by Thomas Scoville

Silicon Valley in the 1990s has earned a place in history, that much is clear. But just how it will be characterized is still more than a little up in the air: is it the cradle of a New Age of Humanity, or just another variation on the same old gold-rush?

There are at present a precious few certainties: The Silicon Valley is the prime destination for global legions of fortune-hunters. The personal web site has replaced the electric guitar as the preferred adolescent power-object. And judging from the escalating price of real estate in this region of Northern California, something very, very big is going on.

And whatever it is, it appears to be blowing away the conventional wisdom about wealth, careers, and class. So of course, we’d all like to understand.

The problem is, it’s a very tricky story.

One of the greatest difficulties facing the chroniclers of the Silicon Valley scene is the conspicuous absence of narrative handles. The place is singularly beige on the surface, with little notable architecture, few recognizable landmarks, tracts of mammoth, homogenous office parks and miles of faceless, sun-baked expressways. There is, in short, little to see; most of the real action is frustratingly abstract, played out in the mind or on the wire.

There are other translation problems, as well: even in these times, when many Grandmothers have gotten the hang of logging on and buying books from Amazon.com, Silicon Valley is still cloaked in formidable language and difficult concepts; there are relatively few essential details that can be communicated without extended engineering treatises or baroque infotech digressions. It seems the fires of digital innovation also generate a lot of smoke, and it’s hard for the casual observer to penetrate the fog.

In the face of this challenging subject matter, Po Bronson’s new book, The Nudist on The Late Shift, is a good -- and sometimes brilliant -- attempt at nailing down the Silicon Valley zeitgeist. Certainly Mr. Bronson has done his homework, and, with the sure eye of the journalist, has come as close as anyone to rendering a coherent and compelling account of the Silicon Valley life and technological landscape.

Clearly he struggled with many of the same difficulties as did other information technology bards before him. In particular, the disorienting chaos and rapid pace of change make the construction of a tidy, linear drama highly improbable; he has chosen the more prudent path of attacking his ferocious subject in less ambitious, but attainable pieces.

Which is what The Nudist on The Late Shift is, ultimately – a collection of loosely-related studies and anecdotes of life in the Valley: “The Newcomers”, a menagerie of young hopefuls who flock to this digital Oz, often with nothing more than a business plan and a plane ticket; “The IPO”, an account of the Valley’s most popular rite of spring; “The Programmers”, a portrait of the bit-twiddling cognoscenti who do the heavy lifting of the information age; “The Salespeople”, a Margaret-Mead-style infiltration of the new breed of digital pitchmen selling at the speed of electrons; “The Futurist”, a flight into the rare air of the technomancers plumbing the industry’s volatile futures, and “The Dropout”, a side-trip into the mind of one of technology’s uber-geniuses -- only this particular genius has neither lived nor worked in the Silicon Valley. No matter; it was one of the livelier passages, and the Silicon Valley is, ultimately, a place in the mind more than a slice of geography. The final Chapter, “Is the Revolution Over?”, promises an answer to the conspicuously overhanging question of how long this frenzy of productivity (or madness of crowds, depending on your level of skepticism) can endure. Disappointingly, the reader’s expectations are shortchanged by a haphazard patchwork of more thinly drawn episodes and oddball characters.

There are a very few details that break the Insider’s spell -- in particular, his black-box approach to describing programming culture. In the zone where vaporware condenses into product (or not), the storytelling itself is a little airy. And at the risk of seeming peevish, it’s also hard to take seriously an account of the Silicon Valley that so willfully and consistently misspells the name of one of its most mightily congested commute arteries, the Dunbarton [sic] Bridge. As a commuting programmer, I stared down the barrel of that span, cursing, for years; its name is burned into my own catalogue of hells.

Po Bronson has capably captured the enthusiasm and hyperkinetic energy of an eminently notable place and time, and his demonstrated ability to burrow into the Valley’s back rooms and hidden chambers in search of detail is more than a little impressive. Yet he has resisted imposing too much structure on his fast-moving subject, having gripped the element of constructive anarchy that has eluded others: the Silicon Valley, far from a centrally-planned technocratic utopia, is most fruitfully imagined as a wildly profitable train-wreck of technology, weather, nerds, venture capital, and brazen carpetbaggers.

Still, there’s something of the awe-struck fan in him. And perhaps his over-the-top enthusiasm is justified -- after all, the Silicon Valley just may be the story of the Century (or the Millennium, as its more manic boosters insist). On the other hand, the Silicon Valley has a kind of protean, all-things-to-all-people quality these days, twisting itself into a number of promising apparitions that have yet to resolve. In the age of science-fictional NASDAQ P/E ratios, it’s difficult to completely shake the notion that the Silicon Valley – and all of the attending hyperbole and high tech dynamism – is important largely because everybody says it is. If this turns out to be the case, The Nudist on The Late Shift may turn out to be nothing more than artful cheerleading.

Still, it’s a good read. And in the face of considerable pent-up curiosity about the Silicon Valley as the century’s main engine of economic creation, it may be a noble public service, as well.

I takes more than a little courage to take on the Silicon Valley story. After all, we’re still in the midst of it; nobody really knows how it will end. And in the absence of any substantial certainties, an engaging storyteller is always a welcome fixture.