The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

by Michael Lewis

In the second part of the 1990s Silicon Valley had the same center-of-the-universe feel to it as Wall Street had in the mid-1980s. There was a reason for this: it was the source of a great deal of change.

Silicon Valley is to the United States what the United States is to the rest of the world. It is one of those places, unlike the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but like Las Vegas, that are unimaginable anywhere but in the United States. It is distinctively us.

For that matter, there is no name for what he’s looking for, which, typically, is a technology, or an idea, on the cusp of commercial viability. The new new thing. It’s easier to say what the new new thing is not than to say what it is. It is not necessarily a new invention. It is not even necessarily a new idea—most everything has been considered by someone, at some point. The new new thing is a notion that is poised to be taken seriously in the marketplace. It’s the idea that is a tiny push away from general acceptance and, when it gets that push, will change the world.

It’s one of the little ironies of economic progress that, while it often results in greater levels of comfort, it depends on people who prefer not to get too comfortable.

But he is, in this case, representative: a disruptive force. A catalyst for change and regeneration. He is to Silicon Valley what Silicon Valley is to America. And he has left his fingerprints all over the backside of modern life.

Progress does not march forward like an army on parade; it crawls on its belly like a guerrilla. The important events in capitalism no longer occur mainly in oak-paneled offices, if indeed they ever did. They can happen in the least likely of places. On a boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, for instance. As it turned out, the main character of this story had a structure to his life. He might not care to acknowledge it, but it was there all the same. It was the structure of an old-fashioned adventure story. His mere presence on a scene inspired the question that propels every adventure story forward: What will happen next? I had no idea. And neither, really, did he.

Often starting with the best intentions, or no intentions at all, he turned people’s lives upside down and subjected them to the most vicious force a human being can be subjected to, change. Oddly enough, he was forever claiming that what he really wanted to do was put up his feet and relax. He could not do this for more than a minute. Once he’d put up his feet, his mind would spin and his face would redden and he’d be disturbed all over again. He’d thought of something or someone in the world that needed to be changed. His new boat was a case in point.

I lobbed into the haze a series of conversation starters before he took a swing at one of them: a book I had first mentioned a few weeks before, Thorstein Veblen’s The Engineers and the Price System. Veblen was a quixotic social theorist with an unfortunate taste for the wives of his colleagues in the Stanford economics department. Between trysts he coined many poignant phrases, among them “leisure class” and “conspicuous consumption.” Back in 1921 Veblen had predicted that engineers would one day rule the U.S. economy. He argued that since the economy was premised on technology and the engineers were the only ones who actually understood how the technology worked, they would inevitably use their superior knowledge to seize power from the financiers and captains of industry who wound up on top at the end

Clark had no great hope that Americans wanted their computers to educate themselves. He assumed they wanted their computers to play Nintendo and otherwise divert themselves from the poverty of their existences.

If you page through his talk on the telecomputer, you can see just how chance favors the prepared mind. The presentation Clark made to his board back in 1992 is a fair blueprint for the Internet boom. All of the ideas (e-commerce, e-mail) and some of the technology he dreamed up for his beloved telecomputer were grafted onto the Internet.

Dick Kramlich, who came up empty-handed, was upset. But the venture capitalist up on Sand Hill Road who called Clark most often, and who sounded the most upset, was Glenn Mueller. Throughout March 1994 Mueller called Clark repeatedly and pleaded to be let in on Netscape. He apologized for the way he’d treated Clark at Silicon Graphics. He said that he agreed with Clark. The Internet, not ITV, was the future. On April 1, 1994, Clark told Mueller for the last time that he would not be permitted to invest in Netscape. Mueller was calling from his sailboat, off Cabo San Lucas. He pleaded with Clark one last time, and Clark rebuffed him. On April 4, 1994, the day Netscape was incorporated, Mueller picked up a gun and shot himself through the head. He died instantly.

In other words, he suffered from an extreme version of a mental disorder that many Silicon Valley tycoons prided themselves on, paranoia. The genealogy chart of Silicon Valley companies that decorated the walls of every office—Shockley spawned Fairchild, Fairchild spawned Intel, Intel spawned…) was a cheery face on a violent truth. The new companies often put the old ones out of business; the young were forever eating the old. The whole of the Valley was a speeded-up Oedipal drama. In this drama technology played a very clear role. It was the murder weapon.