Interviewed by Tom Mangan
Gary Rivlin, author, editor
His "Plot to Get Bill Gates" site is here;
tales of the "bleeding edge" book tour are here.
AUTHORS
Michael Fuchs
Elizabeth Hilts
Paul Riddell
Gary Rivlin
Jim Motavalli
Barbara Shafferman
Jules Siegel
Keith Snyder
ARTISTS/POETS/
PHILOSOPHERS
Jon C. Allen
Will Baker
Mike Leung
Jon Sarkin
COOL SITE KEEPERS
Mike Cash
Scott O'Neal Colf
Godfrey Daniels
Cliff Davis, DDS
Tammy Hocking
Wes Modes
Frank Rogan
DIARISTS
Ralph Becker
J. D. Bruns
Linda DeVault
Mike Reed
Moira Richardson
Jessamyn West
FILMMAKERS
JOURNALISTS
Bernie
Mary Cooley-Jones
Lindsay Crysler
Jamie Dupree
M.O.A.T.M.A.I.
David Moll
Robert Niles
John Orr
Steven Ovadia
Pierce Presley
Mack Reed
Rip Rense
Curtis Ross
Neal Ross
John Scalzi
Catherine Seipp
David Sheets
Dwight Silverman
Matt Welch
MOVIE MAVENS
HUMORISTS
Debbie Farmer
Mike Jasper
Madeleine Begun Kane
Patrick Keller
Bob Sassone
Valerie Sprague
Ken Swarmer
Ian Wolff
SOLDIERS
TEACHERS
TECHIES
Chris Adamson
Mike Gunderloy
Michael Ivey
Greg Knauss
Floyd Maxwell
Ellen McDonough
Mike Pingleton
Wayne Thume
John Worth
TEENS
UNDECLARED
WEBLOGGERS
Sounds to me like you had a pretty good gig reporting in Chicago -- it's a big, rich place, a great news town where you'd never run out of good stories to cover. I'm wondering why you'd leave a sure thing like that and move to the Bay Area.
Yeah, Chicago was a dream gig and one I abandoned only reluctantly.
Everything you imagine Chicago to be, even from 2,200 miles away, is true. I covered politics back then, which in Chicago is followed with the closeness with which Texans follow high school football.
In my eight or so years writing about Chicago politics, I witnessed a fistfight in the City Council chambers, I saw the words "nigger die" spraypainted on a church door when a black candidate for mayor, Harold Washington (along with former vice president Walter Mondale), visited for Easter Sunday services, and wrote a series of articles about the mayor's foes clandestinely taping a conversation between Mayor Washington and another black politician and then slipping the tape to the press. Chicago is the kind of place that sets records for corruption: Over the past 20 years, the city has averaged more than one City Council member indicted per year.
I was 25 and writing for the city's main alternative weekly, the Chicago Reader, when Harold Washington was elected the city's first black mayor, an election that pretty much tore the place apart. He was also the city's first anti-machine mayor in more than 30 years, and also a politician to the left of Ted Kennedy, but it's not like most in the press could see beyond the color of his skin -- which was frustrating but also meant I felt I had an important roll to play.
I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. The TV reporters and print folks would report the story one way, I'd report it the other way -- and many would admit later that often I had it right. You know how your are in your 20s -- cocky, know-it-all. It was a dream fit.
But then in the late 1980s, my sweetie was accepted into graduate school at UC-Berkeley. I thought I might write about Chicago politics forever but, alas, it wasn't to be. While out in California I wrote my first book, “Fire on the Prairie” (subtitle: Chicago's Harold Washington and the Politics of Race), and then, hard up for money, went to work for a suburban daily, the Contra Costa Times, covering county politics.
At my first Board of Supes meeting they were honoring a pig brought into the chambers for its award. I felt like I had died and been sentenced to hell.
Tell us a story about something that seems to illustrate the contrast between how politics works in Chicago vs. how it works in the Bay Area.
When people try to distinguish Chicago politics from politics elsewhere they tend to focus on the hardball tactics of its practitioners. "This ain't beanbag," is a famous comment by a Chicago pol long deceased whose name may or may not have been Dooley, I forget. But generally speaking, politics anywhere ain't beanbag. Sure, the political fighting is more bare-knuckles in Chicago. but politics tends to be bare-knuckles wherever you live. I'd hazard to say more people in this country know the dirt on George W. Bush (accused of doing coke, alleged to have had an adulterous affair) than know his tax policies. Politics tends to get pretty nasty no matter where you live.
(Hell, writing about high tech for the past bunch of years has allowed me to see first hand that it ain't just politics, either. In my latest book, “The Plot to Get Bill Gates,” I detail a Microsoft product manager's nasty, behind-the-scenes smear campaign to discredit Java. He used misstatements, untruths, and off-the-record snipes to discredit Sun Microsystem's programming language. Nowadays, everyone seems to employ Chicago politics-like techniques to win.)
To me the main difference between the Chicago I covered in the 1980s and the politics I've observed as a political writer living in the SF Bay Area is that in Chicago everything boiled down to race and ethnicity. I mean, race and ethnicity were everything in Chicago. It wasn't just an occasional comment about "the black vote" or "the Asian vote" but pretty much the focus of all political commentary and strategy. Chicago was -- and probably still is, though in fairness it has been ten years since I lived there -- a city obsessed with race, and its politicians understood how to exploit racial fears and racial ignorance.
Let me offer an example that brings both these points together: It occurred during the last mayor's race I covered in Chicago, in 1987. Harold Washington, the city's first black mayor, was running against Jane Byrne, who Washington had defeated to become mayor four years earlier. Polling showed that the white community's fear that crime would increase under a black mayor was Byrne's best weapon.
Yet the problem was that Byrne had served as mayor between 1979 and 1983, and when compared to Byrne's tenure, crime was down under Washington -- significantly down. I don't give Washington any more credit for that than I do for the fact that the Bears won the Super Bowl under his tenure -- Chicago was largely reflecting a national trend -- but the facts are the facts, the crime rate was higher during Byrne's tenure than Washington's. That was the dilemma facing the Byrne campaign.
The solution was very Chicago -- run commercials and stage a series of events that nonetheless cast Washington as so indifferent to crime, and so hamstrung in dealing with the problem because of his "base" (code words are a big part of the way the game is played), that crime had run amok under his tenure. How did she pull this off? By taking advantage of a statistical blip.
Crime plunged between 1983 and 1985, but it took a small dip up in 1986. So even though the crime rate in '86 was much lower than any year that Byrne served as mayor, she made it seem like the city was far more dangerous than under her tenure. The sad part is that it worked. It was a centerpiece of her campaign yet, as a staffer for the city's main alternative weekly, the Chicago Reader, I was the only reporter who bothered to check the actual stats.
And then when the Reader put the story on its cover, the Byrne campaign filed a formal complaint with a campaign watchdog agency that had been established because so much racial ugliness had occurred during the '83 election. I was accused of instilling race into the mayor's race. Sigh.
I figure there must be a few choice gems that didn't make it into your Gates book because they didn't seem to fit anywhere. Care to share one or two?
Scott McNealy's propensity to wear plaid golf pants as his everyday workabout slacks -- until he was practically ordered by the people around him to wear something else.
For some reason I could never weave in that tale, derived from an interview with Sun co-founder Bill Joy and John Gage, an early Sun employee. Vinod Khosla was Sun's founding CEO, but Khosla was dumped in a palace coup in like 1984, two years into his tenure.
"Scott was the guy we wanted to take Vinod's place," Joy said. "Except we had one pre-condition."
Gage: "Scott had to let Carol Bartz [another Sun employee] buy him some clothes.”
Joy: "We wanted to have Carol be like Regis [McKenna], who took care of Steve Jobs's image [transformation]."
Gage: “We needed Carol to tell him, 'These are pants, Scott. I know they’re not plaid but they work just the same as the plaid ones. Wear them. Scott was a golfer. Need I say more?"
Joy: "Scott wore plaid pants to work. All the time.”
My interview with Joy was one of the high points of the research phase of "The Plot to Get Bill Gates." Still, unlike other interviews with key players, I never figured out an elegant way of weaving the scene into the book. While a graduate student at UC-Berkely, Joy created Berkeley Unix, the most popular form of Unix. He'd be a lock for first-round induction if anyone were to put together a Computer Hall of Fame; many would list Joy in their top ten. We met for nearly three hours over lunch at San Francisco’s LuLu’s, a toney South of Market restaurant.
He has brillowy hair and deep blue eyes so intense that together they give him a touch of the mad professor look. He really bore into me as I described the idea of the book -- write about Silicon Valley by writing about the various efforts to take on Bill Gates and Microsoft, from Oracle’s network computer to the browser wars to Sun’s Java programming language -- his eyes slightly scrunched, sizing me up.
His look was so intense that it gave him a scowl. He hit me with a mean glare when I asked if he is often compared to “other” Bill, but he proved game even at answering that question, and eventually – with the help of the wine and the presence of Gage, a close friend and a world-class gabber – he really warmed up. He spoke at length about the “black op” project inside of Sun that gave rise to Java, and about the early days of Sun.
That's when he and Gage started telling tales of McNealy, a rich-boy prep boy who didn't quite get it that pants can come in solids.
Oh, and I never quite managed to get in this Gage quote about McNealy: “Scott’s management style has always been a lot like his style when playing hockey. Full speed slam into somebody. Get up. Full-speed slam into the next guy. There’s grace, there’s ballet, but somehow he always ends up landing on his head. That’s Scott. He’s always at full speed, he can do some things elegantly, but he’s always heading straight for the goal. And either the puck will go into the goal or Scott will.”
Let's talk about the book tour last summer: it strikes me as fairly superficial to have you positioned as the "skeptic" on technology while your partners on the tour were positioned as the "cheerleaders." I'm wondering why you went along with that.
My complaint was that I wrote a book that I feel tells a fun tale about ego and obsession in the Valley, yet here I was touring the country (okay, Seattle, New York, Boston, Austin, and of course the SF Bay Area) with two other authors arguing points only occasionally alluded to in my book.
The basic point advanced by Kara Swisher and Po Bronson, my companions last summer, is that the Internet is the most exciting and wonderful thing to happen since the capture of fire (okay, I overstate their point, but only a tad).
To me the Internet offers plenty of good stuff (e-mail has revived the art of letter writing; it empowers small publishers such as yourself; it offers access to a virtually limitless array of information) but, like television or the car or most technological breakthroughs, it cuts two ways, bringing about benefits but also unintended negative consequences.
I'll save you the sermon here but suffice it to say that it's nothing you'd read in "The Plot to Get Bill Gates," which is meant to be a fun story that provides an entertaining and intimate look at some of the bigger names (Gates, McNealy, Ellison, Ray Noorda, etc) and the companies they run.
The theme is the Capt. Ahabs Club: those who become so distracted by the Great White Whale from Redmond that, like the protagonist in Moby Dick, it borders on obsession.
Why did I go along with it, then? The reality of the book biz nowadays is that most authors rarely go on tour. To the extent they get a chance to talk about their work it's a phoner with a radio host or, if you're lucky enough to draw the attention of national television, a trip across town to the nearest affiliate. My publisher sent me to one city for my first book (I was living in Oakland at the time so my publisher sent me to Chicago) and I went nowhere for my second book, which meant I got plenty of attention in the SF Bay Area but virtually none outside.
Had I not agreed to join Po and Kara on the Silicon Valley Bleeding Edge tour (that was Random House's name for it) I'm afraid they would have sent me to Seattle for sure (the Gates/Microsoft connection), and maybe to New York, but nowhere else.
It was sometimes painful playing a contrived role that was far afield from my book but (1) I like a good intellectual fight so there was some pleasure in it; and (2) it helped me gain more exposure.
Think of it like a lesser-known politician grabbing on to a better-known pol's coattails. Po is a well-known novelist with quite a following in high-tech; Kara is a talented big-name reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Me -- well, how many people who are reading this had heard of me prior to the publication of my latest book (probably most hadn't heard of me till your introduction above).
I've been on TV a ton of times (local stations in all the cities mentioned above, and also CNN, MS-NBC, C-NBC, C-Span,...) in no small part because of the Bleeding Edge Tour. What's the appropriate cliche -- beggars can't be choosy? Don't look a gift horse in the mouth? Or is it don't bite the hand that feeds you?
How do you like the chances of Jerry Brown, the former California governor, of turning the city of Oakland around?
My friends would groan if they knew you were asking me to offer my thoughts on Jerry B.
I lived in Oakland until recently (I lived there from '92 until Dec '99, when I moved into SF), and God was I insufferable during Oakland's 1998 mayor's race. It was like everyone I knew was a Brown supporter yet there was no way on this green earth I was going to vote for the man.
They thought (maybe still do) he was this progressive great guy generously offering to help save Oakland, I thought (still do) that he's the political equivalent of Bob Dylan: he may have considerable gifts, but he's reinvented himself so many times I wonder if he even knows what he stands for.
To cite but one recent example: like ten years ago he ran for and won a four-year post as the chairman of the state Democratic party. Your main task in that job is money shaker: you bring the big dollars into the party. Yet he quits that post mid-term to run for president -- and his main issue out on the campaign trail is the vulgarity of money in politics.
The generous interpretation is that Brown caught a glimpse of life inside the money machine and was sickened by what he saw. But that's naive. He served as governor of California, for God's sake --and he made at least one run for the president in the '80s. He was an adept fundraiser for a long, long time. But good ole Jerry saw an opportunity with the backlash against the influence of money on politics.
He was an overnight convert who now was presenting himself as the savior of the political process. To me his decision to run his "1-800," $100 contribution limit campaign was not all that different from a timber executive quitting and running for office as the environmental candidate because he was so tired of cutting down trees. Except who would have given the timber exec any credence?
Sure, Brown did some great things as governor. For instance, breaking new ground by appointing so many black and Latino and women judges. Yet what prompted him to run for the mayor's post in the first place? (I mean, the first time I heard he was thinking of running he had lived in Oakland for only a little more time than Hillary has lived in New York.)
He wanted to move his group, We the People (typical, he starts a group, but then shortly thereafter his plans change, he decides he wants to be mayor, and so much for the group), into an abandoned factory near Oakland's Jack London neighborhood --and grows so frustrated that the city's zoning and planning departments want to review his plans that he now thinks he's qualified to be our mayor. Well, f*** that.
At first he talked some pretty pie-in-the-sky stuff. I actually had a one-on-one conversation with him at this time (I was involved with an inner city anti-violence group, the support of which Brown was wooing) and thought to myself, Jesus, this all Oakland needs, hair-brained stuff about how Oakland should have a car-less downtown.
But to his credit Brown quickly abandoned some of his crazier ideal-but-who's-kidding-whom stuff and turned his attention to real issues: jobs, economic development, crime, the schools. Ran a great campaign, actually -- I give him a lot of credit for that as well, went into the city's roughest neighborhoods to press the flesh.
Yet -- and yet. As editor of the Express (the alternative weekly in Oakland-Berkeley) I paid a lot of attention to the first year of his administration. And here we're witnessing yet another Brown conversion, from left-y, progressive hero to defender of the middle.
His plans to take over the schools reminded me of Chicago's Mayor Daley: The answer is for him to appoint everyone on the school board, the process be damned (Brown has backed away some from that proposal because of the backlash).
I sympathize with all those folks who've set up tents in City Hall plaza to protest Oakland becoming too expensive a place to live--in no small part because of Brown's gentrification plans (or "Jerrification" as critics put it). Last summer I heard him give a shockingly conservative speech, going way overboard when kissing up to the assembled group of entrepreneurs and high-tech workers:
“The government only solves problems it first creates itself. The real problem solvers are people in the private sector.”
Think about that. That's like something Pat Buchanan would say, not the former leader of "We the People."
So how will Oakland fare under Jerry Brown? Assuming he doesn't lose interest (that's been another Brown trait) I assume that he'll help revive Oakland's downtown, and life in the city's better-off communities will no doubt improve. But I don't think for a moment that he'll make life better for those who truly need government's help.
Describe a few manifestations of Left Coast liberalism that you'd be more enthusiastic about if they weren't so annoying.
- Press releases from the city of Berkeley that request that those attending an event refrain from wearing perfumes, aftershaves and deodorant because of those chemically sensitive folks who also might want to attend.
- The white activist in dreadlocks and lip ring and wearing jeans cut off at the knees (worn even in the winter) who is fervid about the struggle of some group of indigenous peoples a continent or two away but oblivious to similar injustices and impoverishment in his back yard.
- The outpouring of emotion (not to mention the inflow of dollars to the appropriate cause) when newspapers report on some tragedy that has befallen an animal or group of animals versus the tree-fall-in-the-forest silence when papers report on some similarly tragic fate that befalls a human.
- And last, but not least, what my good buddy Mike Loftin, an immensely
talented community organizer, has been calling "Zen fascism"
since at least the early 1980s, a phenomenon that somehow renders the
eating of a hamburger while talking left politics a contradiction worthy
of a lecture.
What's something about you your friends would be surprised to learn?
Too bad you didn't call your site six questions. Now what kind of question is that?
What wouldn't I tell my closest friends but post on a Web site for any stranger with a modem to read!?!
But we're so close to reaching the top of the mountain so how about this: that I'm strangely private for someone as talkative and seemingly candid as I come across.
That I'm an open book on so many things, but sniff around too close to those parts of my life I've posted with "keep out" signs and you'll hear me growl; force your way in through clandestine snooping and I'll bare my teeth and snap at you.
Oh, and if you read something I've written that's meant only for myself, or if you read something of mine that's a work in progress, be forewarned--I bite.
It's been fun, Tom. Until now, at least. (Growl.)
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