Delving Into the Roots of California’s High-Tech Culture

I grew up on the flat, perfectly right-angled streets of Hawthorne in the 1950s. I rode my bike to play in the sand piles collected for construction of the San Diego Freeway, which most people in Los Angeles think has been there forever. Hawthorne was a brand-new community then, created nearly overnight, a planned array of almost identical tract houses built for families using the GI Bill and working in the nearby defense plants.

A similar neighborhood is the setting for a stunning new book about the genesis and culture of high-tech communities in California: “Blue Sky Dream” by David Beers, who happens to be a friend of mine.

Beers has written a memoir about growing up in Silicon Valley, the northern California equivalent of L.A.’s defense industry suburbs.

His father was an engineer at Lockheed in Sunnyvale, and Hal Beers is the main character in his son’s memoir. The book is filled with insights about living in a high-tech society, and it is one of the best books ever written about California.

My father was also an aerospace engineer, for Hughes in Culver City. He was among the wave of young men who came to Los Angeles after the war from all over the country, attracted by California’s first high-tech economy.

Many of these young men associated their former homes with the Depression--and California with opportunity, sunshine and Space Age technology.

There are many similarities between David’s father and my own: They were both engineers for immense defense technology companies in California; they are both passionate amateur pilots; they spend much of their free time fixing things and tinkering around the house in ways that dazzle their less-than-handy sons; they spent their careers doing work that they couldn’t describe to their families.

Both our fathers are complicated men, with complex and sometimes contradictory thoughts about their work and about the companies they gave their lives to. They believed, however, that they were creating the best possible future for their families. David and I think they succeeded.

But when I eventually left Los Angeles and began living all over the country, I carried with me resentment over the nondescript, bland, culture-free character of Los Angeles suburban life. Other people had accents, they had regional or ethnic rituals, they had cultural roots. We seemed to have come from nowhere, with no history older than our own undistinguished memories.

It has thus been astonishing to read such a powerful and sensitive book about something that I thought was completely infertile material for good writing: the high-tech life of engineers and their families in the land of perpetually good weather, blank suburbs and household chores, the life of the white middle class in California.

Perhaps the most unexpected result of the lives of Hal Beers and my father is that they each raised sons who have spent their lives looking for meaning from what each of us thought was a background short on meaning, and for social justice in a community in which that phrase is distinctly remote and abstract.

This remains true for the children of high-tech suburbia today. The brightest among them ask, “What comes after this?”

One of the many themes of “Blue Sky Dream” is that technological booms come with corresponding cultures. The book describes, for example, how the homes of the archetypal California suburb of the 1950s and ‘60s were designed around the desires and priorities of the young male engineers buying those houses.

Now this same idea of the high-tech “good life” is creating a universal global standard, what Benjamin Barber of Rutgers University has aptly labeled “McWorld.”

It encompasses not only architecture and suburban planning, but entertainment, cultural values, social hierarchies and expectations about what the future will look like.

As one example, the ideal of the California high-tech suburb, now spreading throughout the world, assumes that people of different classes and racial backgrounds will have very little interaction with one another and consequently no understanding of one another’s experiences. That fosters a certain kind of politics, which we’re now watching rise in the United States.

Here in Austin, the Texas boom in high tech is changing the culture of the region. Indigenous Texas culture is giving way to an ersatz theme-park kind of substitute you can buy in the typical generic mall--Texania marketed to suburban transplants.

Nearly every city and region in the world now has the same goal: to reproduce the middle-class utopias of Southern California and Silicon Valley, to capture the high-tech corporations that produced those economic miracles and to attract stateless technical professionals and consumers.

The price we pay for this uniformity is evident in the way our culture is unfolding. Until now, the ambivalence of those of us who have lived this life has been largely secret. “Blue Sky Dream” tells a story I thought would never be told.