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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Michael Malone: The Mission's Bell Toll
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from Forbes ASAP, Nov. 30, 1998
IN THE FRENETIC WORLD of Silicon Valley, where the daily obsession is to shave a microsecond from every transmission, revision, and decision, a vital lesson about time lies unnoticed. As we spend billions struggling to glimpse just one product generation ahead, a prophecy about our future lies with two Ohlone Indian skulls buried to the eyeballs, cranium down, in a box of rice.
At the very heart of Silicon Valley sits Santa Clara University, an oasis of adobe buildings and gardens surrounded by a sea of industrial parks and suburban housing developments. And at the university's heart, literally and emotionally, is Mission Santa Clara, founded by the Franciscan order in 1777.
Around the mission lie rose gardens, wisteria walks, and one old adobe wall. Each tells a story. But the story told by the rose garden is the most terrible. There, beneath the thorns, and yellow and salmon and red petals, trapped within the deep and gnarled roots, are the skeletons of an untold number of Ohlone Indians, young and old, victims of smallpox and chicken pox mumps and measles ... but most of all, victims of the passage from one era to the next. They are the first valleyites to be sacrificed to the unforgiving passage of time.
The Ohlones ruled the valley for several thousand years. Yet now all that remains of them is a few dusty fragments tucked away in Tupperware bins in the abandoned football team locker room.
There, in the remotest building on campus, archaeologist Russell Skowronek manages a staff of two assistants and five student volunteers as they race to save the artifacts from the oblivion of asphalt parking lots and poured concrete foundations.
What they have found and cataloged is the detritus of America's manufacturing history, a rag-and-bone shop of early California culture: a poker chip, slate pencil, crockery toy marble, shriveled peach pits, the lower half of a glass mustard container, and other shattered and yellowed objects pulled from university grounds and the remains of a privy from a forgotten Santa Clara tannery. And, shockingly, the pair of Ohlone skulls in the desiccant.
Sitting in the university's faculty club, Skowronek anxiously stirs his coffee. An energetic man with a long mustache, he speaks quickly, like a man used to not being heard.
"We're sitting right now on ground zero of the modern computer age, he says. "You already knew that. But what you didn't know is that it started 220 years ago."
Skowronek:
"Let me explain. Before 1777 the Ohlone Indians lived in a cyclical world. It hadn't changed in 10,000 years, not since the last ice age. There was really no sense of time being linear, only circular. The seasons came and went. You hunted or you planted.
"It was not a time-based world. In fact, despite our arrogance about how much better our lives are today, we estimate that it took only one adult Ohlone just 20 hours per week to feed and shelter his or her family."
It was not a long life, Skowronek continues, nor an especially complex one. The Ohlone lived in clans that rarely interacted.... but for the occasional fight or marriage with neighboring clans just a half mile away. With little east-west trade, clans that lived just a mile from San Francisco Bay might never eat a fish or a clam but instead subsisted largely on deer and on acorns pounded into meal. The early European explorers of the region were frustrated when the guide from one clan would lead them only as far as the next stream and then refuse to go on in fear of losing his life.
"It all ended in January 1777, with the founding of the mission," says Skowronek. "Suddenly the Ohlone found themselves in time. Western European time. Life at the mission was run by the bell. You got up, ate, prayed, worked, and signed off the day at midnight with the bell. And from the moment the mission bell rang for the first time, the clocks of Santa Clara Valley began - and they kept going faster every year."
It wasn't just the priests who were trapped in this time but the Ohlone as well.
Having lived millennia without time, they had no resistance to the temporal march ringing each day from the mission tower.
Mission Santa Clara soon became the locus for all activity in the valley, Suddenly, clans that hadn't moved more than five miles in 500 years were crossing ancient boundaries and making regular visits to the mission to trade. Many chose to stay and live near the mission grounds. Stunted for generations, trade soon flourished, as did communications between clans. For the first time the Ohlone became a distinct tribe but in the process gave up the 50 subdialects and unique styles of family artisanship that had long distinguished them. Their arts and languages hybridized into single, common forms.
In listening to the time bell, the Ohlone had embarked on a path from which there was no going back. The Ohlone's vulnerability to the bell was emblematic of a lack of resistance to many things Western, most horribly contagion. In the first three decades of the mission's existence, hundreds of Ohlone died from epidemics of childhood diseases to which they had no immunity. Those baptized were buried in what is now the rose garden. But many others died from less obvious causes that nevertheless were tied to the Western European pattern of time: diet, overwork, industrial accidents, medicine, and the stress of living in a timed world.
"This new world not only changed the pace of the valley but even its look," says Skowronek. "The daily demands of commerce, faith, and schooling meant you had to build more and more buildings and homes. That meant roof tiles and adobe bricks, and that in turn meant kilns. And kilns meant charcoal, and that meant oak trees, And that deforested the valley floor, which meant no more acorns for the Ohlone. From now on they had no choice but to eat a Western diet and live a Western life."
By 1827 and the end of the valley's first modern era, Santa Clara Mission was home to 1,462 people. Spanish was now the lingua franca. Tens of thousands of cattle roamed the valley floor, and the first vineyards were planted near the mission. Alta California, because of its unique location on the Pacific Rim, also rapidly became a center for trade in a global economy: The priests wore silk vestments from China, and mission residents regularly bought items imported from Acapulco and Mexico City, the Philippines, Spain, and even England.
THE SECOND REVOLUTION IN VALLEY LIFE, which occurred in the decade after 1845, was as profound as the first, and it teaches the same lessons. One is that technological change not only produces wholly new types of products but it also forces the reorganization of the society around it. Furthermore, this reorganization is not just structural but temporal. Its participants physically and culturally restructure the world and society, and inhabit an irrevocably new timescape with its own unique rhythms and cycles.
The third lesson is the most disturbing:
When a society encounters such a point of inflection, it divides into two groups. One group, usually the majority, which cannot or will not cross over to the new world, is lost. The other, the minority that does cross over, to be joined by the next generation and new arrivals, establishes a new identity so complete as to erase all traces of the people they were before.
"You see it at the mission during the first half of the 19th century," says Skowronek. "You start out with 50 clans, and almost overnight they become Ohlone Indians. Then come the Catalonian Spanish priests and the mestizo soldiers. Before long, they are Californians. Then, in the 1840s, the Anglos arrive. They are squatters--at least until the Bear Flag Revolt and the gold rush. Then they become 'pioneers.'
"It would be easy to say these are merely changes in nomenclature, mixed with some public relations. But in fact, these name changes represent a fundamental transformation. These before-and-after groups, even when they include the same people, inhabit very different worlds."
No group felt this change more than the Ohlone. The few who had survived the first revolution in time had, within a few years, stopped being Indians and became, in an odd metamorphosis, Mexicans. "Then," says Skowronek, "after U.S. statehood, they became, basically, nothing. They were disenfranchised, dehumanized. And in response they simply disappeared. They hid as best they could in the ethnic population, losing their Ohlone identity. Their descendants wouldn't emerge again until it was safe, in our time."
Meanwhile, the Spanish/Californians, too, became Mexicans and were largely marginalized as the valley filled with new immigrants - Irish, Italian, Yugoslavian (Americans) - who easily adapted to the new pace of life.
One of these was a German, Jacob Eberhard, who bought a tannery, itself the descendent of a tanning works that was as old as the mission, from his father-in-law. Lasting nearly 170 years until finally closing its doors after the Second World War, the tannery was the most enduring business in valley history. Eberhard brought the latest inventions and consumer products to the factory and his own home. By 1880 his home featured a privy and new Edison lights, and the tannery had become a giant complex of a dozen buildings beneath a towering, belching smoke-stack. '
I'he tannery was a foul-smelling, unpleasant place to work - and wasn't very popular at the new college campus across the street when the wind shifted. Nevertheless, it was on the cutting edge of American technology in the years after the Civil War. Leather was the plastic, the silicon, of the 19th century, and nobody made it better than Eberhard. At its peak, the factory shipped 900,000 pounds of cow, calf, and sheep hides throughout the world, most notably to the shoe factories of Lowell, Massachusetts.
But Eberhard wasn't just a mass producer of rendered flesh; he produced some of the best saddle leather on the planet, the finest of which became part of a bejeweled, silvered, and gilded $10,000 saddle ordered by the 101 Wild West Show. It was, according to contemporary accounts,"the most beautiful and high-priced saddle in the United States."
The world of the Eberhard tannery in the 1880s was one of alarm clocks and pocket watches, factory whistles and train schedules. This was the new timescape, and those who could adapt to its regime survived. Those with a gift for it thrived. Once again, the new time transformed the landscape. An added level of complexity had been bolted to the manufacturing process. Now there was a hierarchy of order processing, from customer to retailer to distributor to manufacturer to supplier (like Eberhard) and back again.
This system demanded the rapid transfer of information and material, and soon the valley was crisscrossed with telegraph wires and railroad tracks. And where they and the cattle ranches met, towns appeared. The mission faded in importance to the commercial centers of the valley. Increasingly, the mission became an object of nostalgia for the past, not a part of the active present.
The valley floor itself was now one vast cattle ranch, with the last of the great oak trees felled or killed by grazing. Living in hovels, the surviving ancient Ohlones died out. Meanwhile, in 1881 Martin Murphy Jr., founder of what is now Sunnyvale and owner of most of the ranch land in the valley - indeed, the largest private landowner in the world - celebrated his golden wedding anniversary by inviting the entire state to a party. An arrogant man celebrated not just his own wealth and power but also the victory of the industrial world. Trains were chartered from around the state; hundreds of cattle were slaughtered. Eberhard was there, as were all of the successful businessmen of Santa Clara Valley. This was their moment, the high watermark of their era.
Yet even as they were celebrating, that era was coming to an end.
Within a decade the cattle ranches would almost be gone, replaced by miles of fruit trees. Technology had once again sped up the clock. Thanks to artesian wells and water pumps, mass production, marketing, and reliable railroads and highways, Santa Clara Valley was now the Valley of Heart's Delight, with the most prosperous orchards in the nation. The valley moved on corporate time, the punch clock, and the Taylor Method: In the vast new Del Monte and Libby canneries, workers were shown time-motion films on how to cut apricots and boil cherries and pit prunes. The flats of goods were wrapped in colorful promotional labels, sold according to Chicago Board of Options Exchange prices, and shipped by rail to markets in Minneapolis and Manhattan.
The children of the deceased Martin Murphy and Jacob Eberhard now lived in turreted gingerbread homes in downtown San Jose and sent their well-dressed sons to Santa Clara University and their daughters to the College of Notre Dame. The local towns swelled with the new cannery workers from Portugal and Eastern Europe, who deposited their wages at the new Bank of Italy (soon to be Bank of America).
Mansions now lined the Alameda from the old mission to San Jose, the very path once taken by the Franciscans. And in the spring, the streets would whiteout from a blizzard of blowing fruit blossoms. Busy drivers, rushing to work in the new corporate time, complained about the nuisance to city magistrates.
Once again, as time accelerated and the valley floor was transformed, and as the production process grew more subtle and complex, the people again changed. The aging pioneers, now distinguished but anachronistic, were trotted out at museum openings and interviewed by the local paper about how it was in the old days. And thanks to a new generation of writers like Jack London and local publications like Sunset magazine, a cult of nostalgia sprang up, creating an enduring myth of graciousness out of the hard life of the mission era.
By the 1920s, houses in a growing number of new valley developments featured walls painted in adobe hue, tile roofs, and even little ersatz bell towers - along with a garage to house that most representative object of the new timescape.
Yet even as the Valley of Heart's Delight was celebrating its newfound luxury, two young men, Bill Hewlett and David Packard, were turning on the switch of their new audio oscillator, in whose high-frequency waves could be heard the squeal of the valley's next era.
Then, in 1955, two years after a feeble Eberhard Tannery finally shut its doors, William Shockley, armed with a team of brilliant young men and a Nobel Prize for creating the transistor, returned to his old hometown to reset the clock and, in doing so, annihilate the valley of his childhood.
It is a curious fact, long known to biologists, that every animal - from the torpid giant tortoise to the frantic housefly - is given as its birthright about l billion heartbeats. Even that cynosure of the ephemeral, the mayfly, gets its ten-to-the-ninth as a larva before its brief fling at flight.
Why a billion - 2 at most - and not more? The answer seems to lie in some kind of clock within the cells. It is as if the Almighty, with uncharacteristic democracy, ordained that every species would have its same threescore and ten, the same span of experiences, no matter how quickly or slowly it was forced to live them. Clotho may change the content of each life's thread, but Lachesis always draws out the same length for Atropos to cut.
And all of our vast and costly struggles - medicine, nutrition, safety, genetic engineering - to extend this deadly timer will, it seems, at most improve our fateful number of heartbeats by a factor of two. But in the digital, solid-state world that is the new metronome of valley life, it is a different story. The modern integrated circuit chip will soon be able to perform approximately 1 billion operations per second. One gigahertz.
A billion electronic heartbeats: the equivalent of a lifetime in a single second.
And, of course, at the end of those billion beats, there won't be a tiny electronic death but another billion-beat second, and another. And, since silicon is incredibly stable and invulnerable to almost everything but cosmic rays, there will be a billion more of these digital lifetimes for each chip - more than all the generations of life on earth - before it goes dark.
This is the new clock, our clock, the timepiece of the valley's digital era. This is the mission bell that tolls quicker than the synapses can arc across our brains, that counts out an eternity of silicon days in the time it takes to blink your eye. And thanks to Moore's Law - that defining rule of our lives and augury of our future superfluity - this new silicon clock will grow faster and faster, doubling in speed every few years, until it too produces whole cosmologies of change that are beyond human comprehension. And what then? What happens when the next clock resets the time once again? Who gets through the next time, and what do they become?
Look at any newspaper, magazine, or television show; surf the Net; shop at the local department store; listen to the words you use in daily speech: Silicon Valley is now the center of the world, the greatest creator of new wealth and employment in human history, the dynamo of innovation transforming the modern world, the creator of a new paradigm that is redefining the way we speak, live our daily lives, even how we see the world. And in this digital universe, Silicon Valley is the new Greenwich: We build the clocks and set the pace; the world revolves around our time. We are sui generis, we are unique in all the world and all of history, we are without precedent, and without end.
The '90s have been our golden age - this has been our great party, and we have invited the whole world to attend. We speak knowingly of long booms and perpetual prosperity as if God himself has blessed our good works with immortality.
Yet the lesson of the past is that none of this is new, only the magnitude. In fact, in the 220 years of modern Santa Clara Valley history, there have been three other such eras. Each of them was kicked off by a technological revolution, each of them operated to a different and faster clock, each of them was global in scope, each of them transformed the nature of the valley itself and the self-image of its residents, and each effectively erased all real memory of what came before.
And at the moment of each era's greatest arrogance and self-assurance, each was within a decade or two of coming to an end.
The clock shifted again and they were as effectively erased as Minos or Carthage. Their children lived in a different world, spoke different words, and bore different names.
If the cycles of the past hold, the end of Silicon Valley and of the digital revolution as we know it lies sometime in the years just beyond 2010.
And then? The clocks reset themselves once more, this time perhaps to the speed of nucleotides forming and re-forming a billion times each second in biological computers, or quantum dots, or perhaps one vast global computer, humming away in 100 billion interconnected computers and chips, bearing all the world's knowledge in a new kind of silicon consciousness.
But whatever the clock, the pace will be unimaginably fast. And under such a blazing discipline, who among us will be able to cross over to the other side? A few will, perhaps our children and our children's children who have spent their entire lives as navigators of cyberspace. But it is also not hard to imagine that no one, at least no one human, will enter this new world, or the next one that arrives in the final decades of the 21st century.
Who, or more accurately what, will this new era, this new timescape, belong to? Intuitively, we already know: the machines themselves. Chips can live a lifetime in a second, then live a billion lifetimes more. For them the pace of this new clock is almost pastoral. Eventually, anthropomorphic software agents will be our surrogates into this world ... until they need us no more.
They will in time take over cyberspace as their own universe - real ghosts in the machine. Unlike us, they will be able to change their identities and their roles in microseconds and, thanks to Moore's Law; will grow ever smarter and faster and more capable of dealing with this hyperaccelerated timescape. Then the tool will become the toolmaker, and perhaps the toolmaker the tool. And the numerous objects of our lives will become the broken relics of some future cyberarchive.
We have entered into a kind of Faustian bargain with time: Just join the world of the cock, and we'll give you progress, we'll give you hope. And medicine. A longer life span. Libraries of knowledge. The ability to reach around the world. And fly to the moon. Just listen for the bell and attend to its call...
We have listened, and we have been rewarded in extraordinary ways. But it has come at an enormous cost - perhaps none greater than the one that lies ahead. Time is about to speed up again. Soon the pace will leave us behind.
And then, as for the Ohlone, the mission bell may signal the end of our day.
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