T A B L E__T A L K Life in the information age: Share your stories and rants on password snafus, multiple area codes, incompatible software and server failure in Table Talk's Digital Culture area - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Pictures from an exhibition Please, Mr. Postman?
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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - It isn't too hard to find explanations for why Silicon Valley is like this. The Valley's entrepreneurial success myth has become a standard feature in every news and business magazine over the last year. The myth, in short: Silicon Valley is a place where a good idea, coupled with perseverance and the will to risk everything, can turn a two-person start-up company in a garage into a multimillion-dollar industry behemoth almost overnight. The myth has nothing to say about what you do after your idea has become a product and a profit center. Or rather it does: What you do is start again -- complete another round of this tricky but very narrow cycle. Enormous wealth, then, is really only a byproduct of doing what you do, which is growing businesses. Wealth's purpose is to help you get a head start on growing the next company. One influence of the myth, though, is to stop people who have money from spending it. A famous Valley story has Steve Jobs living for years in a Woodside mansion with no furniture and nothing on the wall. It's a positive tale: We're meant to think, that's so cool. It's thanks partly to the myth, then, that art has such a hard time in the Valley. Jobs now collects fine photography, but that's not the story about him most people tell or hear. In some ways, of course, it's refreshing that the moguls of the Valley aren't generally seduced by conspicuous consumption. They just buy what they need -- a house, a car, a watch -- and then stop. OK, that tends to translate into a mansion, a Porsche and a Rolex because they have the money, but no one really cares much either way. This is why it is wrong to call the Valley's wealthy nouveaux riches, as some have. As usually defined, the nouveau riche wants what Old Money has, and in trying to buy it, reveals himself for what he is. The new rich of the Valley couldn't care less about Old Money -- they think they're onto something much more exciting. But one consequence of this almost careless consumption is an easy acceptance of other people's definitions of quality -- an abdication of taste that quickly extends beyond homes and cars and watches to everything that fits under the rubric of culture: fine art, music, literature and so on. This style of living, of buying cultural goods off the shelf instead of commissioning or creating a taste for new ones, has become an integral part of the Valley's success myth -- so much so that its idea of good living has come to be defined almost in opposition to culture. You can only get to the top and stay there, the belief is, if you banish from your life the artifacts and interests that define culture for the rest of society. Yet it isn't only the force of myth that keeps the wealthy of the Valley from spending heavily on cultural goods. An awful lot of their wealth is locked up in stock, and thus unavailable for spending. It's also liable to disappear with a crash in the market. But then again, at any one time there are many hundreds of people in the Valley who could, if they really wanted to, cash out. They'd be retiring with substantial fortunes and could then, if they wanted, easily become big-time collectors, patrons and sponsors of the arts. But they don't. Like the young retiree "angels" profiled last month in the New York Times Magazine, they stay in the business and fund the dreams of new kids, to whom they are both inspiration and competition. Is it mistaken to expect people whose inventions have changed so many aspects of our lives to want to be involved in old ideas of culture and aesthetics? Perhaps Silicon Valley's elite do have an aesthetic side to them, but just not one the rest of us share. The products that have made their fortunes are marvels of mathematics, technology and engineering; they're often extraordinarily elegant solutions to mind-bogglingly difficult challenges. Perhaps the beauty of engineering is where these people focus all their aesthetic attention, leaving none free for the humdrum materiality of their homes and possessions. If this is the case, it could explain why the Valley seems to have actually become less engaged in making a cultural contribution to the wider world as it has gotten richer and more globally influential. In the early part of this century, the area shared in giving birth to the American Arts and Crafts movement. The renowned architects Green and Green built in Woodside, and the Arts and Crafts Mission style influenced both Frederick Law Olmsted in laying out Stanford University and Birge Clark in his fine institutional blend of Mission and Art Deco in Palo Alto. During the Cold War, the defense-contracting boom spurred developer Joseph Eichler (the subject of a recent San Francisco Museum of Modern Art show) and others in the Valley to build tract housing of distinction and considerable international influence. But since the '60s, the Valley's contributions to world or even national culture have been few and far between. The Stanford Research Park and the Stanford Shopping Center were innovative and influential in their approach to business and retail landscaping, and the area played a role in the birth of "new age" music as the original home of Windham Hill -- but that's about it. As the Valley's fame and fortune has grown, software has taken over from hardware as its major business -- and perhaps that explains the parallel waning of the Valley's engagement with public culture. Have the aesthetic interests of the people who made the Valley great not so much disappeared as turned immaterial -- to things that exist but which the rest of us just can't see? Maybe so. But that doesn't absolve the Valley's leaders from responsibility for their non-virtual environment. They still need to examine why the culture they've built has failed to engage or advance the traditional plastic and performing arts -- the ones that we can see and touch and that shape where we live. If the Valley has produced a revolution in our ideas of space, it has emerged from, and continues to grow thanks to, a very particular space. Everyone in Silicon Valley patently believes in the potency of proximity. This is another cliché of the standard anthropology-of-Silicon-Valley magazine piece: The area is successful because only here do entrepreneurs live and breathe business-making with venture capitalists, engineers, lawyers and accountants -- all sharing the same air and ordering the same lattes. And the cliché is true; the Valley is successful precisely because it is a society, a real, old-fashioned community. Yet the real cities here are being junked up with traffic, pollution and mediocre development. The "renaissance" that might conceivably be evolving on some digital or virtual plane has certainly not spilled over into the material culture of the region. Is that necessarily a problem for the rest of us? N E X T_P A G E .|. Big art can be good business, too |
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