Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Time:
Michael
S. Malone:
The Mission's Bell Toll
- from Forbes ASAP, Nov. 30, 1998
IN THE FRENETIC WORLD of Silicon Valley, where the daily obsession is to
shave a microsecond from every transmission, revision, and decision, a vital lesson about
time lies unnoticed. As we spend billions struggling to glimpse just one product
generation ahead, a prophecy about our future lies with two Ohlone Indian skulls buried to
the eyeballs, cranium down, in a box of rice.
At the very heart of Silicon Valley sits Santa Clara University, an
oasis of adobe buildings and gardens surrounded by a sea of industrial parks and suburban
housing developments. And at the university's heart, literally and emotionally, is Mission
Santa Clara, founded by the Franciscan order in 1777.
Around the mission lie rose gardens, wisteria walks, and one old adobe
wall. Each tells a story. But the story told by the rose garden is the most
terrible. There, beneath the thorns, and yellow and salmon and red petals, trapped
within the deep and gnarled roots, are the skeletons of an untold number of Ohlone
Indians, young and old, victims of smallpox and chicken pox mumps and measles ... but
most of all,
The Ohlones ruled the valley for several thousand years. Yet
There, in the remotest building on campus, archaeologist Russell Skowronek
manages a staff of two assistants and five student volunteers as they race to save the artifacts
from the oblivion of asphalt parking lots and poured concrete foundations.
What they have found and cataloged is the detritus of America's
manufacturing history, a rag-and-bone shop of early California culture: a poker chip,
slate pencil, crockery toy marble, shriveled peach pits, the lower half of a glass mustard
container, and other shattered and yellowed objects pulled from university grounds and the
remains of a privy from a forgotten Santa Clara tannery. And, shockingly, the pair of
Ohlone skulls in the desiccant.
Sitting in the university's faculty club, Skowronek anxiously stirs his
coffee. An energetic man with a long mustache, he speaks quickly, like a man used to not
being heard.
"We're sitting right now on ground zero of the modern computer age, he says.
"You already knew that. But what you didn't know is that it started 220 years
ago."
Skowronek miles.
- "Let me explain. Before 1777 the Ohlone Indians lived in
a cyclical world. It hadn't changed in 10,000 years, not since the last ice age. There was
really no sense of time being linear, only circular. The seasons came and went. You hunted
or you planted.
"It was not a time-based world. In fact, despite our arrogance about how much
better our lives are today, we estimate that it took only one adult Ohlone just 20 hours
per week to feed and shelter his or her family."
It was not a long life, Skowronek continues, nor an especially complex one. The Ohlone
lived in clans that rarely interacted.... but for the occasional fight or marriage with
neighboring clans just a half mile away. With little east-west trade, clans that lived
just a mile from San Francisco Bay might never eat a fish or a clam but instead subsisted
largely on deer and on acorns pounded into meal. The early European explorers of the
region were frustrated when the guide from one clan would lead them only as far as the
next stream and then refuse to go on in fear of losing his life.
- "It all ended in January 1777, with the founding of the
mission," says Skowronek. "Suddenly the Ohlone found themselves in time. Western
European time. Life at the mission was run by the bell. You got up, ate, prayed, worked,
and signed off the day at midnight with the bell. And from the moment the mission bell
rang for the first time, the clocks of Santa Clara Valley began - and they kept going
faster every year."
It wasn't just the priests who were trapped in this time but the Ohlone
as well.
Mission Santa Clara soon became the locus for all activity in the valley, Suddenly,
clans that hadn't moved more than five miles in 500 years were crossing ancient boundaries
and making regular visits to the mission to trade. Many chose to stay and live near the
mission grounds. Stunted for generations, trade soon flourished, as did communications
between clans. For the first time the Ohlone became a distinct tribe but in the process
gave up the 50 subdialects and unique styles of family artisanship that had long
distinguished them. Their arts and languages hybridized into single, common forms.
- In listening to the time bell, the Ohlone had embarked on a
path from which there was no going back.
The Ohlone's vulnerability to the bell was emblematic of a lack of resistance to many
things Western, most horribly contagion. In the first three decades of the mission's
existence, hundreds of Ohlone died from epidemics of childhood diseases to which they had
no immunity. Those baptized were buried in what is now the rose garden. But many others
died from less obvious causes that nevertheless were tied to the Western European pattern
of time: diet, overwork, industrial accidents, medicine, and the stress of living in a
timed world.
"This new world not only changed the pace of the valley but even its look,"
says Skowronek. "The daily demands of commerce, faith, and schooling meant you had to
build more and more buildings and homes. That meant roof tiles and adobe bricks, and that
in turn meant kilns. And kilns meant charcoal, and that meant oak trees, And that
deforested the valley floor, which meant no more acorns for the Ohlone. From now on they
had no choice but to eat a Western diet and live a Western life."
By 1827 and the end of the valley's first modern era, Santa Clara Mission was home to
1,462 people. Spanish was now the lingua franca. Tens of thousands of cattle roamed the
valley floor, and the first vineyards were planted near the mission. Alta California,
because of its unique location on the Pacific Rim, also rapidly became a center for trade
in a global economy: The priests wore silk vestments from China, and mission residents
regularly bought items imported from Acapulco and Mexico City, the Philippines, Spain, and
even England.
THE SECOND REVOLUTION IN VALLEY LIFE, which occurred in the decade after 1845, was as
profound as the first, and it teaches the same lessons. One is that technological change
not only produces wholly new types of products but it also forces the reorganization of
the society around it. Furthermore, this reorganization is not just structural but
temporal. Its participants physically and culturally restructure the world and society,
and inhabit an irrevocably new timescape with its own unique rhythms and cycles.
The third lesson is the most disturbing:
- When a society encounters such a point of inflection, it
divides into two groups. One group, usually the majority, which cannot or will not cross
over to the new world, is lost. The other, the minority that does cross over, to be joined
by the next generation and new arrivals, establishes a new identity so complete as to
erase all traces of the people they were before.
"You see it at the mission during the first half of the 19th century," says
Skowronek. "You start out with 50 clans, and almost overnight they become Ohlone
Indians. Then come the Catalonian Spanish priests and the mestizo soldiers.
Before long, they are Californians. Then, in the 1840s, the Anglos arrive. They are
squatters--at least until the Bear Flag Revolt and the gold rush. Then they become
'pioneers.'
"It would be easy to say these are merely changes in nomenclature, mixed with some
public relations. But in fact, these name changes represent a fundamental transformation.
These before-and-after groups, even when they include the same people, inhabit very
different worlds."
No group felt this change more than the Ohlone. The few who had survived the first
revolution in time had, within a few years, stopped being Indians and became, in an odd
metamorphosis, Mexicans. "Then," says Skowronek, "after U.S. statehood,
they became, basically, nothing. They were disenfranchised, dehumanized. And in response
they simply disappeared. They hid as best they could in the ethnic population, losing
their Ohlone identity. Their descendants wouldn't emerge again until it was safe, in our
time."
Meanwhile, the Spanish/Californians, too, became Mexicans and were largely marginalized
as the valley filled with new immigrants - Irish, Italian, Yugoslavian (Americans) - who
easily adapted to the new pace of life.
One of these was a German, Jacob Eberhard, who bought a tannery, itself the descendent
of a tanning works that was as old as the mission, from his father-in-law.
Lasting nearly 170 years until finally closing its doors after the Second World War, the
tannery was the most enduring business in valley history. Eberhard brought
the latest inventions and consumer products to the factory and his own home. By 1880 his
home featured a privy and new Edison lights, and the tannery had become a giant complex of
a dozen buildings beneath a towering, belching smoke-stack. '
I'he tannery was a foul-smelling, unpleasant place to work - and wasn't very popular at
the new college campus across the street when the wind shifted. Nevertheless, it was on
the cutting edge of American technology in the years after the Civil War. Leather was the
plastic, the silicon, of the 19th century, and nobody made it better than Eberhard. At its
peak, the factory shipped 900,000 pounds of cow, calf, and sheep hides throughout the
world, most notably to the shoe factories of Lowell, Massachusetts.
But Eberhard wasn't just a mass producer of rendered flesh; he produced some of the
best saddle leather on the planet, the finest of which became part of a bejeweled,
silvered, and gilded $10,000 saddle ordered by the 101 Wild West Show. It was, according
to contemporary accounts,"the most beautiful and high-priced saddle in the United
States."
The world of the Eberhard tannery in the 1880s was one of alarm clocks and pocket
watches, factory whistles and train schedules. This was the new timescape, and those who
could adapt to its regime survived. Those with a gift for it thrived. Once again, the new
time transformed the landscape. An added level of complexity had been bolted to the
manufacturing process. Now there was a hierarchy of order processing, from customer to
retailer to distributor to manufacturer to supplier (like Eberhard) and back again.
This system demanded the rapid transfer of information and material, and soon the
valley was crisscrossed with telegraph wires and railroad tracks. And where they and the
cattle ranches met, towns appeared. The mission faded in importance to the commercial
centers of the valley. Increasingly, the mission became an object of nostalgia for the
past, not a part of the active present.
The valley floor itself was now one vast cattle ranch, with the last of the great oak
trees felled or killed by grazing. Living in hovels, the surviving ancient Ohlones died
out. Meanwhile, in 1881 Martin Murphy Jr., founder of what is now Sunnyvale and owner of
most of the ranch land in the valley - indeed, the largest private landowner in the world
- celebrated his golden wedding anniversary by inviting the entire state to a party. An
arrogant man celebrated not just his own wealth and power but also the victory of the
industrial world. Trains were chartered from around the state; hundreds of cattle were
slaughtered. Eberhard was there, as were all of the successful businessmen of Santa Clara
Valley. This was their moment, the high watermark of their era.
- Yet even as they were celebrating, that era was coming to an
end.
Within a decade the cattle ranches would almost be gone, replaced by miles of fruit
trees. Technology had once again sped up the clock. Thanks to artesian wells and water
pumps, mass production, marketing, and reliable railroads and highways, Santa Clara Valley
was now the Valley of Heart's Delight, with the most prosperous orchards in the nation.
The valley moved on corporate time, the punch clock, and the Taylor Method: In the vast
new Del Monte and Libby canneries, workers were shown time-motion films on how to cut
apricots and boil cherries and pit prunes. The flats of goods were wrapped in colorful
promotional labels, sold according to Chicago Board of Options Exchange prices, and
shipped by rail to markets in Minneapolis and Manhattan.
The children of the deceased Martin Murphy and Jacob Eberhard now lived in turreted
gingerbread homes in downtown San Jose and sent their well-dressed sons to Santa Clara
University and their daughters to the College of Notre Dame. The local towns swelled with
the new cannery workers from Portugal and Eastern Europe, who deposited their wages at the
new Bank of Italy (soon to be Bank of America).
Mansions now lined the Alameda from the old mission to San Jose, the very path once
taken by the Franciscans. And in the spring, the streets would whiteout from a blizzard of
blowing fruit blossoms. Busy drivers, rushing to work in the new corporate time,
complained about the nuisance to city magistrates.
Once again, as time accelerated and the valley floor was transformed, and as the
production process grew more subtle and complex, the people again changed. The aging
pioneers, now distinguished but anachronistic, were trotted out at museum openings and
interviewed by the local paper about how it was in the old days. And thanks to a new
generation of writers like Jack London and local publications like Sunset
magazine, a cult of nostalgia sprang up, creating an enduring myth of graciousness out of
the hard life of the mission era.
By the 1920s, houses in a growing number of new valley developments featured walls
painted in adobe hue, tile roofs, and even little ersatz bell towers - along with a garage
to house that most representative object of the new timescape.
- Yet even as the Valley of Heart's Delight was celebrating its
newfound luxury, two young men, Bill Hewlett and David Packard, were turning on the switch
of their new audio oscillator, in whose high-frequency waves could be heard the squeal of
the valley's next era.
Then, in 1955, two years after a feeble Eberhard Tannery finally shut its doors,
William Shockley, armed with a team of brilliant young men and a Nobel Prize for creating
the transistor, returned to his old hometown to reset the clock and, in doing so,
annihilate the valley of his childhood.
It is a curious fact, long known to biologists, that every
animal - from the torpid giant tortoise to the frantic housefly - is given as its
birthright about l billion heartbeats. Even that cynosure of the ephemeral, the mayfly,
gets its ten-to-the-ninth as a larva before its brief fling at flight.
Why a billion - 2 at most - and not more? The answer seems to lie in some
kind of clock within the cells. It is as if the Almighty, with uncharacteristic democracy,
ordained that every species would have its same threescore and ten, the same span of
experiences, no matter how quickly or slowly it was forced to live them. Clotho may change
the content of each life's thread, but Lachesis always draws out the same length for
Atropos to cut.
And all of our vast and costly struggles - medicine, nutrition, safety,
genetic engineering - to extend this deadly timer will, it seems, at most improve our
fateful number of heartbeats by a factor of two. But in the digital, solid-state world
that is the new metronome of valley life, it is a different story. The modern integrated
circuit chip will soon be able to perform approximately 1 billion operations per second.
One gigahertz.
And, of course, at the end of those billion beats, there won't be a tiny
electronic death but another billion-beat second, and another. And, since silicon is
incredibly stable and invulnerable to almost everything but cosmic rays, there will be a
billion more of these digital lifetimes for each chip - more than all the generations of
life on earth - before it goes dark.
This is the new clock, our clock, the timepiece of the valley's digital
era. This is the mission bell that tolls quicker than the synapses can arc across our
brains, that counts out an eternity of silicon days in the time it takes to blink your
eye. And thanks to Moore's Law - that defining rule of our lives and augury of our future
superfluity - this new silicon clock will grow faster and faster, doubling in speed every
few years, until it too produces whole cosmologies of change that are beyond human
comprehension. And what then? What happens when the next clock resets the time once again?
Who gets through the next time, and what do they become?
Look at any newspaper, magazine, or television show; surf the Net; shop at
the local department store; listen to the words you use in daily speech: Silicon Valley is
now the center of the world, the greatest creator of new wealth and employment in human
history, the dynamo of innovation transforming the modern world, the creator of a new
paradigm that is redefining the way we speak, live our daily lives, even how we see the
world. And in this digital universe, Silicon Valley is the new Greenwich: We build the
clocks and set the pace; the world revolves around our time. We are sui generis,
we are unique in all the world and all of history, we are without precedent, and without
end.
The '90s have been our golden age - this has been our great party, and we
have invited the whole world to attend. We speak knowingly of long booms and perpetual
prosperity as if God himself has blessed our good works with immortality.
Yet the lesson of the past is that none of this is new, only the
magnitude. In fact, in the 220 years of modern Santa Clara Valley history, there have been
three other such eras. Each of them was kicked off by a technological revolution, each of
them operated to a different and faster clock, each of them was global in scope, each of
them transformed the nature of the valley itself and the self-image of its residents, and
each effectively erased all real memory of what came before.
The clock shifted again and they were as effectively erased as Minos or
Carthage. Their children lived in a different world, spoke different words, and bore
different names.
And then? The clocks reset themselves once more, this time perhaps to the
speed of nucleotides forming and re-forming a billion times each second in biological
computers, or quantum dots, or perhaps one vast global computer, humming away in 100
billion interconnected computers and chips, bearing all the world's knowledge in a new
kind of silicon consciousness.
But whatever the clock, the pace will be unimaginably fast. And under such a blazing
discipline, who among us will be able to cross over to the other side? A few will, perhaps
our children and our children's children who have spent their entire lives as navigators
of cyberspace. But it is also not hard to imagine that no one, at least no one human, will
enter this new world, or the next one that arrives in the final decades of the 21st
century.
Who, or more accurately what, will this new era, this new timescape, belong to?
Intuitively, we already know: the machines themselves. Chips can live a lifetime in a
second, then live a billion lifetimes more. For them the pace of this new clock is almost
pastoral. Eventually, anthropomorphic software agents will be our surrogates into this
world ... until they need us no more.
- They will in time take over cyberspace as their own universe
- real ghosts in the machine. [Editor's note: and you
thought it was by accident that Arnold lives in California!]
Unlike us, they will be able to change their identities and their roles in microseconds
and, thanks to Moore's Law; will grow ever smarter and faster and more capable of dealing
with this hyperaccelerated timescape. Then the tool will become the toolmaker, and perhaps
the toolmaker the tool. And the numerous objects of our lives will become the broken
relics of some future cyberarchive.
We have entered into a kind of Faustian bargain with time: Just join the world of the
cock, and we'll give you progress, we'll give you hope. And medicine. A longer life span.
Libraries of knowledge. The ability to reach around the world. And fly to the moon. Just
listen for the bell and attend to its call...
We have listened, and we have been rewarded in extraordinary ways. But it has come at
an enormous cost - perhops none greater than the one that lies ahead. Time is about to
speed up again. Soon the pace will leave us behind.
And then, as for the Ohlone, the mission bell may signal the end of our day.
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