The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (48 page)

Moore’s law is not a law at all. It is a social contract, a dare or, if you’re feeling less generous, a whip. Yet by formulating it as a “law,” as immutable as the law of gravity, Moore and his successors have transformed a possibility into an expectation, an inevitability. It is a neat magic trick, and Silicon Valley’s greatest innovation.

Let’s return to our young Silicon Valley “genius” and see how the process actually unfolds. Yes, he does live in an incubator, and, yes, coffee is involved. But the similarities end there. For starters, the Einstyn idea is not his, not his only. He stole it, Greek-style. But heeding the advice of Plato and Roger McNamee, he perfects the idea. None of this happens effortlessly. He struggles. His idea is revised, then revised again. He is racked by doubt, but, driven by some unnamed power, perhaps a chip on his shoulder, he persists. Alas, he fails. But he doesn’t wallow in this failure. He observes it, noting exactly where and how he failed, and vows to fail
differently next time. Eventually, he succeeds, but with an Einstyn that looks nothing like the original concept. At no point does a beanbag chair enter the picture.

Our young genius faces challenges that geniuses of the past did not. These challenges can best be explained by the Heisenberg principle, which states that it is impossible to separate the observation of an experiment from the results. The mere act of observing alters the outcome. This is exactly what is taking place in Silicon Valley today and what distinguishes it from past golden ages. In ancient Athens, pollsters weren’t constantly gauging the public mood. In Renaissance Florence, they didn’t stop people on the street and ask if they were very optimistic, a little optimistic, or not optimistic at all about the future. The experiment called Silicon Valley is affected every day by the observation of it. We are all active participants in its outcome. Every time you do a Google search or buy the latest iProduct, you are, in some small way, determining the course that Silicon Valley takes.

Unlike Athens or Florence, Silicon Valley is suffering from its golden-age hangover
right now
, while it’s still glowing. The pressure to be the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg is enormous. If a Stanford engineering student hasn’t had an IPO by his junior year, he feels like a failure. Futurist Paul Saffo tells me he’s been teaching a course at Stanford for ten years, and only recently did he have his first slacker student. “It was like, ‘Wow, how refreshing.’ ”

Silicon Valley differs from other golden ages in one other important way. What it creates—digital technology in its many guises—also determines how and what the rest of us create. That was not true of, say, Renaissance Florence. The
Mona Lisa
is a sublime work of art, and it no doubt inspired many painters, then and now, but it did not alter the way a shopkeeper balanced his books or a prince ruled his territory. Digital technology, on the other hand, seeps into every nook and cranny of our lives. Never before in history has one place touched so many lives, for better or worse.

As we’ve seen, a golden age doesn’t last long. A few decades, perhaps a half century or so, then it disappears as suddenly as it arrived. Places of
genius are fragile. They are far easier to destroy than to build. Silicon Valley, by my estimation, is pushing a century, ancient in genius terms. It’s been a good run, longer than that of any other place in the United States, with the possible exception of Hollywood. Is its time up? Might it go the way of Athens and Detroit?

That may seem far-fetched, given the heady ambience and robust share prices in the Valley, but in 1940 nobody in Detroit saw the end coming any more than Athenians did in 430 BC. Only the Viennese of 1900 sensed that the end was nigh (“a laboratory of world endings”), and this, ironically, inspired one last, dramatic surge of creative output. We can’t sprint toward the finish line if we don’t know where the finish line is or, worse, delude ourselves into believing that the race will go on forever.

I meet plenty of people in the Valley who pooh-pooh any talk of decline. They remind me that people have been predicting the demise of Silicon Valley since the 1970s, yet the region continues to—I hate to use this awful term but no other will suffice—
reinvent
itself. From ham radio to transistors to integrated circuits to the cloud, revolution begets revolution.

Yes, the Valley has proved nimble (in a fairly narrow way; pivoting from hardware to software isn’t quite the same as pivoting from abstract art to theoretical physics), but it is not immune to the laws of nature. The sun doesn’t rise in the west, and trees don’t grow to the moon. Not even California redwoods.

Silicon Valley’s continued success depends, ironically, not on some shiny new gizmo but on learning the lessons of history. Alas, there is no app for that, but there are some steps the Valley can take, and pitfalls it can avoid, if it is to beat the odds and live to an even riper old age.

Great civilizations rise to greatness for different reasons but collapse for essentially the same reason: arrogance. No civilization, no matter how great, is immune to this “creeping vanity,” as professor of education Eugene Von Fange calls it. Here he is describing the decline of classical Athens, but his words could just as easily apply to any golden age that has begun to lose its bloom. “Soon, their sons, coddled in the use of all the great things their fathers and grandfathers had pioneered, became as
helpless as newborn babes when faced with the harsh reality of an aggressive and changing world.”

It doesn’t take an Einstein to see signs of this creeping vanity in the Valley. Bling has reared its shiny head, and that is never a good sign. You’ll recall that this was the case in Athens, too; the city’s decline can be traced almost exactly to a concomitant rise in luxury, and a taste for gourmet food. When it comes to golden ages, bling is the canary in the coal mine.

Another sign that the Valley has lost its way is that it is beginning to confuse means and ends. The much-touted notion of disruption was once viewed as an outcome, a side effect of innovation. Now it has become an end in itself—witness the advent of the “disrupt conference.” This is not good. Socrates didn’t “disrupt” Athens for the heck of it. He had a purpose in mind, and that purpose was nothing less than wisdom.

There is no such thing as creativity in the abstract. Likewise, there is no such thing as innovation in the abstract. To describe yourself as an entrepreneur or a disrupter is as meaningless as describing yourself as an athlete or a thinker. Really? What sports do you play? What do you think about?

What jump-starts a golden age is not necessarily what keeps it going. The good ones manage to change fuel sources midstream. The Renaissance was initially powered by the recovered ancient texts, but the Humanists who discovered them soon generated their own ideas, their own intellectual momentum. Silicon Valley, if it is to survive, needs to find alternative energy sources, new ways of
being
creative and not simply new creative products.

It also needs to remember that small is not only beautiful, it’s also creative. Girth is another form of complacency, and a particularly insidious one. Firms such as Apple and Google recognize this danger and, though they are now huge corporations, try to behave like the small start-ups they once were. They do this by decentralizing decision making, for instance, a move far more important than all the beanbag chairs in the world.

Along with smallness, it is essential that Silicon Valley remain fluid. It needs to keep those moving vans moving, the fertilizer flowing. This isn’t
easy, but Silicon Valley has one thing going for it: the region’s product, information technology, is inherently diffuse. The nodes and networks of an IT system mirror the social networks of Silicon Valley—or perhaps it’s the other way around; it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the Valley keep these networks flowing and churning like Class V rapids.

One more important lesson for Silicon Valley comes from an unlikely source. One day I wake to see Jack Ma staring at me. He has just taken his company, Alibaba, public on the New York Stock Exchange, and he’s now worth not the $3 billion he was when I met him, but $26 billion. There is his smiley face splashed across home pages everywhere. Well done, Jack, I think, and silently calculate how much
guanxi
it would now take to land a meeting with him. All those zeros. My head hurts. Jack’s prominence, though, reminds me that there is more than one way of being creative and of nurturing creative places.

Silicon Valley already looks toward Asia. Many of its products are manufactured there and, increasingly, sold there as well. On the streets of Mountain View, you see Asian faces, Asian restaurants, not to mention meditation centers and yoga studios. One lesson from the East that I think the Valley would do well to heed is that what goes up must come down, but eventually it will go up again. That is not the Western view. We believe that time flows like a river, and so we see decline as a one-way journey. Once you start to slip, there is no way to go but down. This worldview becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, one in which decline begets only more decline. (Vienna being the exception that proves the rule.)

China and India remind us that it needn’t be that way. If you view time as cyclical, then decline becomes reversible. This might seem like a subtle philosophical distinction, but it is not. China, for instance, has been up and down throughout its history partly because it believes there are ups and downs.

Silicon Valley raises another vexing problem: Is this the last great place? Might this be the end of the road for golden ages, the death not only of places of genius but of place itself? Certainly, the wizards of the Valley would have us believe this. Geography, they tell us, is so five minutes ago.
Thanks to the Internet and its digital handmaidens, you can live and work anywhere. Place has been rendered moot.

Isn’t it interesting, though, that these prophets of a placeless future all live in one place? They eat at the same restaurants, drink their double lattes in the same cafés, ride their $10,000 bicycles on the same rolling country roads. The Vatican of Silicon Valley, the massive Google campus, is designed to facilitate face-to-face contact. Yahoo!, of all companies, recently announced it was eliminating telecommuting. They all know that, as futurist Paul Saffo puts it, “nothing propinqs like propinquity.”

Geography is not dead. Place matters. It matters now more than ever. The proliferation of digital technology has made place more, not less, relevant. The more we skype and e-mail one another, the greater the desire for face-to-face contact. Air travel is more, not less, popular since the advent of digital technology. Ambitious young Chinese and Indian graduates, meanwhile, yearn to work in brick-and-mortar Silicon Valley, not some virtual knockoff. They’ve tasted the fruits of its harvest and want to take part in the growing. Every iPhone is a bread crumb leading to the promised land.

Perhaps Silicon Valley’s greatest export is . . . Silicon Valley. City planners everywhere want to know what the secret sauce is, and they’re willing to pay for it. A cottage industry of consultants has sprouted, and with their help dozens of places have attempted to replicate Silicon Valley, from England (Thames Valley) to Dubai (Silicon Oasis). With few exceptions, they have all failed. Why?

One reason is that they think Silicon Valley is a formula, forgetting that it is a culture, the product of a specific time and specific place. If they do recognize it as a culture, they try to transplant it into their own. Invariably, these attempts fail for the same reason many organ transplants do: donor and host are not compatible.

Perhaps the most important reason these Silicon Valley wannabes fail is simply because they’re in too much of a hurry. Politicians want to see results while they’re still in office, CEOs by the next quarter. That’s not the way it works. Athens. Hangzhou. Florence. Edinburgh. They were all
the result of long gestations, marked by painful complications (see Black Death and Persian Wars). Cities and nations attempting to replicate Silicon Valley think they need to create a frictionless place, when in fact friction and tension, certain amounts anyway, propel places of genius.

All of these efforts raise a larger question: Can we engineer a place of genius—not just a Silicon Valley but an Athens or a Florence? Or is that like trying to engineer a rainbow, or a happy family, a nice idea but wholly impractical? This is, I realize, the most vexing question I have encountered yet. Fortunately, answers lie only a few miles to the north in, of all places, a bakery.

EPILOGUE: BAKING BREAD AND HANGING TEN

I BITE INTO THE BREAD. It is warm and chewy and moist. Pure—sorry, impure genius. Sourdough isn’t unique to San Francisco; it was invented in ancient Egypt. Yet today San Francisco sourdough is widely considered the best in the world. Why? The Boudin Bakery’s small museum at Fisherman’s Wharf offers a few clues. For $3, you can learn more about sourdough than you ever cared to know.

I learn that the company’s founder, a young French baker named Isidore Boudin, moved to San Francisco in 1849, at the height of the gold rush. Isidore was an observant baker, with a keen understanding of “how ambient conditions such as sea mist affect the leavening and baking process.”