0.11 From here to infinity

I came back from my week at Microsoft to a Seattle that looked like an old small town—faded, dated, outmoded, befuddled. It was like coming back to your childhood home, in adulthood, after having matured elsewhere, in a real city, and marveling at how much smaller and more drab it looks than you remembered. After all the energy I’d encountered at Microsoft, Seattle felt like Mayberry, R.F.D. I suddenly fell prey again to that same disgruntled restlessness that had driven me out of Seattle in the 1970s. Having seen the energy and excitement at Microsoft, and the conviction Which, as far as I could tell, was more than justified. that people there were changing the world, I found it impossible to settle back into the complacent slough I’d been inhabiting for the past ten years. Everything looked provincial now, benighted; I’d been to the Center of the Emerging Universe, the coming century’s Big Bang, and writing about local sports, politics, urban self-image debates, and Seattle’s purportedly emerging arts scene was no longer psychologically tenable. I had seen color personal-computer screens, I’d seen computers displaying video, and the whole technological spectacle turned me instantly into a True Believer: I decided that Microsoft was going to be changing the way we did everything—including the way we composed and viewed art—and I wanted to watch it happen from up close.

It was amazing the way a single week in that place made me lose all patience with Seattle’s charm. It turned me into a completely different person. A week before, the thing I had loved most about the city was its resolute backwardness. Now I hated it, viewing it as willful ignorance about the inevitable. Here in our own back yard this burgeoning progress was taking form, and because it was Seattle-generated, it was different, more enlightened, promising splendor rather than ruin, offering progress toward a life both spiritually and materially better rather than the dubious tradeoff ordinary material progress always pushes on the hinterland and its settlers. Suddenly it was stunning to me how little notice Seattleites were taking of Microsoft not only as a business success story but also as a harbinger of what life in the near future—the wired life, the enlightened life—would be.

I couldn’t help but notice too that Seattle was mired in another one of its periodic recessions even as Microsoft was generating mountains of cash by the minute over on its campus. Juxtaposed with the city’s downturn, Microsoft’s prosperity looked like all the more dramatic a sign that the future belonged to it while Seattle—along with my employer—was mired in the past. For the first time in its history, the Weekly had to lay off employees as yet another Boeing downsizing brought on yet another recession, sending Seattle into yet another company-town decline. The fading city, with its reliance on old-fashioned heavy industry, looked in 1992 like the discarded chrysalis of the butterfly spreading its spectacular wings on the other side of the lake.