California dreaming the key to imitating Silicon Valley

WIRED:A QUESTION I've repeatedly been asked is this: how can Silicon Valley be recreated elsewhere? Especially, cough cough, in Ireland,? asks Danny O'Brien

Over the years I think most of the obvious answers have been found and given: a critical mass of nearby investors; a local academic institution concentrating on high standards and practical technological research; a concerted effort to create a social environment between entrepreneurs, thinkers and investors.

Those answers have been heard, and followed, with some success: Dublin's Digital Hub, for instance. The advantages of the valley's location has, to some extent, bled away in the last few years. Ironically, the technology it champions has meant that everyone is a little bit closer to early research documents and an investor's ear. But it still has one advantage that is rarely mentioned, and rarely copied, and which I personally believe outweighs many of the other efforts. Silicon Valley has stories.

You know a few of them already: the "two guys in the garage" mythology of Apple and Google; the dogs allowed in the office, and the all-night coding marathons; the punk hackers, and the 21-year-old chief executive; the glitzy houses and the strange, libertarian politics. That, of course, is the point. Silicon Valley is now as established in common consciousness as it is in business or technology circles.

You'd think that most competitors would hardly be able to fight this first-mover effect. A government can't provide grants for quirkiness - and looks rather silly when it tries. Locations have tried to ride on the shirt-tails of the brand name recognition, by naming themselves Silicon Glen, Silicon Gulch, or even, most recently, London's Silicon Roundabout, but that just serves to emphasise the pale imitation.

But having lived in Silicon Valley for almost a decade now, I have to say that the eccentricity and the stories really were - and to a certain extent are - buried as deeply here as anywhere else. Walk down its streets and the valley looks like a dull suburb of a giant, rural science park.

Many journalists have come and gone here, looking for the excitement of a technological revolution and coming away puzzled at the dull, shy, repetitive geeks and their anti-social obsessions.

Which is rather the point: you'll feel the same initial impression in any tech haven, anywhere in the world. But Silicon Valley was lucky enough to find itself, early on, surrounded by journalists and writers willing to dig deeper.

The first few years of the microcomputer revolution in the early 1970s were documented by the same journalists who had excitedly written about (and were involved in) San Francisco's counter-culture scene. They were happy to project a sense of idealism and excitement on whatever topic they found, and willing to talk big and paint shuffling geeks as heroes of a future revolution.

Writer Stewart Brand moved seamlessly from running the Whole Earth Catalog to filming the pioneers of mouse-and- windows interfaces conducting their first public demo.

Nationwide, journalists like John Markoff turned the mundane daily events in the valley into a breathless litany of exciting events and characters. The public image of the valley was always carved out in Tom Wolfe-style new journalism hyperbole, and the valley itself imitated that, and revelled in it.

Am I saying that Ireland's Silicon Bogs should employ a hyperbolic hack writer to fake excitement at non-existent oddness? Certainly not (although I am available for a very reasonable stipend). The net means that we no longer need writers to invent retrospectively our lives for us. But it does mean that, if you want your corner of the technological revolution to make a mark, you need to think in terms of the stories you will tell your grandchildren. Once the writers and the thinkers around Silicon Valley started thinking what they were doing was revolutionary, it became almost the automatic belief of anyone involved: from the secretaries to the chief technical officers. Even when pouring scorn on it, they confirmed it was the default belief.

I realise that this sounds like a Californian self-actualisation tract, but there's a good reason for that. Technologists are by nature self-effacing and modest about their achievements, because their work grounds them in the dull reality, and they can't afford to be dreamers. But the creation of technology is what defines the future for the rest of us: and dreaming about what that technology can do is what makes it exciting.

Finding a balance between dreams and delivery is what almost all cutting-edge business is concerned with, and if Silicon Valley has been more successful than most, it is because it has recognised that the dreams were under-emphasised among the creators of the future world.

It fixed that balance by being willing to tell stories, grand stories, about its intent. That's a Californian kind of hubris, and a very American kind of self-aggrandising myth-making. If you want to imitate Silicon Valley, this is the cheapest way of kick-starting your own version.