I WISH THERE was an anniversary with a good round figure that I could pinpoint, but my columns here at The Irish Times started somewhat haphazardly in 2001, developing a weekly frequency a few years later. They will, however, definitely end this week.
A decade and some is a long time to steer a column, especially remotely from another country, and so I have at long last decided to draw matters to a close.
When I first started writing, I was a new visitor to Silicon Valley, seeing it all (I hoped) with a fresh pair of eyes. A fresh pair of shoes, too: for many years, I wrote from deep within the valley’s suburbs without the benefit of a US driving licence.
The challenge of negotiating a county thick with start-ups but thin on public transport made for some interesting challenges. Young executives would show me out of their offices only to become visibly confused by my apparently invisible means of transport. When I started off to the streets, I think some may have thought I was hitchhiking back to Ireland to file my report.
Ten years on, the future catches up with you. Walking around the valley became easier when hand-held GPS devices became affordable, more easy to co-ordinate when local transport authorities put their timetables online, and simple when mobile phones got smart enough to plan and map one’s routes.
As a non-driver and gadget hound in a car and technology paradise, I grabbed hold of each of these advances eagerly, and I know I wasn’t the only one here.
The trick is to spot the advances that have a chance of spreading to the rest of the world.
The entrepreneur Brad Templeton, one of the smartest predictors of the future I know, began describing to me a future of self-driving cars at a Silicon Valley event in about 2004. At that time he had no investment in that future, nor did he have a timetable for its arrival. He simply pointed out the evidence that computers would be smart enough to pull off such a trick relatively soon and listed the advantages that would accrue.
I listened sceptically – robot cars indeed! – and then watched as Google began driving its robotic cars, first around its neighbourhood and then more widely across the country.
This month, California prepared to pass a law legalising self-driving cars in the state. The cars get smarter, the obvious applications grow and Mr Templeton looks a prophet once more.
In this column, I’ve written about companies and technologies that triumphed, such as BitTorrent and Firefox, Wikipedia and Flickr, Facebook and the iPhone; and some that stumbled, such as the One Laptop per Child initiative and the social network Diaspora. There are some technologies whose success is still unclear, with names such as Bitcoin and mesh networks.
I always tried, however, to pick winners. It’s easy in a place such as Silicon Valley, where the only thing that’s underhyped is the level of hype itself, to pick on the weak runts, the deluded braggarts who are deliciously oblivious to their inevitable doom. It makes for a good story to point out their flaws.
Ten years ago it was also, in the US at least, a desperately underprovided journalistic duty. The American media is never great at kicking the tyres of a new trend; in the excitement of our own doomed tech booms, the rest of the English-speaking world got a little too good at imitating their uncriticial optimism.
But really, in places such as Hollywood and Silicon Valley (two creative regions that cannot bear to be compared with each other), it’s not hard to spot the hopeful failures. While it looks like glitter from far away, close up the valley looks more like a constellation of doomed enterprises studded with a few successes. In the end you concentrate on predicting the winners, not because you want to erase the existence of the losers but because predicting winners is a statistically more challenging pursuit.
If I have had a bias over the past decade, it has been to write about those who were trying to find new ways to win, and not just for themselves. Silicon Valley is a hotbed of capitalism – everything here fits into the brackets of business and finance. But no one in the circles in which I have hung out ever wanted to conduct capitalism as usual.
Instead they mapped their ideals on to the valley’s money-making engines. Sometimes those ideals ran in the opposite direction to the simple idea of getting rich.
People such as Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement, or those who sought to expand the public domain such as internet librarian Brewster Kahle, saw building a public trust of code and knowledge as being the true direction of networks.
Others saw capitalism as an ideal in itself and sought to unlock markets with technology and automate what might otherwise be imperfectly regulated. Some met in the middle, strange hybrids of individualistic libertarianism and liberal Utopianism that could flourish only in California.
What I love most about writing about Silicon Valley is not how it could predict the future elsewhere but rather how unpredictable the present was here. It has been, remains and must surely continue to be an endlessly fertile place for spectators and participants alike. The future isn’t flying cars; but self-driving cars? Stranger things have happened, and all within walking distance.
