Did we learn the right things from Steve Jobs?

Our quest for meaning ultimately distorts our understanding of what creates success.

I’m going to take a break from writing about mainframes to do something a bit different: a book review! I’ve been spending the better part of a month working through Adam Fisher’s Valley of Genius. Usually, I plow through a book in a week or two, but this one is over 500 pages (ಠ_ಠ) … so it took a minute.

Valley of Genius is written in an oral history style, meaning rather than Fisher retelling stories like the rise and fall of Atari, the founding of the Homebrew Computer club or Larry and Sergey’s Excellent Graduate School Adventure, Fisher strings together direct quotes from the people who were there. Five hundred and twelve pages worth of quotes one after the other, often without any attribution clarifying at what point in the years of interviewing necessary for this book the statements were made.

I’m not a fan of this technique. There are various points where quotes are strung together to give the impression of one person responding directly to a remark made by someone else. For example, Mark Zuckerberg repeats the word “Domination” over and over again as various people affiliated with Facebook rattle off descriptions of early ethical dilemmas. It encourages the reader to imagine Zuckerberg at his most callous and smug while reading. That’s pretty manipulative. The interviewee’s own words used to editorialize against him.

On the other hand, allowing the people on the ground to speak for themselves reveals how significant the things removed can be when the past is being shaped into a narrative. There’s not much in this book that is completely new. You can read the same stories in any number of books or profiles specific to the individual companies or personalities. But Valley of Genius attempts to connect these separate cast of characters to examine the broader context of Silicon Valley’s evolution. Most of these people knew each other, they influenced each other, they stole from each other.

Because much of my career involves technology applied to complex social issues (before USDS I worked at the UN and overseas for various governments and NGOs) I’m often struck by how often people learn the wrong things from experience. How often the narrative constructed to explain a success or failure is edited to eliminate important details. Then you have new people coming in believing they understand the history of past projects and…