Chapter 6 (Louis Barry)

I was interested when Davis was speaking about the "controlled sips of California’s creative anarchy, its 'go with the flow' Beat Taoism", the computer industry discovered new philosophies of management and productivity that were appropriate to the increasingly chaotic global market their products were helping to produce. Such philosophies are by no means limited to the computer industry, of course. Faced with information overload, a spin-cycle marketplace, and the broiling seas of deregulation, businesspeople across the globe are now a most enchanting machine learning to “surf”—a supremely Californian image based on loosening top-down control and resiliently responding to the unpredictable flux of capital, data, and shifting demand. Management gurus speak an increasingly New Age lingo of “thriving on chaos,” generating “dynamic synergy,” and cultivating the Tao of the Dow, In Out of Control, his manifesto of cybernetic technocapitalist evolution. Wired even quotes Lao Tzu, whose wisdom could “be a motto for a gungho 21st century Silicon Valley startup,’ Marshall McLuhan prophesied that “the computer is the LSD of the business world.But in today’s Silicon Valley and San Francisco’s multimedia gulch, computers plus LSD sometimes seems like the formula for success. Apple bought Grateful Dead tickets for employees at the end of the year, and the band’s tie-dyed iconography could even be spotted at the NASA-Ames military research facility in Mountain View, a home for hard-core virtual reality research.