0.13 Dark pop

How can I explain how shocking it was to come back to Seattle again? I had been to the frontier at Microsoft, the edge of the Universe, my spaceship the frantic manic madcap nonstop whirling center of the Silicon Rush. I’d been surrounded by unfolding tales of wealth and high drama and insanity. I’d seen Microsoft discoveries under way that were going to change the world! Work and life and art would never be the same again because of what I’d witnessed out on the cutting edge. By the time I came back to earthbound Seattle in 1994, struggling to ratchet back to its normal sleepy pace, the world’s media had glommed onto the Microsoft story and were madly speculating about the miracles to be wrought by the coming release of Windows 95—the operating system that would take us all where no man had gone before. And I’d been there! I’d felt the excitement, drunk in the glamour! I’d lived in Bill Gates’ mining camp—the land of lore and lucre! All you had to do was dip your fingers into the stream of bits there and you’d come up with a fistful of gold…. Hell, a man could get rich at Microsoft, be set for life, after working for only a year!

Settling in again at the Weekly , all I could think about was what it would have been like for Doc Maynard to go back to Ohio after taking in the splendor and potential of the Pacific Northwest. Everything at the Weekly looked faded, tired, outdated, out of touch. The alphanumeric interface on my computer made me feel like I was wearing green eyeshades and sleeve garters, working for a bank that forced its employees to use adding machines while all the gleaming new banks in town had installed calculators. We didn’t even have e-mail This mock outrage is intended to be tiresome, in case you were either wondering or falling asleep. ! And the paper was still mulling over Seattle’s identity, values, traditions, downtown conditions, and the same old lackluster prospects for the Seahawks and Mariners. I’d been gone for two years, watching a revolution unfold, and came back home to find not only that nothing had changed but that everyone around me was oblivious to the world-changing events exploding just outside the door. I would sit, stunned, in my cubicle, feeling like the only person in all of Rome who sees the Visigoths massing on the hills outside the city.

I found myself fixating against my will on the notion that the massive flow of money into the software industry was somehow legitimizing—a blessing conferred on it and its participants because of the revolution’s inherent goodness. Money, which I had always affected to disdain, now looked like a measure of moral worth, and my lifelong indifference to it looked to me like the emptiest of pretensions—the principled rejection of the unattainable.

Now when I thought of software’s nouveau riche, I didn’t picture programmers and other exotic fauna so much as I pictured people like me—English majors—who had gravitated to the right place at the right time while I was indulging in my poorer-than-thou hauteur, my Seattleite’s affected purity of heart. I thought again of Jan Allister, whose 1600 Microsoft shares, by my increasingly frenzied calculations, must have ballooned in worth to somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 million—assuming, as I tended to assume in mid-fantasy, that she hadn’t blown it all on a new house or something back when the windfall was small enough to spend.