, Web addicts: they put up their personal Web sites, searched the Web for outlandish oddities, tracked sports scores and sumo wrestling tournaments, subsisted amid category 5 Katrina-style offal, and gradually began to work up a subject list of interesting sites-acc.u.mulating "hyperlinks" as they are known. The categories: news, sports, science, recreation. Soon (late 1994) they had a Yellow Pages all their own, "Jerry and David"s Guide to the World Wide Web." Timing was everything; before Mosaic there wasn"t much of a Web, but now it was growing like topsy so someone had to try and put another "overlay" on the overlay of Mosaic: a search engine. Yellow for yellow pages (and the Asian explosion?) became the color, but what would be the name? Well, it wouldn"t be Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle, this new company, so let"s just call it Yahoo! It was another brilliant Valley triumph over the way things were done everywhere else, juvenile all the way to the bank; Yang and Filo captured in five letters the vitality and verve of the exploding Internet era, where brand name was suddenly everything (Yahoo or Webcrawler? Google or Lycos?). In 1995 Yang and Filo offered Sequoia Capital a 25 percent stake for Si million; that turned into almost $8 billion in 1999, and by the end of that year Wall Street valued Yahoo at $91 billion.63 Today workers fill the myriad purple cubicles in its Sunnyvale campus trying to find ways to stay abreast of Google.
A Googol Here, a Googol There...Pretty Soon It Runs into Real Money.
In the mid-199os the Internet was clearly the next new thing, but the question was how to make serious money off it. Michael Wolff tells of a 1996 visit to the Basking Ridge (New Jersey) headquarters of former mega-monopoly AT&T-"the kind of structure that might be erected in an oil-rich one-party state"-where self-important moguls sat around trying to figure out how to turn the Web into a cash cow. If someone could create "the ultimate navigational system" for the Internet and then "create a product that can habituate the customer" so that you make just a penny a day off AT&T"s 8o million customers, voila, a horn of plenty.64 But they didn"t do it, and neither did anyone else; no one could figure out how to "habituate the customer" and start real money cascading through the Internet. The Web was just another catalog business, however easy and convenient-Sears Roebuck on steroids. Maybe the Internet was nothing more than a communications system, Wolff thought-a hyperfast take on the culture itself, and not a very good one: "contentwise [sic] it"s 99 percent dross," a bunch of fads and trends mixing with larger forces (like history and society) about which it remained clueless.65 Beyond catalog shopping, no one was making serious cash. Most amazing of all, Microsoft"s geniuses couldn"t figure it out, either, they were behind the curve all through the 199os and at this writing, they still are. Then Google came along-or was it TREC that came along, in an unlikely place?
Page and Brin superseded Yang and Filo as famous Stanford grad students-c.u.m-entrepreneurial stars, starting Google up in (you guessed it) a rented garage at 232 Santa Margarita Avenue in Menlo Park, but "search" began in the singular town that magically channels all the worst winter weather through its portals-Ithaca, New York (doubtless down there with Urbana on Jim Clark"s Chianti-in-a-basket list). Around the time that the ARPANET flashed into being, so did SMART-Salton"s Magical Automatic Reviewer of Text. Gerard Salton, a Cornell computer scientist, came up with seminal ideas like "concept identification based on statistical weighting and relevance algorithms based on feedback from queries." So began another long technological slog through the decades, often via the annual Text Retrieval Conferences (TREC) that Salton"s work inspired and that heralded the newest state-of-the-art techniques. TRECkies weren"t very interested in the Web, but Larry Page and Sergey Brin were; their first "pitch" of Google in 1996 ran something like this: "The primary benchmark for information retrieval, the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC 96) uses a . . . "Very Large Corpus" benchmark [of] only 2oGB compared to the 147GB from our crawl of 24 million Web pages. Things that work well on TREC often do not produce good results on the Web."66 If you can understand that, you can begin to understand that twenty gigabytes is a flea-flicker"s notion of capacity, a flyspeck on Google"s terabytes today.
Soon this dynamic duo had a crawler called BackRub that not only collected millions of sites but ranked them as well, through algorithms that they understand and I don"t-and neither do you. Google algorithms are the best in the business, and as closely guarded as Bill Gates"s operating systems; instead of searching for acne ointments and getting the Web site of a teenage werewolf in Dubuque, your friendly algorithm locates those sites judged best (or most popular) by everyone else looking for the same thing. BackRub thus returned robust results, while AltaVista and Excite gave you trivia. Best of all, as John Battelle put it, this search engine would scale as the Web scaled, that is, "the bigger the Web got, the better their engine would be." So they changed BackRub to Google after googol, the name mathematicians give to a i followed by ioo zeroes. The first version of Google was on Stanford"s Web site in August 1996. Trouble was, it required such mind-boggling capacity that it took up nearly half of the university network"s bandwidth. Within a year or so, however, Valley moguls were starting to cough up a lot of money (Brin and Page celebrated their first $1oo,ooo at Burger King), along came John Doerr again, and by 2ooo Google was sitting alongside the hailstorm of traffic on Highway ioi in Mountain View, with about 15o employees.67 Google"s motto is "do no evil." What does it mean? It might just be another iteration of "Valley uniqueness," or graduate student innocence, or good public relations; the firm has the requisite sloppy dress codes and lunch volleyball-but PARC had that forty years ago. Page and Brin validated their motto when they took Google public in August 2004: Wall Street had to stand aside and witness one of the first stock offerings in American history where insiders and dominant firms had not cornered most of the value already. In a complicated Internet auction, anyone with a hundred dollar bill was able to make a bid, and basically if you bid above $85 you ended up with a share-or many shares. Wall Street clairvoyants had valued the stock at anywhere between $2o and $9o, but it settled around $85 and then pa.s.sed $700 in 2007. As the stock escalated, Google also resisted the urge to split it, the sleight of hand Wall Street uses to fool the incognoscenti.
In the first years of the new century Brin and Page showed everyone how to sell advertising profitably on the Internet, just like on the radio in the 192os, while keeping ads to a relative minimum (text boxes rather than irritating pop-ups). Through AdWords anyone with a credit card could post an ad on Google, through AdRank the most popular ones went to the top of the heap, and then after much experimentation, Brin and Page figured out how to charge customers only when someone actually clicked on their ad. It seems counterintuitive; people may only click on one out of a thousand ads. But the googols are so wildly humongous (AT&T was right about that), and the incentive to post free ads until someone notices them so overpowering, that Google can make a ton of money.68 Valley Outliers: FYIFV Seattle and Austin.
Beyond the Valley there are two other places where you find successful hightech firms in the West: the Northwest (mostly Seattle, but also Portland) and Texas (mostly Austin). Across the lake from Seattle is Redmond, the lair of Jim Clark"s hydra-headed monster Microsoft, run by an "utterly ruthless" tyrant and a couple of other "badly dressed geeks"-arch-monopolist Bill Gates and his friends, who built their Evil Empire in "misty, mossy Seattle (of all places)." Or maybe he"s the Kim Il Sung of Bellevue, surrounded by a cult of personality and craving his daily hit of hero worship.69 Or he might just be a compet.i.tive son of the WASP bourgeoisie and their nonostentatious genteel tradition, transplanted to misty-mossy Seattle: home in Laurelhurst, summers in the mountains, private school at Lakeside, Harvard education, corporate career, a man of bland ambition about whom cultish folks might ask, what personality? Well, that was more or less Bill"s father (except that he didn"t go to Harvard) -corporate lawyer, pillar of the community, board member of charities and universities, and entirely typical of the publicspirited upper crust of a city having none: no Brahmins, few Irish or blacks or Hispanics or Jews, just G.o.d-fearing white folks who got there first, a mere hundred years before Bill Gates was born.
William Henry Gates Jr. wasn"t quite that early, arriving in the i88os and then quickly departing for Nome during the Alaska gold rush. He returned to found a secondhand furniture business in Bremerton, across Puget Sound from Seattle, prospered in "dry goods" and soon belonged to "virtually every civic organization and social club in the area." William Henry Gates III was born in 1925, served in the army in World War II, studied not at Harvard but at the University of Washington, and made his best move when he spied a Kappa Kappa Gamma girl called "Giggles," Mary Maxwell, "vivacious social dynamo" on campus but more important perhaps, granddaughter of the founder of the National City Bank of Seattle. Grampa died in 1951, just when Bill and Giggles got married, remembering to leave an estate worth half a million dollars.70 Bill Gates and Mary Maxwell lived well but modestly in the View Ridge neighborhood, where their son-William Henry Gates IV, inexplicably called Gates III like his father, ergo his nickname "Trey"-was born in 1955, and where he went to grade school. It wasn"t ostentatious, but Bill and Mary knew everyone, including people like Dan Evans (as in Governor Evans) or Brock Adams (as in Senator Adams), and Bill Sr. became famous for his role in an ant.i.trust case against the whitest white of them all, Wonder Bread. Like the Kennedys, they exhausted themselves competing against each other in outdoor sports, swimming, skiing, races, games, and puzzles. Nor did the unostentation last long; by fourth grade the family was in a large home in sw.a.n.k Laurelhurst, with a much-coveted panoramic view of Lake Washington. Thence it was Bill to Lakeside, Bill to Harvard, and Bill to MS-DOS immortality.
A friend of mine spent most of her career working at Lakeside, and over dinners I would hear one story after another about the latest rowdy exploits of the egregiously spoiled brats at this all-male school and the hovering, wincing, cowering teachers-c.u.m-therapists who gently sought to cajole the boys to stop vomiting on each other or blowing up the toilets. But it was Seattle"s most exclusive prep school with a lovely transplanted New England campus, and it was rich enough to have an ASR-33 Teletype machine, not too different from what Bill Taylor had in the D-Ring at the Pentagon-except that ARPA wasn"t paying for it (for once) so it cost $8 an hour, with additional bucks for storing your data. The Lakeside Mothers Club rode to the rescue by making the ASR-33 their worthy cause of the year 1968 and piled up enough cash so that "a runty freckle-faced eighth grader" could proceed to hog it for hours on end. If that wasn"t enough, the university had just installed Seattle"s first stateof-the-art Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-io computer, a "minicomputer" compared to IBM mainframes but still very powerful, and was selling time on it to Boeing and other local firms. A staffer at the computer center had a son at Lakeside, and he thought it might be nice to let him and his friends have some free time on it to see if they could get "bugs" out of it or even try to "crash" it-which they did every Sat.u.r.day morning. Bill Gates whiled away his Sat.u.r.days learning BASIC, FORTRAN, and DDT-io ("Dynamic Debugging Technique"). Then he met Paul G. Allen, who could exhaust his university librarian father"s computer-time account, and the free hours on the PDP-io just kept on expanding. Soon DEC itself was asking the kids to try and crash newer and newer programs, and they routinely obliged.71 It was something like being Henry Ford"s test-driver and handyman in r9io, careening around Dearborn in Model Ts to see if they break down or crash.
Bill Gates in his salad days at the Lakeside School. Courtesy of Lakeside School Archives.
In 1972 Gates and Allen did the same thing Jobs and Wozniak did: they built their own computer, using the 8oo8 chip that all the computer geeks coveted. Paul Gilbert in the university physics lab knew hardware (Gates and Allen were and always have been strictly software experts), and together they built the vaunted Traf-O-Data to automatically count cars in Seattle"s mostly empty streets (thanks to the Boeing bust). But Bill had also busted out his SATs with a perfect Boo in math, so it was a normal Laurelhurst story after all: off he went to Harvard, in fact to the ever-popular Wigglesworth Hall, where he roomed with one black and one Jew, as if someone had thought it all up in advance to give a Seattle boy some broadening. He didn"t date and he got a C here and there, but at least he was out of the suite most of the time (more than one acquaintance found him obnoxious) because he was now mesmerized by a video game called Breakout-which happened to have been developed for Atari by Jobs and Wozniak.72 And in his second year he got to know someone who could pa.s.s in any Seattle country club.
Steve Ballmer doesn"t quite come off as a nerdy geek or even a nasty guyrather an outgoing, good-natured, strapping would-be jock who grew up in a Detroit suburb, the son of a Ford executive who aced so many math and science tests that he got into Cal Tech and MIT but went to Harvard, where he inadvertently hit the jackpot when he walked into Currier House in his soph.o.m.ore year and found that Bill Gates was his new roommate. Gates soon dropped out to join the computer revolution; Ballmer graduated, but by 198o he was helping Gates run Microsoft"s finances, and he was instrumental in the somewhat notorious deal that purchased a program called "86-DOS" (also known as QDOS for "quick and dirty operating system") for $5o,ooo from Tim Paterson of soon-to-be-history Seattle Computer Products, and the even more notorious (to Steve Jobs and Jim Clark) deal with IBM that followed on its heels to put "86-DOS," excuse me, MS-DOS, into every IBM personal computer-and all the clones, too-which meant into nearly every office in America and soon, most of the world. The next month (August 1981) IBM unveiled its personal computer, and within a decade there were 5o million IBM-compatible PCs on American desktops.73 Selling the computers or the clones, however, was much less valuable then selling the MS-DOS operating system because profit margins on it ran to around 9o percent-and then came the real ringer: once the IRS or the FBI or your "health care provider" teaches millions of employees how to use the program, wild horses won"t make them change. It"s like telling a baseball player the pitcher now gets to stand fifty feet away, or you can use your hands in soccer because that"s how they do it in basketball. It"s the principle of the QWERTY keyboard: it may not be the best arrangement, but it"s been around for over a century and rearranging the keys would cause a general panic, so it persevered into the computer age. Change won"t happen, you will just upgrade when Bill says it"s time. Nearly i billion computers worldwide ran Microsoft operating systems in 2009.
In Seattle if not the Valley, Microsoft was the gentle lamb to Boeing"s rough beast, the city adored it, and the city fathers all knew Bill"s dad. They also loved its sensational stock opening in 1986. Before the public offering, local newspapers said anyone could buy shares at $i8 a pop. The stock hit almost $28 on its first day, and anyone who held onto a thousand shares at $i8 until the late 199os became a millionaire several times over (the stock lost about 5o percent of its value when the bubble burst, and some unwise souls wrote the company off).74 When Microsoft moved to its Redmond campus, that is, to 400 wooded acres called Evergreen Place next to a development called Sherwood Forest, it was accompanied by a ch.o.r.eographed reiteration of Silicon Valley customs: no pecking orders, no obvious management privileges, no clocks on the walls to encourage workaholism, volleyball nets and basketball hoops for breaks, the earliest birds into the parking lots got the best spots, and it didn"t matter if they wore shorts and sandals, and cafeterias offered everything from burgers to tacos to veggie to Thai.75 (As always, keeping labor unions at bay was also in the mix.) It looked like a college campus (or a minimum security prison), and the people in it looked like college kids; some called it testimony to the flat leading the bland. But at least in the early years there was an admirable esprit de corps and absolute dedication to one"s work, so it is hard to know why so many people hate the new Big Blue; Silicon Valley with its up-to-the-gills saturation in secret Pentagon contracts, user-friendly Stanford pliability and Ellison/Clark/Jobs-style megalomania rarely attracts invective like the Evil Empire: "a fraternity of rich eggheads"; "softies" with their FYIFV b.u.t.tons ("f.u.c.k you, I"m fully vested"); callow, white people who"ve never worked anywhere else; profanity (no!); a "supremely aggressive" and intensely smug and insular culture; "slavish fealty" and "zombielike [sic] devotion to the Maximum Leader" (and that"s just one author).76 Perhaps a certain WASP-strikes-back element excites this anger-but again, why not in Silicon Valley, too?
Bill Gates moved on to a more distant relationship to Microsoft and to Rockefeller-like philanthropy as America"s perennial richest man, but Paul Allen used his software billions to truly remake himself as an incident to remaking Portland and Seattle. Famously reticent and sequestered (a reporter likened public glimpses of Allen to "Big Foot sightings"), he bought the Portland Trail Blazers (basketball), the Seattle Seahawks (football) and, some say, much of both cities. In 2006 one of his companies, Vulcan, was promoting an eco-friendly "New Urbanism" by constructing a io-million-squarefoot biotech hub in the drab and seedy industrial district south of Lake Union (that is, downtown Seattle), including a dozen or more fifty-story condo towers that will house io,ooo workers, while another $ioo million went into the "Allen Brain Atlas," a project hoping to chart the entire neuro-anatomy of the human brain, not to mention $240 million for a rock-and-roll emporium in tribute to Seattle legend Jimi Hendrix. Meanwhile Allen lurks about in his own private submarine and works out of Captain Kirk"s Star Trek chair, leading some to wonder if he"s squandering his $zo billion nest egg on realizing childhood fantasies."
Texans Can Do High-Tech, Too.
Texas Instruments had a provenance just like Hewlett-Packard and Varian. It originated in the 193os as a small seismograph producer for the oil industry called Geophysical Services, but during the war this Dallas company expanded dramatically by producing electronic devices for the military, like airborne radar systems and submarine detectors. The firm changed its name in 1951, and a year later, after coughing up $25,ooo for a license, it began producing transistors, mainly for the Pentagon during the Korean War. Silicon was much harder to work with than germanium but infinitely available (on the beaches of the world among other places), and after Texas Instruments (TI) hired Gordon Teal away from Bell Labs, in 1954 his team mastered the art of making chips with high-purity silicon. In May he attended the National Conference on Airborne Electronics in Dayton, Ohio, and heard one speaker after another talk about how impossibly hard it was to make transistors from silicon. When Teal"s turn came he mounted a podium, gave his scheduled talk about TI"s recent research, and then closed by telling his audience that TI had already made silicon transistors-"I happen to have a few of them here in my pocket." TI"s Pentagon business had dropped by twothirds after the Korean War ended, so the firm went commercial by making cheap transistors for the world"s first pocket radio, originally priced at $49.95. It sold ioo,ooo units in 1955-and sold out all over the country. But TI wasn"t making a decent profit on the radio because its four transistors were too expensive, so they got out of pocket radios and settled on producing transistors for what clearly was a high-volume market for this new-new thing.78 Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka got to know each other in 1945 when they were desperately trying to build heat-seeking missiles to take down American B-29s blasting j.a.pan"s cities. Ibuka, an electrical engineer and by 1952 the president of Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo (Tokyo Electronic Industries), visited New York and told Morita that the enemy nation, America, was actually rather fantastic: "Buildings are brightly lit until late at night. Streets are jammed with automobiles. This is a stunning country!" Like Texas Instruments, the two men forked over $25,000 (a fortune in war-ravaged j.a.pan) for a license to produce transistors. Soon they had a prototype radio, a few months after TI"s portable hit the stores. But would Americans buy a radio from a company whose name they couldn"t p.r.o.nounce? The two friends found the Latin for "sound" in a dictionary-sonus. But sonus was not mellifluous, so after more cogitation they got it right-and Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo became Sony.79 If Sony quickly cornered the market that TI had created, a six-foot-six Kansan named Jack Kilby wandered the empty halls of Texas Instruments during its mandated July vacation time in 1958 (as a new hire he had no vacation days), wondering how the army"s "Micro-Module" program, which stacked silicon wafers together like poker chips, could be made to work more simply. How about putting everything-resistors, capacitors, transistors, and diodes-on a single silicon chip? Within two months TI had fabricated the vaunted "monolithic chip" that everyone else had been trying to make. Almost at the same time, Robert Noyce and Jean h.o.e.rni at Fairchild Semiconductor hit on a similar chip that wrapped the silicon wafers in oxide layers, drastically reducing impurities and thus creating "planar" surfaces. Once oxide-sealed, these chips were impervious to external jolts or shocks and seemed to last forever. Unfortunately for Kilby, Noyce landed the patent for the integrated circuit. (It was just what the air force was looking for, but Texas has congressmen, too, so the air force also bought TI"s new chip.) Then John F. Kennedy"s plan to put a man on the moon combined with the ever-present cold war struggle to keep a ravenous (if sheltered) market growing wildly for Fairchild, TI, and other Sunbelt firms all through the 196os (in 1962 the government bought every single integrated circuit made in America). Meanwhile more established companies like AT&T hesitated to disrupt their existing markets, machines, and networks with these miniaturized marvelselaborations of what Bell Labs had first invented but for which they had little immediate need.80 Another prominent Texas high-tech firm, Tandy, became the largest ma.s.s retailer of electronic goods and made 40 percent of all personal computers sold in 1980. It worked closely with Microsoft to bring out the Model 2000 three years later-a more powerful version of the PC which could run an early version of Windows (which was so powerful it made IBM PCs grind to a halt) and would have a built-in market: nearly 8,ooo RadioShack stores around the country distributed Tandy products. The first Windows computer! But as Robert Cringely put it, the brains behind RadioShack back in their Fort Worth headquarters thought of their trusty customers "as Albanians who would loyally shop at the Albanian Computer Store" regardless of what other stores might be selling. The Model 2ooo was a total flop-except at RadioShack stores, which each got one to keep inventories whether they liked it or not.81 It got better for Texas after three Texas Instruments engineers-Rod Canion, Jim Harris, and Bill Murto-got together at a House of Pies in Houston and used a placemat to lay out the architecture of an IBM clone. It would be ioo percent compatible with the IBM PC but, with artful corner cutting, about $8oo cheaper. Compaq PCs first appeared in Sears and ComputerLand stores in 1982, and then took off like Don Garlits: 47,000 computers worth $111 million sold in its first year. It got even better when an eighteen-year-old University of Texas undergraduate started clearing as much as $30,000 a month by selling "gray market" PCs from his dormitory room and went on to found Austin"s Dell Computer, as in Michael Dell.82 But when all was said and done this was cloning, not creation. Compaq and Dell possessed ma.s.s marketing genius (and Dell still does); these firms helped contribute to Texas"s position as the leading state in merchandise exports in 2005 (California was second, New York third, and Washington fourth). Except for Texas Instruments,83 though, technological virtuosity still resided in Silicon Valley.
Perhaps hoping to remedy this imbalance, in 1988 fourteen firms funded a semiconductor research and manufacturing consortium in Austin called Sematech, into which the Pentagon plowed $ioo million a year. The idea was to share the costs of early product development and think and plan for the long term thus to compete with the j.a.panese, who were thought not only to be dumping chips unfairly, but to be state-guided visionaries who planned for the distant future. Robert Noyce came out of Silicon Valley and retirement to run it. Sematech had a complex and checkered history, but it validated Austin and the University of Texas as the winning candidate for "Silicon Elsewhere," as thousands of high-tech jobs were created in the 198os and branches of Intel, IBM, Advanced Micro Devices, National Semiconductor, and other firms sprouted nearby, and home-grown Dell became the world"s leading merchant of personal computers. But running Sematech meant very long and draining working hours for Bob Noyce, and within two years he died from a ma.s.sive heart attack. This towering figure in American high-technology history was a mere sixty-two years old.84 Texas was hardly bereft when it came to government contracts. Politicians, preeminently Lyndon Baines Johnson, made sure that a lot of federal pork detoured through Texas before heading out to the coast. We have seen that NASA"s Manned s.p.a.ce Center started up southeast of Houston in 1961 (it is now the Lyndon Baines Johnson s.p.a.ce Center), a Pentagon-subsidized aircraft industry was the core of Fort Worth"s economy, and San Antonio remains dependent on several nearby military bases. After a succession of accidents and calamities, however, NASA was closer to a national embarra.s.sment than the high-tech center of the future, and many called for simply shutting it down. Austin remains the high-tech nexus of the state, but it is a mere shadow of Silicon Valley.
Conclusions: Daily Life at Warp Speed and the American Position in the World Silicon Valley had a long, dilated beginning from the day that Charles D. Herrold began stringing his radio wires in San Jose, flying under the radar of the nation until Bill Gates and Steve jobs made most Americans an offer they couldn"t refuse: a computer all of their very own with magical and maddening qualities, which ordinary beings contemplated like Cro-Magnon man staring at fire. If steel mills couldn"t be hidden from the day they started belching smoke, the silicon chip was a perfect, un.o.btrusive machine to infiltrate the Valley"s garden. It remains the most important research corridor in the country-and the world. The Valley was clearly the most productive node in the American economy in the 199os, but it probably was since the r9,5os, in value-added per employee-where Valley productivity is not only very high compared to other sectors but even higher across its own industries compared to the same industries in the rest of the country. By the mid-r99os the Valley produced more than a third of California"s exports, making San Jose the leading exporting city in the United States; even after the bubble burst it was still ranked second in zoo6 (behind Seattle).85 There is unquestionably something startling about Silicon Valley and its Pacific Coast rival Seattle-you can read book after book on semiconductors and computers and barely find a mention of Route 128 or MIT (well, Shockley) or Harvard (OK, Lotus 1-2-3) or Yale (?). What makes the difference? AnnaLee Saxenian"s definitive study attributes the decline of Route 128 to a host of weaknesses: confrontational politics, a difficult labor market, weak social networks, companies too large to change, Harvard not being a flexible coupling like Stanford, Puritan heritage, hierarchy and authority instead of an egalitarian and democratic working culture, all combining to explain the absence of the kind of synergy so obvious in Silicon Valley. She adds that Stanford had a very different relationship to Washington than did MIT: both were up to their ears in open and secret contracts, but Stanford was far and MIT near, so people ran up and down the Bosh-Wash corridor spending many fruitless hours cultivating policy networks.86 I would add that the Valley and Microsoft were also a continent away from the prestige and power of the elite corporations and universities of the Northeast quadrant, providing a realm of freedom for experimentation, particularly for young people like Bill Gates or Steve jobs who clearly couldn"t care less about the prestige or posturings of IBM and AT&T, Harvard and Yale.
The geography of firms in Silicon Valley. Map by Bill Nelson.
Doug Henton found four cycles in the technological development of what he aptly calls "Innovation Valley" in the last half-century: (i) a "defense" wave starting in World War II but taking off during the Korean War; (2) an integrated circuit wave in the 1970s; (3) a personal computer wave in the 198os; and (4) an Internet wave in the 1990s.87 I would add a radio wave a century ago, a Stanford-Varian-HP (micro)wave in the late 193os, a transistor wave from 1947 to 1970, and a defense wave that started in the late 193os and has never quit, with military procurement acquiring almost all transistors and integrated circuits until the consumer wave began in the 198os, and with Washington agencies either buying high-tech products or sponsoring research leading to electronic mail, the Web, 3-D graphics, Web browsers, and many other technologies. In other words, this was a direct continuation of the profound role of the central state in the development of the Pacific Coast, and probably the most important of all in its impact on cutting-edge technology and American leadership in the world. This industry has been the avatar of American technological prowess, the essential basis of its awesome military reach, and the critical reason why the American position vis-a-vis its industrial rivals has barely changed since they reestablished themselves after World War II.
However it happened, it is a fact that it happened on a particular crust of the earth on the edge of the Pacific, and no other nation has such a sprawling realm of advanced industries up and down one lengthy, protean coast. Across the Pacific are East Asian counterparts of the Valley, in j.a.pan, Korea, Taiwan, and now China; in high technology the North Pacific is already a Braudelian Mediterranean. Absent a distant and wide-open West Coast, it is entirely questionable whether the same thing could have emerged in the industrially crowded Northeast or Midwest. Relying on its comparative advantages, from the late 19306 onward Silicon Valley grabbed Noah Cross"s "future," that ingrained California thing, and ran away with it-occupying the horizon of advanced industry, where it remains today.
The history of government, business, and university collaboration makes it difficult to really call the Valley a unique "habitat for innovation and entre- preneurship."88 Elsewhere in the world important innovations and efficient production have not required start-ups and "synergy" in a valley distant from the core-they have gone on in centralized megacities and even old industrial centers like Paris-Sud, London"s M-4 corridor, and the megalopolises of Tokyo and Seoul. Valley innovation has been non-stop, and visionary entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs exist, but most of the crucial innovations have come from a ma.s.sive river of cash generated on the other side of the continent in Washington, the energetic labors and self-exploitation of smart young people, and the vision of early leaders like Terman, Hewlett and Packard, Noyce and Moore, who founded a new and eminently questionable relationship between secret work for the Pentagon and the CIA, the ostensibly open university, and the profit-oriented corporation. It is not a question here of judging this,89 but of saying, this is what happened, and absent state funding and an accommodating university, it probably wouldn"t have.
In the 199os California got a new kind of farming to add to the good old days of wheat and citrus-"server farms"-because of another huge comparative advantage that it shares with the Pacific Northwest: an abundance of cheap electricity. In 1995, 20,000 server farms existed, and six years later, 6 million; Google"s are the biggest and best. Contrary to popular opinion, they gobble gargantuan amounts of electricity: in recent years a single server farm typically used as much electric power as the Twin Towers in New York. Even your wireless Palm Pilot requires the electricity of a heavy-duty refrigerator, but you don"t see the stream of power because the guts of the industry are sitting in un.o.btrusive but hugely expensive air-conditioned buildings, housing servers, routers, fiber-optic cables, and the immeasurable stored-up human and mental labor that runs the system.90 Google has a thirty-acre server complex along the banks of the hydroelectrically bountiful Columbia River in The Dalles, historic terminus of the Oregon Trail and the site for Henry c.o.ke"s elegiac tribute to wide rivers, high mountains, and tall pines. Google"s ever-deepening algorithms are wonderful if you"re looking for an old girlfriend or a new plastic surgeon or a hotel in Delhi lacking bedbugs-or perhaps you just want free e-mail. As always, however, your democratic government was way ahead of you. Under the Patriot Act of zoos the National Security Agency got the right to riffle through all your e-mail messages and searches on Google, Yahoo!, and anything else in cybers.p.a.ce. Naive Americans thought this couldn"t be done without a judge"s warrant, but right after September ii the Bush administration began secretly tapping into the ma.s.sive communications junctions that now unite all of us. The NSA requires Google or Sun or Verizon or any other company to place security traps and trace devices along its junctions and circuits in the United States and around the world.91 So it isn"t clear if we"re in the realm of Silicon Valley free play or we"re realizing Kubrick"s 2ool dystopia.
Once we cease to distract ourselves with lifeless arguments about isolationism, we shall be amazed to discover that there is already an immense American internationalism. American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American machines and patented products, are in fact the only things that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognizes in common.
-HENRY LUCE, 1941..
An immense democracy, mostly ignorant, and completely secluded from foreign influence ... with great contempt for history and experience, finds itself in possession of enormous power and is eager to use it in brutal fashion against anyone who comes along, without knowing how to do it, and is therefore constantly on the brink of some frightful catastrophe.
-E. L. G.o.dKIN, 1895.
eneath the immense bleached sky, the Pacific states form the earthly margin where we run out of continent-where "things had better work out," as Joan Didion wrote, because there was no place else to go. By and large, all things considered, they have: the American Pacific Rim is more than a facsimile of the hopes and dreams of nineteenth-century leaders and prophets. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow materialized immediately, before the ink was dry on the treaty ending the war with Spain, but the built environment of today, from the Puget Sound down to Coronado Bay, would flabbergast visionaries from that time, even full-throated believers in Manifest Destiny like Thomas Hart Benton. Sparkling cities-Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego-punctuate the coastline with three different paradigms of flourishing, urbane civil society. The highly productive continental economy remains the standard by which all other countries define themselves. For all its problems, the United States is still a recognizable contemporary version of the hopes of people like Benton 150 years ago.
The North Pacific can now be circ.u.mambulated in eight hours on a Boeing 787 from Seattle to Tokyo. A couple of hours on, and you"re in Shanghai-a contemporary version of Chicago rising on the prairie, or Los Angeles bringing the city to the valley and the valley to the city. Shanghai distills the talent flowing out of two grand river valleys, just as China deploys an enormous market for the world economy, for the first time in world history. There"s "no place else to go" for the Pacific states but to China-and vice versa. Americans are again turning around to face West: will that face be martial or pacific, comprehending or unworldly? Today Americans show two faces to the world: an arbitrary, nationalist, militarized face, and the heritage of Atlanticist internationalism, predicated on a first-among-equals sharing of a common democratic heritage. In the new century American leaders committed every imaginable sin in John Quincy Adams"s book of foreign policy calamities. A catastrophic failure to understand the real sources of American strength and the uses and limits of military force propelled the world toward a darkening horizon and drove anti-Americanism to unprecedented heights on all continents. Paradoxically, however, Henry Luce"s prophecy on the eve of Pearl Harbor still offered a dream for everyman, and a hope that the country would return to its ideals. "The mark of a living civilization is that it is capable of exporting itself, of spreading its culture to distant places" Braudel wrote," and America still held a very long lead over any compet.i.tor in doing just that.
A Pacific Coast Still Facing East.
One hundred and fifty years ago the United States dismembered Mexico on the way to making a continental union, which immediately brought Pacific influences pouring into the country-Mexicans and Indians in the Southwest, and tens of thousands of Chinese laborers to dig out the gold and build the railroads. The gold rush was the catalyst for an instant and diverse peopling of California, and for sending new waves of technology and innovation washing over the state ever since. It also stimulated movement across the Pacific, symbolized by Perry"s mission. But did this create a new Pacific culture? Oregon and Washington quickly achieved a settled system that is a manifest extension of the New England pattern. Texas and California created new versions of American culture, but not new cultures. F. Scott Fitzgerald"s The Great Gatsby is probably the best example of an American genre that we might call "the eastern": someone out of the Midwest or West tries to make good in the citadel of wealth and culture, New York or Boston or Cambridge, and fails. In facing East it discloses an inferiority complex. After so many years have pa.s.sed, has the Pacific West (or at least California) established a self-confident alternative cultural sphere?
For Kevin Starr the "coast of dreams" had truly become an East-meetsWest reality by the early years of the new century, which he called "Zen California." At its foundation was "a feeling of integration, of mind-body well-being," drummed into the soul through a thousand purveyors of Asianderived practices: guru incantation, tortuous yoga postures, mind and body detoxification, Shiatsu and friction ma.s.sages, Ayurvedic potions, anointing with oils (shirodhara) and hot towels (abhyanga), "Bliss Facials," gourmet vegetarian meals, holistic childbirth, and career/lifestyle a.s.sessments with your Chopra counselor-and this is just the regimen at one spa, the Chopra Center for Well-Being in La Jolla. Starr also surveyed the rapid growth of Eastern religious influence, like the Novice Buddhist Academy in Long Beach, poet Gary Snyder"s works (which Starr thinks infuse the California landscape with Zen meaning), and "the most trendy" new-new thing, unnamed Tibetan fetishes popular in Hollywood. If Edmund Wilson"s "void of the vast Pacific" was ever true, it isn"t now: "Pacific Rim Culture, of California as of Asia, dominates the demography and consciousness" of our time.2 If we examine "Zen California" demographically, no doubt California is America"s most Asianized state among the contiguous forty-eight. Thirty percent of the population in Silicon Valley is Asian, about half a million Koreans live in a transformed central Los Angeles community west of the Harbor Freeway called Koreatown, then we have Chinese in Monterey Park, Vietnamese in Orange County"s "Little Saigon," Cambodians in Long Beach, Laotians in Santa Ana, Samoans in Compton and San Pedro, Little Manila in Daly City just south of San Francisco, Hmongs in the Central Valley, and Asian Indians who grew to 314,819 in the state by 2001.3 But in what sense beyond the aesthetic, the exotic, and the demographic has Pacific Coast culture come to dominate or even influence European and Atlantic civilization? Isn"t this just a predictable evolution from the Theosophists" Raja Yoga School in San Diego a century ago or Barry Goldwater"s first cousin, Julius Goldwater, who was ordained as a Zen priest in the 193os?
Zen California encompa.s.ses New Age baby boomers and their offspring looking for something out of the ordinary. But it remains another choice in the vast consumer inventory, another means of coping with advanced industrial society-often a mere affectation, an epidermal addition; it doesn"t remotely have the impact on individuals or the nation that, for example, Southern California Christian fundamentalism has had, and when it tries to influence national politics it instantly prepares its own defeat (witness Governor Moonbeam, Jerry Brown). The New Right is unquestionably a western phenomenon, beginning with Barry Goldwater and gaining its lasting momentum with Ronald Reagan. But in the end that, too, is a reaction to the cultural and political dominance of eastern liberals, recuperating the virtues of the frontier and small town America.
Today "facing West" is for the unilateral extension of American military power, for trade and for exotica, all running on entirely separate tracks. CINCPAC looks after the whole, widgets crisscross the Pacific in containers, and Asian exotica excites the curiosity of adults with disposable income. Buddhism in the Big Sur, a Noguchi lamp for the study, yet another sushi restaurant on Geary Avenue, L.A. Laker basketball coach Phil Jackson"s "Zen" hocus-pocus, Oracle-founder Larry Ellison"s full-tilt j.a.panoiserie at his "Sanbashi" mansion in Atherton. "The Orient has repeatedly offered a line of flight" from the ba.n.a.lity of American daily life,4 but it is usually no more than that-a temporary flight of the spirit, an aesthetic touch, a penchant for unthreatening Orientalia.
The intellectual traffic across the continent and the Pacific is still mostly one way: an enormous American literature-best sellers, novels, historybooks, social science texts, biographies, self-help guides-continues to be produced in the East and consumed in the West; it gets translated into j.a.panese, Korean, and Chinese, but traffic the other way is slight. The words of Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington, or Francis f.u.kuyama are dissected in East Asian capitals, while specialists on foreign affairs in East Asia use American theories to understand the world." The very best literature from East Asia gets translated (sooner or later), but the bulk of what the reading public consumes there does not; in a field like history, hardly anything from East Asia reaches the general reading public until it is translated into English and published here-and since that reading audience is small to begin with, little gets translated. Asians see nearly all our films; we view a mere handful of theirs, mostly in the dwindling stock of repertory and art cinemas around the country. Films with Asian themes that do big business usually traffic in exotica: Quentin Tarantino"s excellent Kill Bill is a highly stylized kung fu movie. Memoirs ofa Geisha-both the blockbuster book and the less-watched movie-offered Orientalia, but it enters a place in the American mind scarcely different from Pearl Buck"s The Good Earth.
Our newspaper of record, the New York Times, covers East Asia much less than Europe or the Middle East. The second largest economy in the world gets attention in the business pages, but otherwise articles about j.a.pan appear when another typhoon or earthquake strikes, or when a new prime minister comes along, or when another cultural oddity gets unearthed (new and voluminous stipulations for recycling garbage in Tokyo, people lining up around the block to get into a noodle house that seats eight people, etc.). China gets attention mainly for its unfortunate human rights situation, its booming economy, and its "looming threat," but when Jiang Zemin was China"s president, the Times twice referred to him as "President Zemin." North Korea hogs almost all the press from that peninsula, so long as a "nuclear crisis" endures and Kim Jong Il provides such good copy, but major events in South Korea easily pa.s.s unnoticed here.
A friend of mine taught at the Naval War College and was amazed to find that few officers read the op-ed page of the New York Times or had even heard of its columnists. Why? Because it is impossible to follow policy debates in the Bosh-Wash corridor without reading it, and this paper of record remains the daily national arbiter of what"s what in culture, the arts, books, theater, films, fashion, real estate, food; only the Wall Street Journal beats it for business news-and it"s also in New York. Across the continent, intellectuals strain to pay attention to the Times. But what do you say about the premier Pacific Coast newspaper putting its editorial and opinion pages in the hands of the same Bosh-Wash elite? In zoos East Coast transplants were managing and deputy managing editors of the Los Angeles Times, New Yorkers ran the editorial page and the op-ed columns, and they reported to Michael Kinsley, former editor of the New Republic and Harper"s. The whole paper was "looking east for direction."6 Apart from local news and issues, there really is no counterpart to the eastern papers, so they dominate elite circuits.
America has continuously shaped and been shaped by its Atlantic and Pacific dimensions, but the Atlantic influences remain dominant-something that owes as much to inertia as to any other force, to a longstanding mobilization of Atlanticist bias that overwhelms most of our inst.i.tutions. Our secretaries of state spend nearly half their time visiting Europe (41 percent of foreign trips in 1977-85, 44 percent in 1997-2004) compared to about 12 percent for East Asia, even though our trade with East Asia surpa.s.sed trade with Europe by 1980 and towers over it today (in 2000, United States imports from East Asia alone were higher than our total trade with Europe).7 In polls taken in the 199os more people in j.a.pan than in the United States could name our secretary of state, and the average American cannot name the j.a.panese prime minister-and in truth, can barely tell the difference between j.a.pan, China, and Korea. As usual, though, it is the educators who most need educating. High schools still persist in teaching French and Spanish, and if you"re lucky to be in a good one, German. University curricula make room for the serious study of East Asia, but when compared to the settled academic ballast of Europe-the "West" of Allan Bloom"s or Samuel Huntington"s imagination -there is no comparison.
The neglect of America"s Pacific history manifests itself inadvertently, in gen