Technically Speaking

The Nudist on the Late Shift and Other True Tales of Silicon Valley

Braodway Books, 256 pp., $14.95 (paper)

Nobody will ever accuse the players of the high-tech world of being very outwardly interesting. All those old stories of brash twentysomethings raking in twentysomething million dollars overnight have gotten really very commonplace. So-and-so was a genius, but so-and-so was just lucky. So-and-so's mother even went public. What a bore! Still, chronicler Po Bronson, author of last year's The Nudist on the Late Shift (recently released in paperback), has spent a lot of his time and energy trying to find the pathos and the zeal of Silicon Valley in hopes of creating a defining picture of what has, in a very real sense, become the Holy Land of hardcore capitalism. What he comes up with is a nicely researched collection of tales and anecdotes that do very well at presenting the dreams and the struggles of high-tech entrepreneurs, but fall sadly short of putting the Valley in the exalted historical context that he aims for. In the end, though, it is not Bronson who fails -- it's all those damned players themselves.

And Bronson doesn't hide the fact that he's trying so very hard to capture something historical, something lasting and worthwhile, in his work. He describes the wave of newcomers to Silicon Valley with a bravado that makes the rhetoric of New York and the Statue of Liberty at the start of the 20th century seem strangely modest: "They feel they are being offered a neo-Faustian trade-off by society: all of life's sprawling dimensions will be funneled through the narrow pipe of the career path." Later, he engages himself in a serious debate over whether the Valley is more like Florence during the Renaissance or California during the Gold Rush.

As absurd as these historical models may seem, Bronson seems to be rooting very sincerely for his folks in the Valley to make it big -- even Renaissance big. He is sober enough to admit that the odds are stacked high against them and that a great many people will leave Silicon Valley with nothing in their pockets. But he loves them for taking the risk, for being so young, for still eating ramen noodles after the millions come in. Surprisingly, he misses out on a thorough comparison of the high-rolling techies to a more recent model -- that of Wall Street in the 1980s. Perhaps that's too easy, or too greatly expected. But Bronson, who has written about that other boom, too, must know that like the massive glamour of Wall Street, Silicon Valley's reign will eventually diminish, or change in some drastic way. Maybe it already has. But Bronson's apparent hope is for an elite that he calls a true meritocracy, along with all the contradictions that such an idea entails. Multimedia