“What do you do here?” Steve demanded.

“I’m wrapping things up.”

“You mean that in a while you won’t have a job?” Steve shot back. “Well, good, because I need someone to do some grunt work.”

What a strange way to motivate people, Jim thought. Then again, it was a chance to work for a legendary figure.

It turned out that the “grunt work” would give Jim a close-up view of Steve’s deliberations about how to save Apple. The job was to take notes at the meetings where Steve would review every part of the company and decide what to keep and what to kill.

The gatherings were held in the boardroom, which was in the only high-rise office building on the low-slung campus. It had a panoramic view of the expanse of Silicon Valley. Steve would call in the head of a product team and all of its key players. Anywhere from a dozen people to three dozen would crowd around the long wooden table. They had to show Steve all of their existing products and expound in detail about their future plans. If they made physical products, like monitors, they had to bring models of their upcoming lines. If they wrote software, they had to run Steve through the features of their programs.

Steve’s attitude wasn’t confrontational. He wanted to absorb a vast amount of information before he took action. Still, there was always an undercurrent of tension, and Steve would occasionally upbraid people if they didn’t seem to realize the urgency of the situation. Gil had made extensive cuts, but Steve was going to cut a lot more. Steve said that he would keep only the great products and the profitable products. If something were unprofitable but strategic, its managers would have to argue for its continued existence.

During the first review meeting with a group, Steve would listen and absorb. In the second meeting, he would ask a series of difficult and provocative questions. “If you had to cut half your products, what would you do?” he would ask. He would also take a positive tack: “If money were no object, what would you do?”

The series of group meetings helped Steve to get to know hundreds of people at Apple. And once he knew the players, he would deal with them directly. He had total disregard for the hierarchical chain of command. He would remember what several hundred people did and call on whomever he needed, always bypassing their managers. It was as though everyone in the company reported directly to Steve himself. “Steve has the ability to buffer so much in his head,” Jim Oliver explains. “He can remember the last conversation and the last e-mail exchange that he had with 300 people.”

He put especially intense pressure on the top executives. He tormented Heidi Roizen with constant calls to her office phone, home phone, cellphone and pager, starting at 7 a.m. almost every day. She was so unnerved by his interrogations and his frequent tirades that she decided the only way to preserve her mental health was to ignore his calls. She tried to communicate with him only by e-mail, which enabled her to consider the issues calmly and rationally, unaffected by the irresistible force of his compelling live presence.

Heidi talked with Bill Campbell, whom Steve had named to Apple’s board of directors. Bill was a bona fide tough guy, a former college football coach, but he confessed that he, too, was unnerved by Steve’s constant phone calls.

“Do what I do,” she advised him. “Don’t answer the phone.”

“That’s what my wife said. I tried that. But then Steve would come over to my house. He lives only three blocks away.”

“Don’t answer the door.”

“I tried that. But my dog sees him and goes berserk.”

In his first month as “interim CEO,” Steve began walking around the office carrying a sleekly curved piece of white foam. It was the model for the size and shape of a computer, which would eventually become known as the “iMac,” for “internet Macintosh.” It was the creation of Jonathan Ive, who was 30 and looked more like a scruffy bicycle messenger or skateboarder than the chief designer at a major manufacturer of consumer products.

While the physical look of the iMac had been conceived before Steve took over, everything else about the computer was still uncertain. Steve’s thinking was strongly influenced by his friendship with Larry Ellison as well as their unspoken rivalry. He believed the future belonged to stripped-down machines, called “network computers,” or NCs, that would connect to the Internet and cost only half as much as PCs. Larry had even started his own company, Network Computer Inc., to try to cash in on the idea.

Steve decided that the iMac would be a network computer. “We’re going to beat Ellison at his own game,” he told his Apple colleagues, who were surprised to see Steve secretly delighting in the competition with his best friend.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

In September, Steve began taking decisive action. Gil had cut the number of research and development projects from 350 to 50. Steve cut it from 50 to about 10. Instead of hoping for some stunning technical breakthrough that would save the company, Steve looked instead at improving Apple’s advertising and restoring its cool, hip image. He invited three ad agencies to pitch for Apple’s business, including Chiat/Day, which had created the famous “1984″ television commercial during Steve’s first run at Apple.

Chiat/Day still had the same creative director from the “1984″ campaign, Lee Clow, who came to Cupertino and proposed a new slogan: “Think Different.”

“That’s not grammatical,” thought Jim Oliver as he sat there taking notes for Steve. But no one in the room had the guts to say so.

Lee Clow said that the comeback of Harley-Davidson motorcycles was a good model for Apple to emulate. Harley’s advertising convinced people that they could feel its renegade spirit even if they were investment bankers rather than Hells Angels. It rehabilitated a counterculture icon for the baby boomers who had grown up and sold out.

That’s exactly what Apple needed to do.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Apple’s new advertising campaign came together quickly.

Steve had always liked photos of cultural icons. At his first house in Los Gatos, Calif., near his mattress, he had kept pictures of Albert Einstein and an Eastern mystical guru. Steve also loved black-and-white photography. He hung Ansel Adams prints at the Palo Alto, Calif., house. Those were the elements: the slogan, the icons, the monochrome tableaux.

The first outsider to see the new ads was Newsweek’s Katie Hafner. She arrived at Apple’s headquarters at 10 on a Friday morning for an interview with Steve. He kept her waiting a long time. Finally he emerged. His chin was covered by stubble. He was exhausted from having stayed up all night editing footage for the “Think Different” television spot. The creative directors at Chiat/Day would send him video clips over a satellite connection, and he would say yes or no. Now the montage was finally complete.

Steve sat with Katie and they watched the commercial.

Steve was crying.

“That’s what I love about him,” Katie recalls. “It wasn’t trumped up. Steve was genuinely moved by that stupid ad.”

On Sept. 30, 1997, Steve assembled Apple’s employees for an outdoor party — with beer and strictly vegetarian cuisine — to celebrate the new campaign.

He explained that Apple’s ads were going to convey an image and an attitude rather than simply describing a product. As a model, he talked about how Nike’s ads projected a sense of athleticism and success without even showing its shoes.

“Apple spends $100 million a year on advertising,” Steve said, “and it hadn’t done us much good.” They were going to continue spending $100 million a year, but now they were going to spend it better, he said, because now they realized that the Apple brand was one of the most valuable things they had going for them.

One of the employees in the audience was a young woman named Kate Adams. It was the first time she had seen Steve speak close up, and she was very excited. “It was a good — no, great — speech, delivered in a ‘I might sound like I’m musing but I’m damned sure of what I’m saying’ tone,” she wrote in an e-mail message to a friend.

Her friend turned out to be a software entrepreneur, Dave Winer, who wrote DaveNet, a column that he e-mailed to hundreds of the most influential people in the industry, including CEOs like Bill Gates and Michael Dell. To Kate’s surprise, Dave published her e-mail in its entirety: a long, detailed account of Steve’s talk.

The next day, Kate received a voice-mail message.

“Hi, this is Steve Jobs. I’d like to get together and chat with you.”

Steve’s voice sounded cheerful. What did he want? Was this some management theory of his, calling random midlevel employees and picking their brains for a while? Or was he pissed off by the DaveNet column?

Kate called Steve’s secretary and made an appointment. She didn’t sleep well that night. The next morning at 10 she entered Steve’s office. He was in the corner, typing on his Next computer. Steve relied on three computers, and none of them was a Macintosh. He had black Next machines at his home and office and a Toshiba Tecra as his notebook.

With his back turned away from her, Steve waved and told her to sit down.

Kate eyed a pile of “Think Different” T-shirts as she waited for four minutes.

Steve turned to her.

“Hi, how ya doing?” he said amiably. Then he held up a printout of her message. “Can you tell me what this is?”

Steve had “sniffing” software that could screen and search his employees’ e-mail.

“I was encouraged by your talk, and I just wanted to tell my friend Dave.”

“You realize this is the kind of thing that can be published?” he asked.

“Well, it already has,” she said.

“Do you realize this $100 million figure is proprietary?” he continued. His tone was serious and confrontational but not outright hostile.

As she was walking out, he said:

“By the way, what do you do in the Quicktime group?”

“I’m on the engineering team,” she said.

“OK.”

She escaped. She knew that if she had said “marketing,” she would have been fired. He still needed Apple’s engineers, but he had no respect for its marketing people.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Before Steve’s takeover, Apple people loved to leak. They did so partly because the company really did have lackluster marketing. If you were proud of your work, the only way to let other people in the industry know about it was to leak it yourself. A number of Web sites, like “Mac OS Rumors,” were devoted exclusively to Apple gossip.

Steve insisted on his old “loose lips sink ships” policy. At first the employees were incensed. Before long, though, they began to trust Steve to do Apple’s marketing for them.

Still, the Apple rank-and-file remained fearful of the Bad Steve persona. Word got around about Steve going into meetings, saying, “This is shit,” and firing people on the spot. People worried about getting trapped with him in an elevator for a few seconds, afraid that they might not have a job when the doors opened. The reality was that Steve’s summary executions were rare, but a handful of victims is enough to terrorize a whole company.

For a while there was an elevator in Steve’s building that had protective coverings on its walls because construction was going on, and someone said: “This must be Steve’s elevator since it’s padded.” Another employee responded: “Is it for him or for us?”

Apple needed some kind of shake-up. It was filled with people who had virtually ignored and ultimately outlasted three CEOs as they did their own things. “I don’t know if the previous CEOs at Apple had any effect on that company,” says John Warnock of Adobe, which is Apple’s biggest software provider. “We would have meetings with all those CEOs and nothing would happen, no traction, unless the group responsible went for the idea. The energy just dissipated into the organization, where the first person capable to make a decision is the one who makes it. But with Steve, he comes in with a very strong will and you sign up or get out of the way. You have to run Apple that way — very direct, very forceful. You can’t do it casually. When Steve attacks a problem, he attacks it with a vengeance. I think he mellowed during the Next years and he’s not so mellow anymore.”

Before Steve’s takeover, the campus had a leisurely atmosphere. Staffers loved to hang around smoking and chatting in the courtyard of the R&D complex, which always had ashtrays stocked at the outside and inside doors of all six of its buildings. Some employees seemed to spend most of their time throwing Frisbees to their dogs on the lawns.

Steve enforced new rules. He decreed that there would be no smoking anywhere on the Apple property. Then he banned dogs on campus, ostensibly because canines were messy and some people were allergic to them.

The employees were outraged: Why didn’t Steve understand them? Smoking in the courtyard was how they networked with their colleagues from other departments. It was a vital form of communications! Steve’s prohibitionism forced them to take long walks to De Anza Boulevard so they would be off the Apple property. It wasted a lot of time.

And their dogs were essential to productivity, too. A lot of people worked very long hours at Apple, even nights and weekends. They were hardly ever home. If they couldn’t care for and feed their dogs at the office, they would never get to see the pets.

It seemed as though Steve were pushing his own lifestyle on 10,000 others. At a company meeting, someone asked Steve what he thought was the worst thing about Apple.

“The cafeteria,” Steve said.

Steve proceeded to replace the entire food-service staff. He hired the chef from Il Fornaio in Palo Alto. Before long, tofu was prominent in the menu offerings.

And yet, somehow, the reign of terror was beginning to work. Apple had long been like a civil-service bureaucracy, with thousands of entrenched employees who did pretty much whatever they wanted regardless of which political appointees were temporarily at the top. Now that was changing. People started to realize that Steve could assert his authority over seemingly any aspect of the company’s life. Apple was going to follow the vision of a single person, from the no-smoking rules and the healthy cuisine to the editing of the TV advertisements. Steve was clearly in charge, and Steve was seemingly everywhere.

Kurtz, who’s based inside the Beltway, spent 18 months hanging out in the canyons of the Street, where he discovered that New York’s financial press is more powerful and morally bereft than Washington’s political punditry. “No single reporter can affect White House policies or a candidate’s campaign through mere analysis or commentary,” he writes. “In this realm, journalists are score-keepers and second-guessers and naysayers, and their influence is ephemeral and diffuse.” But on Wall Street, “financial journalists are players. They make things happen instantaneously, and their impact is gauged not by subjective polls but by the starker standard of stock prices.” When reporters tout or bad-mouth a stock on TV, their pronouncements can alter a company’s market value by billions of dollars within minutes.

With that kind of money at stake, it’s no surprise that the powers of Wall Street — the CEOs, brokerage honchos and mutual-fund managers — are constantly trying to use journalists for their own ends. Kurtz shows that reporters allow themselves to be used by these self-interested sources because the media has such a continuous need for fresh material — for a “nonstop flow of tips, touts, picks, and pans” to lure millions of viewers and readers seeking that elusive edge.

The strange thing is that no one ever holds the journalists accountable for being wrong — and they are wrong so much of the time. And hardly anyone notices that the stock analysts and financiers supplying the opinions have a tremendous conflict of interest, since they’re often touting stocks they own or puffing companies that are their investment banking clients. “The media’s willingness to play along with this insider’s game is nothing short of appalling,” Kurtz concludes. “It’s as if a presidential candidate’s chief fundraiser put out a report predicting a great future for this man, and this caused a spike in the politician’s approval rating.”

Kurtz’s analysis is persuasive, but he doesn’t belabor his own punditry, which is mostly confined to the book’s introduction and its afterword. In between he follows a large cast of media players as they covered the stock market from 1998 to earlier this year, serving up dead-on profiles of stars like CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo (the “Money Honey”), TheStreet.com’s James Cramer and former CNN Moneyline anchor Lou Dobbs, who left the cable network to head up Space.com. As Kurtz takes us through all the jarring NASDAQ swings, his narrative is compelling, though occasionally a bit numbing, as if you’ve been watching CNBC all day and still can’t get off the couch.

But what makes the book so good is Kurtz’s taste for delicious detail, especially about the egos, excesses and quirks of the media elite. He writes that Dobbs “once demanded that a very short producer stand on a chair so he could yell at him, and when the young man refused, Dobbs crouched down to deliver the scolding.” Kurtz tells us that when Roger Ailes, the notorious Republican campaign strategist, left politics and took over at CNBC (before becoming chairman of Fox News), CNBC anchor Mark Haines was “on a hit list of people to be fired, but as a fellow fat guy, Ailes felt he deserved another chance.”

We learn that the guest experts on CNBC were always told in advance what stocks the viewers would call in about, which made it easier for them to feign omniscience. We watch as New York Observer financial columnist Christopher Byron, who hates almost every stock, gave a rave to Martha Stewart’s IPO partly because he thought she had a nice ass. (Stewart, for her part, was amused by the assessment.)

While Kurtz’s overall posture is muckraking and moralizing, he also writes admiringly about the ingenuity, energy and dedication of some of the smartest members of the business press. One particularly delightful scene describes how the Wall Street Journal’s Kara Swisher followed up on a late-night tip that America Online and Time Warner were merging in a colossal deal. Swisher knew that something big was happening when she logged onto AOL at 2 a.m. EST and found that many of the company’s top executives were online, since their secret screen names turned up on her buddy lists. When she sent them instant messages saying, “We know,” most of the execs were so freaked out that they logged off immediately, but one confirmed the tip, which helped produce a huge scoop, albeit a short-lasting one. The story ran on the Dow Jones wire at 3 a.m., an exclusive for two hours before Time Warner’s CNN trumpeted its own company’s tale.

Even when crack reporters get a story like that, there’s constant pressure to do it again and again, which is bound to be “numbingly repetitious,” Kurtz says. He concludes that even though the members of today’s financial punditry are “well paid and sought after and increasingly famous,” they are also cogs in a “hype machine” and “victims of its relentless expectations.” True. But then again, who ever thought that business reporters would ever be highly paid, let alone achieve even the smallest degree of media stardom?

In his new book, “The Global Me,” Zachary spins a theory of why countries will succeed or fail in the global economic struggle, sort of a “Wealth of Nations” for the microchip era. His argument is that innovation depends on the cultural collisions that come from an ethnic and racial mixing of the population, which is exactly what happens in places like California. Outsiders and misfits are the ones who provoke change, he says. Immigration and intermarriage are economic boons because they create “mongrels”–hybrid personalities who are exceptionally creative: “They have more perspective than the one-dimensional person and are more willing to rebel against tradition or question habitual ways of thinking or doing.” Nations that remain homogenous and closed off, like Japan, risk getting clobbered. Countries that are starting to encourage diversity (like Ireland, surprisingly) are the ones that stand to win.

The book is an example of its own thesis: It’s an interesting read because it’s such an unusual melange — a lyrical political manifesto, a shrewd economic and business analysis and a finely-observed reportorial notebook, with more than a bit of enticing armchair travel, too. The title, “The Global Me,” evokes the image of a footloose soul who’s no longer constricted by a single national identity. Zachary himself, a long-time Berkeley, Calif., resident now based in London, exemplifies how mongrel breeding and global mobility can produce a highly original thinker. His own ancestry is half Italian, half Eastern European Jewish, and his wife is Irish. Salon recently caught up with him for pasta in San Francisco’s North Beach.

What provoked the ideas for this book?

It was triggered by my experience in Silicon Valley. It’s the most innovative place in the world, technologically and socially, and I saw that a big source of its strength and vitality was the large amount of diversity and the mixing. That’s what’s critical — the mixing. Typically one-third of a company’s engineers were from foreign countries. And many people maintained connections internationally — they weren’t just Americanized foreigners.

One of the reasons the United States regained its lead over the Japanese in industry, and why it has never been seriously challenged by Europe in information technology, was because the United States has this great ability to harvest the world’s talent. American society is open and porous enough so that talented foreigners could come here and feel they were expressing themselves. When you go to Japan and Germany as a foreigner you might be contributing to an organization, but you feel that you’ve lost your self.

This is a simplification, but your basic thesis — about the importance of ethnic and racial mixing in a society — reminds me a little of the old ’60s notion that if we all make love to each other the world will be a better place.

(An embarrassed laugh.) Contact with strangers is the engine of growth and vitality, the heartbeat of a vital society. And to an extent, one of the things about the ’60s was you were supposed to have intimate contact with all kinds of people, whether it was sexual or social, through drugs or partying.

And I think that is the new ideal of American diversity — not that groups are supposed to be separate or protected, which was a big advance over the idea of a melting pot, that we would all act alike. That was the ’50s idea. You were supposed to only show your unique identity in the privacy of your own enclave. So if you were a devout religious person, that was something for home, not to intrude on the public life.

Joe Lieberman still carries that out. You don’t see him wearing a yarmulke at the Democratic Convention. He says that he’s an Orthodox Jew, but he’s only going to go so far. For older people there’s still a sense that your most intense feelings of group unity are private. Then in this public sphere in American life we’re all supposed to be the same. But in the last 25 years we’ve started to see that people want to carry their traditional names into the public sphere, and their traditional language, and more importantly they want to bring some of their values to the public space.

You make a compelling case for the value of cultural mixing as an impetus for innovation, but where does that stand in relation to other factors influencing global competitiveness? Silicon Valley has a cultural melange but it also has unique structures for raising capital and forming companies.

More and more places in the world are imitating the structures of Silicon Valley. Europe now has the NASDAQ. For the past five years you can raise venture capital in Europe; you can float a public stock offering there. Is that likely to decisively change the competitive balance around innovation? No. It hasn’t and it isn’t going to. Because while these factors are necessary for innovation, they’re not sufficient. If you have capital and a good educational system you can compete, but without this mixing of top talent from around the world, you don’t get the vitality and the cutting-edge results.

Economists consistently miss the cultural aspects of change today. Just as it’s easier quantitatively to track the financial factors, it’s easier to duplicate them. Governments have been trying to duplicate Silicon Valley for 25 years but what continues to elude them is this collision, this mixing, this social melange, because that requires a whole different mindset. Some countries are making strides towards it. Ireland, for example. Singapore.

You write about the stubbornness and arrogance of Germany, where the elites feel philanthropic because they let in hordes of uneducated workers but they keep out the educated technocratic classes that would compete with them.

One of the big issues facing the rich parts of the world right now, in Asia and Western Europe, is that the U.S. advantage in diversity is crippling them; that even if they get all the financial factors right, all the regulations right, they’re going to have this other problem, that they don’t have diverse populations that feel good about the diversity. Right now you’re seeing a backlash in Europe, of neo-Nazis and others, partly because the leaders are starting to talk about immigration and diversity as if it’s good.

There’s still a struggle to re-examine what does it mean to be a good German or a good Irish person or a good French person. If being Irish is no longer being Gaelic and Catholic, what is it? Anybody that shows up there and contributes — is that enough? That’s fairly close to the U.S. definition of citizenship. If you follow the rules and you contribute, you deserve to stay. For many societies, that’s a radically different notion of community, which is based on religion and race, but not just on pulling your own weight.

The European Union allows everyone in those 15 countries to live and work in every other country. That was one start of it. The shortage of babies, the low birth rates, means the European nations have big worker shortages and they’ve got to let people in to solve that.

For the Japanese, the first question is immigration. They’re just beginning to talk about how if they don’t get immigrants, then in 100 years their population will fall by half. The country’s influence and wealth will naturally decline if there are 60 million people and not 120 million. And they’re steadily falling in population already. They know immigration is important. The problem is that, like Germany, you can let in immigrants, but it’s not set up to handle their aspirations. They may be worse off in the short run. Instead of having the contribution of lots of talented people, you just have a lot of angry foreigners living in your country.

What’s happening in Northern Europe, in a culturally homogenous place like Finland with the success of the cellphone maker Nokia?

Nokia has brought hundreds and hundreds of foreign people to Finland. They’re changing their fellow employees. Nokia realizes that you can’t ask foreigners — whom you’ve recruited — to change to satisfy Finnish ways. They won’t. They’re not going to be told how to dress, where to eat, how to behave. The Finns are very reserved and structured. These foreigners bring a more freewheeling, out in the open, argumentative approach. And so some Finns at Nokia will start becoming that way, and it spills over to the larger society.

Finland, because it’s bringing talented people into the country, may have a better chance at pulling off a more thorough diversity than Sweden, where they never really did try to attract talented foreigners. They were a big country for asylum seekers, for the desperate, lesser-educated people who deserved to stay in the country. But Sweden has ended up with essentially foreign ghettos, and they recently had a race riot there, where Swedes and these immigrant neighborhoods exploded in battle. The United States has had that and still has it. Tensions and violence themselves don’t mean that you failed. It could mean that you’re gaining ground because people are getting anxious.

Revolutions of rising expectations?

Exactly. Turks in Germany are more militant now than ever, yet they’ve got more rights and they’re better treated than ever. The reason is because they now need to be treated as well as the Germans, despite their differences. There’s still a ways to go. In Germany you can run a newspaper ad that says I’ve got an apartment for rent but don’t bother applying if you’re Turkish.

An influential book by Rutgers political science professor Benjamin Barber, “Jihad vs. McWorld,” portrayed the rival forces of multinational companies spreading branded American culture in confrontation with indigenous cultures and traditions. You don’t see this polar conflict. In a qualified way, you’re praiseworthy of the cultural influence of multinational companies.

Many people got swept up by the idea that the world was falling into two camps: globalists and nativists. But in most societies, people are trying to marry the two. They’re trying to have a paradoxical attachment to both. They want traditions, but they want freedom to explore the world. And that’s the dominant motif, the grand narrative of the future: people getting both. The world is much more complicated than this idea of warring camps. There’s a war inside the souls of each one of us to be both global and local. There’s an American openness to many multinationals that’s very attractive and that contrasts favorably with the approach of local employers, where nepotism and discrimination are still common.

You have to criticize multinationals on a case by case basis, but in general, I don’t think they’re any more destructive culturally than purely domestic companies. And in a lot of cases they can do good. No one who goes into a McDonald’s in a foreign country thinks they’re getting anything central culturally, but they have an attraction to it. It fills a need. And McDonald’s is often the first retailer in a country to offer clean bathrooms. In Moldova, it’s the only retail establishment I know of that has hot water in its bathrooms. Women go in and wash their hair sometimes just to experience hot water.

There’s a perception in the political left that multinational corporations and the globalization trend is evil. Look at the passion of the WTO protesters …

My first writing job was at the Berkeley Barb. I’m a contributing editor to In These Times. I’m sympathetic to the left’s critique and to people on the left. My argument is simply that even if you didn’t organize the world economy around multinationals and open financial structures, you’d still have to deal with migration and diversity in a new way.

German trade unionists are opposed to diversity in Germany. People on the left in Germany are against multiculturalism. Trade openness means people openness. In Europe some of the biggest nativists are left-wingers. Socialism in Britain means victory for the British working class and that’s the people who are there now. So the Guardian, the most leftist newspaper in Britain, is very skeptical of these multicultural ideas I talk about. Aren’t the people who are here already supposed to get the benefits of trade? And who are the people who are there? Well, they’re white English people. Who are the people in Germany benefiting from the trade unions? White German people.

It’s fine if you’re against the WTO. I think it’s undemocratic and it’s not a good structure to deal with trade agreements. I’m just saying that within this realm of diversity, which is very essential, multinationals have a good record. The ones that aren’t are those involved in extractive industries, like the oil companies, mining, low-wage manufacturing. These have bad records. But there’s a lot of knowledge-based multinationals and these have a much better picture.

People on the left have to make more fine distinctions about what multinationals are actually doing and how much responsibility these trade agreements really have for the overall society. If you have ethnic strife in a country, it’s not helped if you don’t allow a free-floating currency or if you have trade barriers that protect domestic manufacturers. You still have serious issues about how in a knowledge economy, which is predicated on creativity, how do you gain creativity in society? You do it through mixing. Collision of ideas. Out of that comes misfits and new experiments.

When people have looked at the sources of creativity, they find again and again that misfits are the most creative. And who are these misfits? They’re the outsiders. It used to be that outsiders were flukes, so societies once in a while got something creative. Now, everybody in a society can be a misfit, metaphorically. One could say the entire Bay Area is just a collection of misfits.