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The Joke of Silicon Valley
THE JOKE OF SILICON VALLEY, by Judith Stone
You could say that Jeffrey Armstrong has moved beyond wetware and
software, beyond hardware to har-dee-har-hardware. And that's about all
you could say, because once Armstrong gets rolling, there's no chance to
do much else but make the sign of the monitor and shout hallelujah. But
hush. He's telling the congregation how it came to pass that he quit his
marketing job at a California computer company to become a full-time
stand-up saint. "O ne night, as I was home in Santa Cruz, working on
my computer, lightning struck the satellite dish on the roof of my
house. I was rendered unconscious, and when I awoke, the Keyboard
Prayer was on the screen--'Our program who art in memory, HELLO be thy
name....' I was given the name Saint $ilicon, and the Giver of Data,
G.O.D., instructed me to start the Church of Heuristic Information
Processing, CHIP, the first user-friendly religion." "That was in
1984. Since then, the cherub- faced, 40-year-old Armstrong, a.k.a.
Saint $ilicon, the fourth-quarter prophet and strict fun-damentalist,
has been ministering to "the data-distressed, the unwired masses, the
D-based and D-filed," mostly at corporate events like sales meetings,
motivational seminars, and conventions of computer-store owners. One of
his favorite gigos (garbage in, gospel out) was Apple's Christmas party.
Usually Saint $Silicon preaches to the sort of people who actually
understand those W ang commercials in which attractive young computer
jocks howl with laugh ter over what the MIS guy does after they take a
DEC workstation and, via a Wang PBX, get it talking to his own mainframe
through a Wang VS. But tonight not one of his flock sports a nerdpack.
There is a guy wearing a rather large, four-sided healing crystal in a
deerskin shamanic pouch; Saint $ilicon is the guest speaker at the High
Frontiers Monthly Forum, a new-age Chautauqua sponsored by the
more-or-less quarterly magazine that's devoted to "the cutting edge of
science, technolo gy and/or psychoactivi ty." Among the men and women
gathered in the meeting room of Shared Visions Bookstore in Berkeley,
California, are a stockbroker who's going back to school to become a
therapist, a software designer who's going back to school to become a
therapist, a therapist, a holistic video engineer, and a man whose card
says REVERSING ENTROPY IS EVERYBODY'S BUSINESS. The crowd is friendly,
technohip, bright. Okay, a couple of people are having an animated
discussion about th e mystical acoustic properties of tarantu la spider
silk, but basically it's heartening to see the sixties rebooted, laid
back but on-line. The lectern's been transformed into a
red-velvet-draped pulpit for Saint $ilicon, who wears a white suit with
a button on the lapel that says HAS YOUR DATA BEEN SAVED? At his neck
is a clear plastic brooch with flashing green, red, and yellow lights
controlled by a voice-activated computer; it looks a bit like a petri
dish surrounded by tiny Chri stmas bulbs. Oh yeah, and a silicon chip
is stuck to his fore head. ("The MIT group wear their chips on their
shoulders," he tells the crowd.) In the compelling twang of a
down-home Bible Belter, Saint $ilicon rocks into the Sermon on the
Monitor. "Dearly C-loved, we are assembled here together because PCing
is believing. We're here to console you; ASCII and ye shall receive.
We say there is a life worth debugging. Data, data, everywhere, but not
a thought to think, that's the problem.... Friends, perhaps you know
someone out there with a terminal illness, so me poor hacker with
bloodshot eyes in data distress who's been attacked by the evil one,
Glitch, and his wicked helper, Missingstuffinfiles. Even if your data
has been blown all to HAL, there's not a thing we can do to bring it
back. But we can solace you in your hour of need. "And that is why
the Giver of Data has downloaded to me, from the heavenly host
mainframe, the Keyboard Prayer for the data distressed. Now let us make
the sign of the monitor (a squa re traced in the air, if you'd like to
try it at home), bow our heads, and pray responsively." The crowd
mumbles good-naturedly: "...Forgive us our I/O errors as we forgive
those whose logic circuits are faulty. Lead us not into frustration and
deliver us from power surges. For thine is the algorithm, the
application and the solution, looping forever and ever. Return!" Saint
$ilicon holds aloft a Binary Bible, which, he says, he translated from
the ancient Geek, and reads from its first book, Sysgen I:i: "In the
beginning, the Giver of Data ge nerated silicon and carbon and the
system was without architecture, and uninitialized, and randomness was
upon the arrangement of the matrix...." Then come announcements. For
the "Cathode-lics" in the audience, CHIP is opening a new high school,
Our Lady of Perpetual Upgrades ("We don't have nuns, we have nulls") and
a new junior high school, PC Jr., the Immaculate Deception. Papal bull
isn't the only kind Saint $ili slings. He's an equal opportunity tease,
offering to perform circuitcisions and bar-co de mitzvahs; he quotes
the Ten Commands ("Thou shalt not pirate programs") and the Twenty-third
PROM--for programmable read-only memory--("Yea, though I commute to the
Valley each day, I fear no evil, for my Mazda is running. You prepare a
desk for me in the office of my competitors..."). For Bootists, there's
a mantra (Ohms EPROM RAM ROM); for CMOSlems, readings from the glorious
Core-RAM; and for aging hippies, Beep Here Now, by RAMDOS. "Let us
turn to h ymn number 1101101," the saint cries, exhortin g the faithful
to make a joyful noise. "Amazing space," they sing. "how sweet it is,
to have a disk like thee, My files were lost, but now they're found.
There's room on my PC." During intermission, when Saint $ilicon has
finished hawking such holy relics as posters, buttons, and tapes, he
talks about the true message of his on-high-tech antics. "Essentially,
I created Saint $ilicon, the patron saint of appropriate technology, to
save myself fro m the adverse effects of working seven years in the
compu ter industry," says Armstrong. "He's the embodiment of a certain
idealism." Like most saints, $ili/Armstrong has an odd resume. The
Detroit native holds degrees in psychology and creative writing from
Eastern Michigan University, and in history and comparative religions
from the University of California at Santa Cruz. A former street poet
and vice president of a garment company, Armstrong was planning to teach
when federal budget cuts dried up positions in the humanities. To
support his wife and daugh ter (ten-year-old Guenevere, who thinks his
act's a scream), Armstrong became a Middle East sales representative for
Apple. Later he was marketing manager for Corvus Systems, then Nestar
Systems, two Silicon Valley firms. "My job was to help customers
understand what the engineers were doing. I was what I call an
intelligent interface between end users and the people who were creating
the technology. I'd go to the engineers and say, 'What does this do?'
And they'd say 'Do?' They got so cut off from t he rest of the world. I
learned that's the only danger of technology--disconnecting from
reality. That's when you hurt yourself and other people. "Science and
traditional religions run on algorithms--that is, rigid rules. Following
rules blindly, inflexibly, leads to danger. I developed the Church of
Heuristic Information Processing to teach a model of thinking for the
technological era: Heuristic thinking is flexible and varied, offering
rules of thumb , not strict, specific laws. Our generation is
challenged to absorb a lot of new information, while staying rooted but
not rigid." The best way to keep people supple, he thinks, is by
getting them to laugh at themselves. There will be no salvation for the
computer industry until it prepares to meet its mocker. Tonight's
audience is ready to laugh, even when they don't get it all. "I'm just
a beginner with computers," says the man with the crystal the size of
Big Rock Candy Mou ntain. "Some of it was over my head, but he's
funny." The saint's car eer is going divinely. He seems to be a solid
hit on the circuit circuit, where the silicon-savvy get all the
in-jokes--and hang around after the sermon to tell some of their own.
("One I heard recently was, how is Ronald Reagan like Pascal
programming? They both use a semicolon.") He does two weekly radio
spots, one heard in the San Francisco Bay area and the other in New
York, and he is publishing his own Binary Bible. Several European firms
have booked him, including the Va tican, though the boss won 't be
there. And he's running for president on the Technocrat ticket. "We're
neither left nor right," he explains. "We're light. Our motto is,
Lighten up!" After intermission, Jeffrey Armstrong addresses the group
as himself, something he doesn't do with the corporate crowd. He
discusses his desire to integrate the linear thinking of the
technological age with the cyclical thinking of the agricultural age,
leads an esoteric discussion of Bo olean algebra, and recites poetry.
But it's Saint $ilicon wh o sends them out the door, warning folks to
watch for the signs of PCness envy--the fear that the other guy's system
packs more RAM than yours--but ending with the promise of Nerdvana and
words that restoreth the scroll: "There's no need to abandon hope, all
ye who press Enter; in the end everything will be right justified." (>
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