The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis

Author:Michael Lewis [Lewis, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1999-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

10

God Mode

Allan Prior was a sailor’s sailor, if such a thing can be said to exist on a 157-foot yacht decorated with thirty million dollars worth of French Impressionist paintings and run by a computer. He had finished the Whitbread around-the-world sailboat race three times, and had won it once. The Whitbread race is one of those rites of passage, like swimming the English Channel or eating one hundred and twenty cream donuts at a sitting, that indicate a man’s willingness to suffer for his art. Back in New Zealand, where Allan grew up, the Whitbread race is a national obsession. In the late 1970s a psychiatrist at the University of Auckland made a study of the strange desire of young New Zealand men to leap into small boats with seven friends, a few sacks of powdered food, and a commitment not to bathe or shave or wipe or sleep for six weeks at a stretch. The psychiatrist evidently decided that the thing had to be seen to be believed, and so made a documentary film of his study. He called his film No Use Calling Home to Mum.

When No Use Calling Home to Mum made its debut on New Zealand television, the station’s switchboard received so many protests that they never again aired the film. To this day, if you want to watch it, you have to purchase a samizdat copy for five hundred dollars. No Use Calling Home to Mum was distinguished from other disturbing television programs by its absolute lack of the usual offensive material. The film contained no sex, no nudity, no blasphemy. It advanced no political or religious heresy. It was perhaps the only film ever made to give offense solely through its main characters’ grotesque violations of ordinary standards of personal cleanliness. For thirty days at a stretch the only swipes the young New Zealand sailors made at personal hygiene were from a box of Handi Wipes. When those thirty days were distilled down to an hour and a half of television, the brave young sailors of New Zealand turned their nation’s stomach.

Allan Prior had been one of those brave young sailors. The idea of it still pleased him. He was now in his midforties but an odd smile still played across his face whenever he recalled the nauseating details of his youth. He was, in many ways, still living the life of a Whitbread around-the-world sailor. He rarely bathed. He never changed. He attacked his food with an artless violence that impressed his ship mates so deeply that they would relive their last meal with him in the way people do who have just witnessed a traffic accident together. Once, during dinner, the crew members had watched their new captain reach up into his wiry salt-and-pepper hair, pluck loose some strange particle, and eat it. He had made a deep impression on them. However damning No Use Calling Home to Mum might have been, it clearly did not begin to explore their captain’s

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