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The war for America's thumbs
The stakes are huge and the combatants are mighty -- who will win the war for video-game console supremacy?
By Greg Costikyan
[10/21/99]

Professor cyborg
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Technology: View from the top
Stoking the Net's growth
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[10/18/99]

The Hollywoodization of venture capital
The business of funding tech companies has gone gaga for brand names and boffo deals. "Visionaries," though, may be out of luck.
By Mark Gimein
[10/15/99]

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Adventures in Silicon Valley
Hilarious and incisive, Michael Lewis' "The New New Thing" captures the elusive spirit of Silicon Valley.

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By Mark Gimein

Oct. 22, 1999 | It's a testament to Michael Lewis' achievement as a chronicler of Wall Street that no matter how much and how incisively he writes, the single phrase that will always follow him will undoubtedly be Big Swinging Dick. Anyone who has read his first book, "Liar's Poker," will recall Lewis' appellation for the cowboys who pulled in the big bucks on the Street in the junk bond-besotted '80s.

In his preface to "The New New Thing," his new book about Silicon Valley, Lewis calls his tale "an old-fashioned adventure story." He's right, of course (why shouldn't he be? It's his book), but there's more to it than that. "The New New Thing" is an old-fashioned adventure story with the old-fashioned arc of a Bildungsroman -- a biographical novel. The biography is of Jim Clark, a onetime professor of computer science who came to Silicon Valley, started three companies -- Silicon Graphics, Netscape and Healtheon -- and became a billionaire. A simpler way of putting it, though, is that "The New New Thing" is the story of how Jim Clark became Silicon Valley's Biggest Swinging Dick.

Like all Lewis' writing, "The New New Thing" is funny. It is funny in a wry, carefully observed way -- "Gibagibagibagiba," babbles a baby unfortunately brought to a gathering of investment bankers. It is funny also in a slashing, profane way: "Clark's friends who did not know Ed McCracken," writes Lewis of Clark's early nemesis, "came to believe the man's name was Fucking Ed McCracken." Yet what makes "The New New Thing" an exceptional book is not how funny it is, but how closely it sticks to a mission of investigating the mythic properties of Clark's singularly mercurial character.

The New New Thing By Michael Lewis W.W. Norton 277 pages Buy The New New Thing

Books about the culture of Silicon Valley have proliferated in the last year. Some, like David Kaplan's "The Silicon Boys" or Joshua Quittner and Michella Slatalla's book about Netscape, "Speeding the Net," have touched on the same themes, and even the same characters. The difference between Lewis' book and the others is that, put bluntly, "The New New Thing" is a lot less about Silicon Valley than it is about a greater and much more ambitious theme -- the clash between the two cultural archetypes that drive our economy. You can call this clash the showdown between the farmer and the locust.

The farmer and the locust are my words, not Lewis', but they seem to me to capture the starkness of Lewis' vision. In his view of the world, there are very few farmers and a lot of locusts. The farmers of Silicon Valley are the scientists, engineers and programmers who come up with the technologies that make the next big thing. They are the ones who design the machines and write the code. They are stubborn, impossible to manage, contemptuous of the traditional mores of American business and intermittently brilliant.

The locusts are everybody else. The Big Swinging Dicks of Wall Street. The venture capitalists with their term sheets, their valuations, their craven battles to get into the next hot deals. The company psychologists and middle managers. The Serious American Executives -- especially the Serious American Executives. Or maybe, on second thought, especially the glorified money managers of the banks and venture capital firms.

The farmers, as you've probably guessed, come up with the goods. The locusts grab the rewards. "The New New Thing" is about how Clark, an engineer, learned to think like a very powerful locust and chased the other locusts off the field.

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