Po Bronson: The Nudist On The Late Shift and Other True Tales of Silicon Valley

The unprecedented, and in many ways unpredicted, expansion of computer technology over the last five years has given rise to everything from potentially revolutionary, life-changing innovations (telecommuting, a more democratic distribution of information) to Pokémon. It's also produced a still-developing literary genre: the Silicon Valley chronicle. To be consumed presumably by those outside the business, as well as those drawn to the subject by the huge amounts of money changing hands, these books seek to explain the burgeoning technologies, the people behind them, and the lives they lead. The problem is that most will be as outdated as a Commodore 64 in a matter of months, such is the pace of the industry. That novelist Po Bronson understands this fact, as well as the difficulty of explaining the business to those outside of it (as he himself is), proves one of the great strengths of his essay collection The Nudist On The Late Shift. The focus here is on the people behind the technology, and not necessarily the major players. In his preface, Bronson writes that he set out to find "people in pursuit of unusual lives." This he did, and one of his book's greatest strengths is that the background against which they live becomes clearer when you examine the lives themselves. Nudist's opening chapter, "The Newcomers," follows a cross-section of new arrivals to the Valley, a collection of fortune-seekers and techno-idealists who may or may not make it big. Subsequent chapters such as "The Programmers," "The IPO," and "The Salespeople" look inside some of the individual components of Valley life, choosing individual cases that reveal more about the big picture than a description of the big picture could. Bronson's profile of Danny Hillis, a well-respected engineer at work on a monumental clock designed to last 12,000 years, may be his best work here. Hillis' clock, in development in conjunction with Disney, serves no practical purpose, but to Bronson, it's an invention of enormous symbolic value. Planned to commence on Jan. 1, 2001, the clock helps put things in perspective, making the computer revolution—the money to be made from it momentarily taken out of the equation—seem like a blip in the grand scale of things, but also perhaps a starting point for something far wider-reaching.