The Silicon Valley Tarot
Sometime in early 1998 I had this weird idea for a simultaneous satire on The New Economy/Silicon Valley and The Occult. Couldn't you reinterpret the Tarot in the context of the high tech biz? You know – The Fool becomes The Hacker, The Hierophant becomes The CIO, The Wheel of Fortune becomes The IPO, etc.
I wasn't really an artist, and I didn't know any artists at the time, but I did have the conspicuous example of Dilbert's Scott Adams, who can't draw his way out of a paper bag. So I just doodled the cards myself, scanned them, did the most basic of Web-smithing, and put them up for my colleagues' enjoyment.
I called it the Silicon Valley Tarot, of course.
Okay, I created a monster. Somebody at Associated Press ran a national story and suddenly It was the flavor of the week. It was Netscape's Cool Site of the Day; it was USA Today's Hot Site; The San Jose Tech Museum gave it some sort of award. A number of newspapers, magazines, and trades piled on: The San Francisco Chronicle did a print feature and an online feature. The San Jose Mercury ran a story. ZDTV did a TV segment. . TechWeek did an article. Business Week did a writeup in the March 2000 "Up Front" section. Newsweek did a story. CIO Magazine did a blurb. Information Week did a story around October 1999. Public Radio International covered it in "Beyond Computers." San Jose TV station KNTV did a feature piece in November 1999. I got a publishing deal, with Steve Jackson Games.
Enough, already.
A number of funny stories came out of that experience. Like this one: a conspicuous number of hits early on in the life of the SV Tarot came from Paul Allen's Interval Research, which at the time was supposed to be the breeding ground for any number of Next Big Things. I cautioned them, via a radio interview: “Listen, guys, this is for entertainment purposes only. This is not to be used as a substitute for actual innovation.”
Or this one: I originally approached US Games with the Silicon Valley Tarot. They're the Tarot publisher of record for Planet Earth; they publish a zillion flavors of Tarot decks. I told them I had gotten all this attention and people were burning up the Web site – 200,000 hits a day at the peak. They hit me with all these submission requirements: I had to submit a draft in triplicate, I had to send it registered mail, blah blah blah. Um, no, I said, it's all right up there on the Web. Go have a look. No, they said, not the way we do business, et cetera. So they missed publishing one of the most hotly collected Tarot decks of the late 20th Century. Because they didn't get it.
And I still get email from Silicon Valley consulting companies who use it – some only partly tongue-in-cheek – to make critical business decisions. Which is why it says on the box: “Cheaper than a consultant. Same results.”
