Raging Against The Machines

Raging Against The Machines

One of the most promising mathematicians of his generation posed for the picture above at the University of California, Berkeley in 1968. It was a short-lived period of relative normalcy for him, as he’d resign abruptly the next year. A decade later, radicalized by the development near his cabin in rural Montana, and by reading Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, the mathematician became a terrorist.

That mathematician, of course, was Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. As part of a deal to get him to stop mailing bombs to people, the Washington Post published his manifesto in 1995, Industrial Society and its Future. In Tim Knight’s debut novel Solid State, terrorists inspired by Ted Kaczynski detonate a nuclear bomb over the San Francisco Bay Area in 2036, frying all the electronics from Silicon Valley to San Francisco and beyond.

The Right Man To Write This

Although this is Tim Knight’s first novel, he’s been a published writer since the early ‘80s, so his novel has the professional polish you’d expect from a seasoned novelist. And Tim is the right man to write this, in the sense that he’s a longtime resident of Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, and a former tech startup founder and Apple employee. Tim’s novel evinces intimate knowledge of the tensions between the haves and haves-more in the region, and other signs Tim is tapped into the Silicon Valley Zeitgeist.

For example, one of the big tech companies in the novel produces augmented reality glasses that annotate people and objects their wearers’ look at. The same technology appeared in Neal Stephenson’s novel Fall a couple of years ago, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Tim came up with the idea independently, simply because he’s been similarly plugged into tech culture.

Tapped Into The Zeitgeist

Having terrorists in the novel inspired by Ted Kaczynski is another example of Tim being tapped into the Silicon Valley Zeitgeist. Obviously, Silicon Valley tech titans aren’t luddites, but they have exhibited concern about the impact of technology—at least when it comes to their own families. Some of the wealthiest parents there send their children to a school that bans electronics. So Kaczynski’s ideology his handled with nuance in Tim’s novel: there’s obvious anger at the act of terrorism, but the terrorists’ most prominent victim is prompted to find new ways for people to fine respite from technology.

What’s not in the novel is, I suspect, related to the Silicon Valley mindset as well: non-Asian minorities. There are a couple of Asian characters, but otherwise everyone appears to be white. On the one hand, it’s nice to not have the sort of shoe-horned diversity common in movies and TV today, but on the other hand, race is a big factor in America (and the Bay Area) today, and it would have been interesting to see how that would have manifested itself in a post-apocalyptic scenario. What would Oakland look like after the lights went out? Larry Niven and David Pournelle included some elements of racial diversity in their post-apocalyptic California novel Lucifer's Hammer in the late 1970s, which I highly recommend. I highly recommend Tim’s novel too: it’s a page-turner, and ultimately a story of redemption.

Before the lights go out in Silicon Valley, Tim’s U.S. Senate candidate has some interesting ideas about economics and the Federal Reserve. Hopefully, Tim writes a sequel in which he can expand on that.

In Case You Missed It 

In a post over the weekend (Lessons From Last Week's Trading), I mentioned one of those lessons was to have a bearish tilt toward retail in the current economic environment. 

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