While Furness was struggling for money inside the HIT lab, the gold rush was raging outside of it. In February 1997, Coopers & Lybrand reported that 61 Washington companies had closed venture-capital deals in 1996, bringing $295.5 million into the state—a significant chunk of the $10.1 billion invested nationwide in such deals, particularly given the size and remoteness of Washington. “It probably doesn’t get any better than it is right now,” the Puget Sound Venture Club’s Gary Rittner told the Seattle Times. “These angel[101] investors are feeling pretty good. If you’re the right guy with a good idea, you can probably get the money.”
Weirdly enough, it was going to get a lot better than it was right then, and you didn’t even have to have a good idea. In retrospect, the years 1996-1999 can be seen as a classic mania of the sort that overtakes financial markets in times when money, being in oversupply, sends people into a paradoxical panic to make a lot more of it. At the time, most Seattleites viewed the boom as evidence that economic rules and models were changing and that Seattle was helping lead the world into a new economy, the workings of which were inexplicable to minds trained to think in old-economy terms. In time, the believers insisted, the new rules would become clear, the behaviors and results rational and reasonably predictable.
Cooler heads tried to prevail. Even as early as 1997, people in Seattle and elsewhere were floating comparisons between the dotcom boom, as it was beginning to be called, and the 17th-century Tulipmania speculation disaster. Excited as Seattle was by the surge in wealth, growth and energy, there also was the profound sense among many here that something was tremendously wrong about the city’s headlong rush into unreasonable prosperity—particularly given the obvious fact that many of the local companies reaping millions in the stock market or from private investors would never, under any circumstances, turn a profit.
Examples abounded of nonsensical investments. Virtual i/O raised first-round cash of $20 million, most of it from the cable television company TCI, to build head-mounted displays, on the theory that millions of consumers would eventually want to wear their televisions. FreeShop.com, a web site that compiled free offers for consumers, had a market capitalization of $203 million at the close of the day it went public. Amazon.com, emerging as Seattle’s biggest startup story, having lost $5.8 million in 1996 and on its way to losing $1.75 billion through mid-2000, filed for an initial public offering in 1997, generating infinitely more excitement than old-fashioned, profit-making, outmoded Microsoft had when it went public in 1986.
By the end of 1997, there was very little talk in Seattle of where technology was headed or what technological bets would play out well in the long term. Talk had devolved exclusively to what idea would catch on fabulously enough to take a company public, cash in, and make its promoters millionaires. After that, who cared what happened? Money, which a few years before had been the means by which a technical vision could be fulfilled, now was the end in itself, the funded hallucination being a mere means to instant riches. Instead of betting on a company’s prospects for turning into a solid business, investors were betting on companies they thought would generate enough hype to lure in huge numbers of subsequent investors immediately. It was like watching people bet on racehorses that would be taken out and shot as soon as they crossed the finish line—even if and especially when they won.
I tried, both in the Weekly and on abcnews.com, to sound various alarms about moral decline, long-term costs, the dangers of turning America into a nation of shareholders, and boom-delivered damage to the soul of the city, but my heart wasn’t in it—partly because I was growing tired of my own determined-Seattle-loser shtick, and partly because casting aspersions on everybody clever enough to cash in on the boom was coming across more and more as either sour grapes or idiocy.[102]
And really, what was the point of turning away free money? What was to be gained? I fell prey to the conviction that I was missing out on the inevitable, the wonderful, out of some misguided set of values that felt more and more like crankiness or pretension.[103] Almost everyone was having a great time and getting paid lavishly for it, and they all were supremely confident about where they were headed. They were wiring the world! Building the future! They were young and rich and happy, and I was old and irascible and getting poorer by the minute relative to everyone else.
The explosion in salaries and net worth in Seattle and the tremendous influx of young, moneyed new residents set prices and real-estate taxes on a steep upward curve that made supporting a family on a writer’s income increasingly difficult. I started to fear that I was starving my children to feed my ego. Seattle’s cachet—or at least my high dudgeon about it—was costly to people like me, and I would sit at our dinner table in the evening imagining I was leading my family to financial ruin by refusing to buy into the boom. If only I’d pursued those opportunities with Microsoft and Amazon![104] My kids would be better fed, more secure, happier! We could be sitting here over dinner trying to figure out how to diversify the family stock portfolio!
Instead, we sat through dinners night after night in deepening silence, and I kept hearing the same conversation in my head:
“What’s for dinner tonight, Daddy?”
“Moral indignation.”
“Not again!”
It didn’t help that the boom took shape largely as a generation-gap dispute, with the beneficiaries and righteous promoters of the new Seattle way of living large being kids, and the confused, disapproving and nostalgic being their elders. To watch young people getting richer at age 30 than I would ever be, and staying excited all the time about what they were doing, only deepened my sense that the Weekly and I were out of touch with the city and the times. We had missed the significance of grunge; a rival paper, the Stranger, had come on the market in 1991 and by now had thoroughly captured the young moneyed market the Weekly couldn’t seem to understand; and all the themes and preoccupations we thought made our paper great were passé now, boring and backward.
This young-dotcomboomer-vs.-old-babyboomer divide in Seattle played out in particularly stark fashion at the Weekly, which lapsed headlong into a cataclysmic identity crisis in 1997, when the paper was sold by its founders to Hartz Mountain Pet Foods. The founding investors in the Weekly were retiring from active investment, turning their portfolios over to their children, and the children wanted to take their money out of publishing and invest it where it could earn a far higher return. Katherine Koberg, who had been only half-heartedly pursuing that job at Amazon, took one look at the new owners and bolted for the bookseller. The pet-food people—New York corporate types in tasseled loafers—had big plans for using the Weekly to gain entrée into the newly cash-rich Seattle market—they never uttered the word “Seattle,” in fact, unless it was attached to the word “market.” The first thing they wanted to do was retarget the paper toward all those new-moneyed youngsters who were reading the Stranger.
“They’re going to want to make some significant changes here,” a shamefaced David Brewster, who was to retire as a condition of the sale, told me. “Advertisers want to reach readers in the 18-to-28 age bracket, because they’re more impressionable.”
Moneycentric kids were taking over the city, then, along with all its institutions—including the one that had most affected disdain for money, status, ambition, material progress. The Weekly was to be transformed from gadfly to booster, from iconoclast to corporate cog. Hartz Mountain bought the Weekly for $8.5 million, which seemed a staggering sum for something I had always regarded as resolutely anti-commercial. It was also a depressing sum, proof positive that the Weekly was turning into yet another Seattle sellout story, going the way of all Seattle craft movements: grunge had gone to mainstream record labels, Redhook to Budweiser, Starbucks to Pepsi, Microsoft to monopolist, and now the Weekly to Hartz Mountain Pet Foods. The new owners would soon be forcing us to add two new sections—Technology and Rock Music—at the expense of the fine-arts-coverage franchise Koberg had worked so hard with Brewster to build. We would all be working on ad-revenue-driven trend, lifestyle and pop-culture pieces that would be as boring to write as to read—but then, if I read the signals properly, the paper was no longer to be targeted at people who read.
Watching Koberg leave in the face of that certainty was the most painful experience I’d ever been through at the Weekly—and not only because of the immeasurable loss to the paper. By the time she completed her months of negotiation with Amazon, Koberg had gotten so steeped in Seattle’s emerging new boom-culture that already her interests, passions—even her speech—had changed dramatically. When she first began serious talks with the Amazon people, she would come back from her meetings there laughing at their peculiarities. “They asked me what my SAT scores were,” she said one day. “I just had to laugh.” She had taken the SATs 26 years before, and like the rest of us back then had barely bothered to notice what she had scored, let alone bothered to remember it. A meaningless, momentarily entertaining number then, an SAT score now was apparently a credential—something, Koberg noticed, that people at Amazon would always contrive to work into introductory conversations about themselves.
A woman who had never deigned even to feign interest in technology or popular trends, focusing instead on arts and culture, Koberg was talking by the end of her negotiations with Amazon like a brainwashed convert to technoboomism. “The web isn’t going to be about content,” she said, with a surprisingly straight face, during one of our last conversations before she left. “It’s going to be about transaction.” I felt like that last terrified, uninvaded human at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
The Seattle glass artist Dale Chihuly had spent the previous ten years turning himself from an artist into an industry. By the mid-1990s, he had left his bowls and baskets and seaforms behind and was doing huge hanging “chandeliers” that looked like massive Medusa-esque tangles of glass, and mounting gigantic indoor and outdoor installations all over the world, all these efforts faithfully chronicled in lavishly produced books and videotapes. His crews cranked out “Chihuly” pieces virtually around the clock in two factory-like facilities—one on Lake Union, the other in Ballard—in numbers that took on assembly-line proportions.
In 1989, Chihuly Inc. began producing glass pieces decorated with “putti”—plump little glass nude boys perched in various playful poses, connoting inextinguishable mischief and joy. By the late 1990s, he was practically mass-producing them. Regarding them one day, I was struck by how much a departure they were for Chihuly, and I was wondering if they signaled a dramatic new direction in his art when I looked up from my desk in Furness’ HIT lab to discover that two of the putti had put on clothes and come prancing into my life. Named Michael “Squish” Almquist and William J. “Joey” King, they were among Furness’s most promising protégés, and by far the most perversely interesting creatures ever to come through his lab.
From time to time over the previous several months, I had heard about “Squish and Joey” and their adventures inside and outside the lab. They were variously believed to be either delusional or enlightened, their dreams of starting companies that would produce entirely new, highly advanced computer and communications interfaces being tremendously—and, many believed, impossibly—ambitious.
The two wanted to build not so much a single company with a single product as an entire industry manufacturing an entirely new set of devices that would be part of what King called “a tightly coupled system”—a computer system wired so thoroughly to the user that it could react to wishes and mood changes without the user having to bother issuing a command. King wanted to realize the vision of the scientist J.C.R. Licklider, who wrote in a famous 1960 paper, “The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.” To that end, King wanted to develop computer interfaces that were “dyadic” or “symbiotic,” in that they could be designed to accept, as he put it in a 1994 paper, “facial nonverbal behavior (i.e., facial expressions, eye movement or gaze, and pupil size)…as a novel input channel to computer systems.” King believed that a computer could be made to have an “active or proactive” interface that could interpret human behavior and facial expressions so quickly and accurately that it could, in effect, answer questions before they were asked. King liked to call these dream machines “imagination amplifiers.” “One of the things that I do when I want to modulate my own behavior is play different music,” he told me the first time we met. “And I’m often annoyed because I’ll be doing something and the music won’t be right, and I’ll have to change it. And there’s no reason why I should have to do that. I don’t think it would be very hard to have a machine do that for me.”
Where King’s expertise was in human-computer interaction, Almquist’s was in networking, virtual reality and interactive content, and he dreamed of producing Internet systems that would move data at hitherto undreamed-of speeds, allowing people to connect and communicate in rich, immersive, three-dimensional multimedia environments. The two first met in 1992, and within a few weeks were spending hours upon hours together fantasizing about future ideal interfaces and applications making use of King’s tightly coupled systems and Almquist’s high-speed-network-mediated virtual environments.
Their dreams ultimately took form as a communications system in which as many as eight different people in eight different locations could put on a little head-mounted display connected to a small box that was in turn connected to the Internet, and “meet” face to face in a digitally rendered “environment,” in which they could manipulate and collaborate on any kind of digitally stored file. The system would allow all forms of collaboration and competition, from simple face-to-face conversation to working together on three-dimensional models or playing complex computer games.
The dream in itself would have sounded bizarre and impossible had not the HIT lab already built an experimental version of it. Working with a team of researchers at Japan’s Fujitsu Research Institute, Furness and his assistants had built a system in which a team at the HIT lab appeared to be sitting in the same virtual environment with a Fujitsu research team on the other side of the Pacific. The environment was crude, and there was tremendous latency in the communication of data. When a person moved or spoke, several seconds went by before the others in the environment saw the action or heard the speech, moving images were displayed in slow, jerky, frequently interrupted motion, and speech and mouth movement were poorly synchronized. But the experiment proved that the concept could be workable with future technology.
The tenuous technological feasibility of the dream aside, there was the more difficult matter of the credibility of the dreamers. Almquist and King struck the sane as unlikely builders of a digital communications empire. Cherubic, mischievous, chronically boyish, poorly groomed and given to long, energetic, freeform disquisitions on any subject anyone brought up, the two were like a high-tech Tweedledum/Tweedledee tag team, tormenting whoever came near them with rapid, insistent, almost frantic speech that could be hard to track—particularly when, as was often the case, they finished one another’s sentences. King had a tendency toward sarcasm and impatience with the rest of the world, which he and Almquist both deemed irredeemably slow. A Texan, he talked in a high-pitched drawl that made him sound like Slim Pickens played at too fast a speed. Almquist, for his part, could never wipe the murderously mischievous look off his face. He didn’t so much walk into rooms as come bursting into them, spewing wisecracks one after the other, the one-liners related to one another by tenuous puns or connections no one else could see. He described himself to people he met as a formerly “dyslexic and autistic” child, and accompanied this confession with the hissing, spitting, head-shaking fit of someone trying to force a million ideas at once out of his brain through an interface that can only accommodate one statement at a time. He also liked to describe himself as a latter-day Godzilla—“I am vast!” he would thunder, “I romp and stomp and devour small planetoids!”—a presentation that could be off-putting, if not frightening, to people he had just met.
I first met Almquist when he dropped by the lab to visit Furness, who brought him by my desk for an introduction. As he shook my hand, Almquist fixed me with a piercing stare. “There’s a lot of craters out there,” he said, “and I don’t intend to be one of them.”
King, while less intense, was no less odd. He rigged up a computer with a hidden camera that could photograph faces of users without their knowledge, then wrote software that made the computer respond incorrectly to common commands. He conducted months of experiments in which he secretly photographed users’ faces as they stared in confusion at the rogue machine.[105]
While King was pursuing a combined psychology-computer science Ph.D. on human-computer interaction and trying to convince someone, somewhere that his “facial expression work” was worth doing, Almquist left the lab in 1994 amid considerable controversy and started a virtual-reality company, called Ambiente, that failed within a year. He then sunk into a long depression before emerging in early 1996 to start another company, F5 Labs, with a young venture capitalist named Jeff Hussey. King went to work part-time for F5 as its “chief scientist,” charged with designing its interface. Almquist, the “chief technical officer,” led a four-person team of programmers, and Hussey—the “CEO”—busied himself raising more money (the two had easily raised $1 million to get started) and hectoring Almquist and his fellow programmers to work faster, faster, faster!
From 1996 into 1998, when not slogging through the emotional morass at the Weekly, I followed Almquist and King around downtown Seattle, gathering material for my HIT lab-centered book,[106] as they fought for their dream against various demons. F5 was building what Almquist called “a load-balancing switch,” which was software, installed where a web site connected with the Internet, that monitored the array of PC boxes or servers comprising the web site and distributed information requests—the data packets that came in over the Internet—to the least busy among them. The device would allow a site owner to replace extremely expensive server boxes with extremely cheap personal computers and dramatically increase the speed of a web site, thereby allowing both for simultaneous communication with more users and the display of richer multimedia content.
The switch, which Almquist named BIG/ip, was to be the first in a series of devices he envisioned for the Internet of the future. Only when all of these products were deployed would the Net be able to deliver full-featured multimedia and virtual-reality experiences like the ultimate communications system Almquist and King envisioned.
What fascinated me about King and Almquist was their mix of insanity and immaturity with technical brilliance and apparently solid strategic thinking. When talking about BIG/ip’s technical features and role in the development of the Internet, they sounded extremely credible, sober, rational. But watching them in action—watching, for example, as they worked through a complex conference call with a customer while Almquist knelt on his chair making infantile faces at the speakerphone, or referred to a potential business partner as a “poopyhead,” or tried to run a simple meeting without cracking jokes incessantly, or even just tried to order lunch—they seemed willfully helpless and helplessly childish.
They lived together in a house on Queen Anne hill that was packed with gadgets, junk food, wine, technical magazines, the works of George Orwell, books of Nostradamus’ prophesies, comic books and video games. They were obsessed with MTV’s Real World, taping all episodes and watching them repeatedly, particularly the Miami episodes in which the group tries futilely to launch a business. They were inseparable and often indistinguishable—so much so that one of my colleagues at the Weekly told me once, “I thought Squish and Joey were the same person.”
Sitting at lunch with them one day—they had ordered deep-fried ham sandwiches,[107] genuinely horrifying fare—I started telling them about my dinner the night before. “My wife,” I said, “made a normal macaroni and cheese casserole, but then did something really cool—for the topping, she crumbled up Tim’s Cascade Style potato chips[108] and sprinkled them over the whole thing.”
Simultaneously, their jaws dropped and their eyes started glistening.
“That’s a great idea!” exclaimed Joey.
“That woman’s a keeper!” said Squish.
Squish in particular often came across not so much as an entrepreneur or software engineer but as a performance artist, his role of the moment being that of the founder of a high-tech startup. He had an odd kind of frenetic energy—if you looked closely enough, you could see little lightning bolts constantly crackling from him. He referred to any event, however traumatic, disastrous, strange, unexpected, or distressing, as “the usual madness,” and he could not keep himself from incessant play, no matter what purportedly serious task might be occupying him at the moment. Email detailing what needed fixing in BIG/ip was always a mix of technical arcana with maddening asides. “Root need to start em off with either: bash, tcsh, or ‘STTY TERM PC3’! Otherwise blood will shoot out of my eyes and fingertips!” he wrote after inspecting the first test version of BIG/ip to be installed at a customer’s site. “This merits some documentation and perhaps an ‘install script’?! Something – blah blah blah!…. ALL of this PLUS the following are “ACTION ITEMS” that Sally and I are negotiating. When we’ve come to an agreement we’ll DEFINITELY LET YOU GUYS KNOW! The pressure is BIG and so are the payoffs! ACK ICK OOK OCK!…”
I watched him end one argument over programming strategy by looking at his interlocutor and saying, “Is that your face or did your neck throw up?” And one day when Hussey—a crisp, impeccably coifed young man who showed up every day in F5’s grimy little office suite in a suit, tie, starched shirt and scowl—was screaming at him for having missed a deadline, Squish looked coolly at him and said, “When I said we could make that date, I was smoking crack.”
Every day I would faithfully chronicle the signs of failure I could see all around me at F5. There was the utter disorganization of Squish’s mind; the repeated failure of successive builds of BIG/ip to work consistently; Hussey’s apoplexy; and the growing tension and distrust among Squish and the other programmers, growing to the point where Squish would sit at his computer with headphones on and his CD player turned off so that the people around him, thinking he was listening to music, would talk freely about him, not knowing that he was listening to their every word. Hussey would rail at me in private about how he was teaching himself programming in order to get rid of Squish and take over the faltering programming effort.[109] F5 had hired a receptionist, a sales vice president, and various other people who appeared to have little or nothing to do, and they would sit in the F5 offices all day long either trying to look busy or playing solitaire on their computers. Hussey had a stock ticker installed in his office, clandestinely hooked up to the stock feed at his old employer, A.H. Capital, which was also an investor in F5, and would spend his day trading stocks instead of running his company or raising more money for it. F5 had a version of BIG/ip installed at the Tower Records web site in northern California, and spent hours every day anxiously monitoring and maintaining it from their Seattle office, always coming within seconds of having it crash. Squish and his minions consistently treated the exercise more like a game than a business: “Arrrggghhh, the ol’ rust-bucket [BIG/ip], she be takin’ on water…she’s goin’ down fer sure,” I heard Squish say during one typical BIG/ip flameout. (He liked to pretend he was a pirate.) And always in the background, like a loudly ticking clock on a time bomb, was the countdown to when they would run out of money.
Through it all, when you would have expected everyone involved to be focused and panicked over trying to make BIG/ip stable and successful, they instead spent increasing amounts of time brooding about what they perceived as unfair allocation of employee stock. Avi Bar-Zeev, a programmer and erstwhile friend of Squish’s, quit when Squish wouldn’t grant him options on more stock. Squish was convinced that Hussey was being awarded stock far out of proportion to his contribution to the F5 effort, Hussey insisted more and more vociferously that Squish should lose some or all of his stock for his consistent failures to meet company milestones, and I watched all this amazed that people were devoting so much energy to fighting so strenuously over something that was likely never to be worth anything.
The more the pressure built at F5, the more Squish/Joey and Hussey maneuvered against each other, each hoping to persuade their investors that the other was to blame for the failure they all feared was coming. Squish and Joey would sneak into F5 in the middle of the night and go through Hussey’s email and papers, looking for evidence that he was stealing money for himself. Hussey would rail at me about the shortcomings of Squish and Joey, calling Squish an “unredeemed fuckup” and Joey an “arrogant little shit.” To Squish, Hussey was “a wee little man! A wee little man!”—a term he invoked almost constantly whenever Hussey came up in conversation.
One day, I walked across downtown Seattle with Squish to a suite in the Westin Hotel that had been converted to a home for web servers. F5 had a test site there that was serving pornography for free, Squish having decided that that would be the best way to test BIG/ip under constant, exceptionally heavy demand.[110] Since he routinely dealt with the fulminations of Hussey and the constant series of disappointments and disasters at F5 with a series of exclamations (“Incredibly humorous!” “Highly amusing!” “Quite hilarious!”), manic facial expressions, piratespeak, and long stretches of what he called “coding like the wind,” I had not noticed how frantic, depressed and exhausted he had become. But we no sooner settled down in the room at the Westin than he started tinkering with his machinery and screaming out his frustration and anger. “The whole situation has become so incredibly ludicrous that it’s difficult for me to get really upset about it,” he began. “Yesterday I was incredibly pissed, incredibly mad, which is weird, because that now makes the tenth time in my life I’ve ever been really mad. There are so many people milling around, fighting, screaming, backbiting, and milling about because they don’t have a clear vision or clear focus. So I went home really pissed, really burned out, and this morning I woke up and said, ‘It’s obvious! Fire everybody!’ This is not, like, ‘Things are broken.’ This is my last recourse. This is, like, a moment of absolute calm. A moment of absolute clarity.”
He saw the end coming for F5 before it could start selling BIG/ip and making money. Not only was his company running out of funding, but Cisco Systems, a multibillion-dollar Internet company, was one of many established companies also at work on load-balancing solutions. If it was going to survive, F5 would have to get to market before the others with a better load balancer. “Now, is this a crater in the making?” Squish asked rhetorically