The Nudist on the Late Shift by Po Bronson

Books can't just stay on to-be-read shelves forever. Each book has a shelf-life, a time when it's relevant, and if you don't get to it during that time, it turns like milk.

If I were more ambitious, I'd lay out some kind of mathematical formula for that shelf-life - with variables for when the book was published (brand-new books generally age quickly; books older than you can last forever, like Twinkies) and its topic (non-fiction ages faster than fiction, in most cases) and so on.

But I'm not.

So, instead, that is why I read this book. A twenty-five-year-old pop non-fiction book about the first Silicon Valley boom, published in 1999, is still vaguely relevant now, but it's receding into the distance. Our world of rapacious tech billionaires is not at all the same as the early days of scrambling for a mere (but oh-so-coveted) $20 million. But I thought the blinkeredness, that intertwined drive for massive profits and massive disruption, the obnoxious workaholism, and endless neophilia - all of that would probably be roughly the same.

So I finally read Pro Bronson's first non-fiction book, The Nudist on the Late Shift. I have long been a huge fan of his first novel, Bombardiers - it's as close to a "Catch-22 for business" as we're likely to get - but I've mostly avoided his later books, which seemed to be very touchy-feely life-coach stuff. This was the last book before he went full goo-goo, so I've long wanted to take a look at it. And I finally did.

It's a pretty typical reported "check out this scene" book, divided into eight chapters, each one focusing on a subset of Silicon Valley people. Bronson went to Stanford; his first novel was about San Francisco finance and his second about tech companies; he'd been writing for Wired and other outlets about Silicon Valley for a few years at this point. So he was plugged in: he knew enough people to get introductions to other people, and was in about the best-possible position to write a book like this. And, in retrospect, writing mostly in 1998 to publish in 1999 is close to the perfect time, too - sure, pushing it back a year or eighteen months, to the edge of the eventual crash, might have been even more extreme, but no one can time a market peak like that.

Bronson is positive and optimistic throughout, as if he really believes all of these men working eighteen-hour days to code a new Java-powered widget and get Microsoft to buy it for multiple millions are doing something worthwhile and useful. Oh, sure, some of this benefited people other than the ones getting the truckloads of money backed up to their garages - but not all that much. And it all fell apart as everyone outside the bubble knew it would.

So this is a book about, mostly, crazy optimists who are mostly in their mid-twenties, mostly have never failed at anything in their lives, and mostly have never seen a problem they couldn't just solve by working harder. It comes across as at least slightly naïve now, but this kind of book always does: the "line always goes up!" story is only plausible when no one has a memory of line going way down, suddenly.

But it's amusing, and full of fun stories, and Bronson was, as ever, an engaging and exciting writer on a sentence level (though he's less pyrotechnic here than in Bombardiers). My schadenfreude wishes there was a twenty-fifth anniversary edition updating all of these people, but that probably would be a parade of dead, selling Acuras in Burbank, dead, retired at thirty and running an obscure futurist thinktank, major VC player, mid-level manager at Intel, disappeared during Burning Man in 2006, in federal prison for financial crimes almost no one understands.

And who wants that? The whole point of a book like this is the dream - that we can believe that they all hit it big, all got their dreams, all made the Brand New Thing and cashed out and were awesome at everything. Leaving it a time capsule preserves that dream.