Technically, it’s a layoff. I prefer “sabbatical.” After 12 years of being able to pick up the phone and wangle a new job, all I get now is a dial tone. According to JournalismJobs.com, I am one of at least 823 tech journalists from Bay Area-based magazines who’ve lost their jobs in the last 14 months.
Trying to figure out what to do next, I spend a lot of time hiking. I prefer one particular trail at Rancho San Antonio, an open-space preserve south of Stanford. It’s a four-mile lung-buster that leads to a vista point 1,600 feet above the Santa Clara Valley, where the highs and lows of my life spread before me.
The sky is usually hazy, whether with winter clouds or syrup-colored smog, so I can only estimate the site of the hospital where I was born. I can see the country club where I suffered through summer swim meets, the tree-shaded neighborhood where I grew up, the high school where I never felt as smart as the Stanford faculty brats. Hoover Tower indicates my alma mater, where, at the Daily, my journalism career began.
Standing here, I realize that the history of Silicon Valley also spreads before me. I can see where HP has preserved the 1960s offices of its founders. To the southeast, there’s Moffett Field, a remnant of the glory days of NASA. Next door, there’s Yahoo!; beyond that, Cisco and others who so recently purported to be changing the world.
In his Silicon Valley history, The Big Score (Doubleday, 1985), tech journalist Michael Malone traces a wobbly but intriguing line from the first California gold rush to the last one. It’s based on a series of technological landmarks. To begin with, the placer mining of the mid-19th century gave way to hydraulic mining by 1865, drawing engineers to California. Some of these engineers came to the Santa Clara Valley to work at the New Almaden Quicksilver Mine. In 1891, Herbert Hoover came to Stanford to study mining; his subsequent fame publicly linked Stanford with engineering. In 1910, Lee De Forest invented an amplifier for transcontinental phone calls at Palo Alto’s Federal Telegraph Company. And in 1930, David Packard and William Hewlett came to Stanford, where they forged the partnership that would define Silicon Valley.
Now what? I used to say that I could sit in my office and brilliant people would call and tell me what the future was going to look like. Now I have no office and those visionaries do not call. I worry sometimes that the Internet bubble may have sucked all the oxygen out of innovation. Other times, I’m confident that we have not even begun to realize how computers—and the people who use them—can collaborate through the exchange of information.
Either way, I’m not sure what comes next. I am luckier than most in that my loving wife works for the federal government, which is now celebrating its 226th year without a forced layoff. I know that while my particular gold rush is over, technology remains, and with it the need for people like me to translate its relevance. I wish, from my hilly vantage point, that I could figure out when the phone will ring again. I wish that I could trace my future, and the future of the Valley, as easily as I can trace our pasts. But the outlook, like the sky, is hazy.
Howard Baldwin, ’77, most recently worked on CMP Media’s ) M-Business. He lives in Sunnyvale, where he intends to finish writing a ) novel and learn to speak German during his sabbatical.
