CONTINENTAL DIVIDE

By Michael Kinsley

In Washington, Highway 50 goes along the Mall, past the National Archives, the National Gallery of Art and other grand government buildings that celebrate the permanence of the institutions they house. Across the country, just before it enters the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, Highway 50 (by now merged with Interstate 80) passes a nondescript office building where a fifth-floor suite is the temporary home of a 1995 cyberstart-up called @Large Software. @Large has about 15 employees going on 40--and, it hopes, hundreds--so it is moving soon to a larger space on the other side of the highway. If the company succeeds, it will move again and again.

Stable, permanent democracy and tumultuous, ever changing capitalism: the two pillars of the American miracle, and each helps make the other possible. But they are different worlds. Two Beltways. The office nameplates along @Large Software's one short hallway are an inspiration. They read like a 1990s version of Hollywood's World War II bomber crew. There's Andy Bang, Co Huang, Sharam Sasson, Maurizio Gianola. Edward Montgomery shares an office with Yuri Zhovnirovsky, Roberto Jeres bunks with Jen Yu, and Alex Sherstinsky is doubled up with Samir Elias. Pamela Reilly, Karen Cooper and Steven Kishi are down the hall.

In a way, then, this tiny company is a living celebration of American diversity--and immigration, an increasingly unfashionable cause back in Washington. But in another way, all these folks share a culture to which most Americans, and nearly everyone in D.C., are strangers. Islands of this high-tech entrepreneurial culture dapple the country. But they reach critical mass in and around San Francisco.

In C.P. Snow's famous 1959 essay, "The Two Cultures," the British novelist and social critic described the huge gap in mutual understanding and shared knowledge between two groups. "Literary intellectuals at one pole--at the other scientists... The degree of incomprehension on both sides is the kind of joke which has gone sour."

The life of the mind in America, 1997, is not what it was in Britain four decades ago. But, with some fiddling, the concept still applies. For literary intellectuals, substitute "Washington," in the metaphorical sense of the world of public affairs that has, to some extent, replaced literary intellectual life as a focus of ambition and status for brainy nonscientists. For science itself, substitute "Silicon Valley," in the metaphorical sense of the entrepreneurial world that is steadily encroaching on the labs and clinics of scientific academia. And the "two cultures" problem remains.

The analogy is not perfect. Snow described two cultures that were mutually suspicious or even hostile. Today the suspicion and hostility mainly run only one way. Silicon Valley shares the contempt of Americans generally for Washington and sometimes imagines that Washington is hostile to it. But in fact the dominant attitude in Washington about the high-tech world is one of swooning admiration. Nevertheless, swoon and scorn alike are based on astonishing ignorance inside each Beltway about the life and concerns of the other.

Many Washington big shots, with expensive computers on their desks, have never visited the World Wide Web. ("My kids have promised to teach me this summer.") Ask for their E-mail address, and they sheepishly start patting their suits, as if for a lost pen, and finally say, "My secretary knows it, I think." To a denizen of the Other Beltway, this is like not knowing your own phone number. (And the tired Washington posture of "I'm such a busy big shot that my secretary runs my life" is also foreign to the Other Beltway, where the preferred macho posture is "I've got my whole life right here on a computer so tiny it fits up one of my nostrils.")

Snow used to prove his point by asking literary intellectuals to explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics. They usually couldn't, even though, as Snow pointed out, to a scientist this would be like not having read a work of Shakespeare's.

The knowledge gap continues. At a Washington dinner party recently, out of deference to a visitor from cyberworld, the talk turned to computers. One guest made a brave foray: "What is this thing Pathfinder I keep hearing about?" Answer: Pathfinder is one of the most heavily trafficked sites on the Web. The company that owns this very magazine has spent untold millions building and promoting it. Time Warner executives will be disappointed to learn that none of these Beltway honchos could identify it. One person--an actual Time Warner employee--volunteered, "Oh, I know! It's just like Netscape!" Netscape Navigator is the leading browser software that allows your computer to use the Web. This would be like someone from the Other Beltway saying, "Newt Gingrich--isn't he a member of the President's Cabinet?"

Which is almost possible. I asked Sharam Sasson, 42, president and CEO of @Large Software, if he knew who Trent Lott is. Sasson, a highly educated, thoughtful and articulate research engineer, born in Iran but now an American citizen, said, "I don't know him." I also asked Joel Bellenson, the 32-year-old CEO of Pangea Systems, a 1991 biotech start-up. A few years and a few moves further along than @Large (though still, shall we say, preprofitable), Pangea is recently installed in a glamorous office overlooking a lake in downtown Oakland. Bellenson, who says he subscribes to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and listens to National Public Radio, said, "I presume he's a Southern political figure."

A happy and productive life does not require knowing that Trent Lott is the Senate majority leader. Not knowing may even help. But anyone inside the Washington Beltway could tell you who Trent Lott is, just as anyone inside the Other Beltway knows the difference between Pathfinder and Netscape. And each would be struck by the other's ignorance. The "incomprehension" between the Two Beltways, in Snow's term, does run in both directions.

The incomprehension in Washington and the rest of the country about the world of high tech is partly the techies' own fault. What, for example, do these companies do exactly? Well, Pangea has developed some kind of software that is used to sort through all the information that's coming out about human genes, in order to speed up the development of new drugs. Or something. "Industrial Strength Bioinformatics" is the company's slogan. Its product, styled GeneWorld 2.0, "gives you the industrial-strength capacity you need when sequence data production exceeds analytical throughput." (Don't you hate it when that happens?) @Large's first product, Sasson says with a smile, is "one of the simplest for marketing people to explain." And he's right, sort of. It's software that enables employees to file expense reports on a corporate intranet. (What's an intranet? Ask Trent Lott.) The sales brochure promises a "Thin Client" with "Rich Java GUI," which sounds like it's pushing a dietetic dessert.

The Other Beltway's language does have the edge in one respect: informality. I felt no qualm about E-mailing "Hi Joel" to someone I had never met. ("Hi Jon," I E-mailed to Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley when he announced that he'd gone online, adding helpfully, "This is the proper form of salutation in cyberspace." Yardley answered, jokingly, "Dear Mr. Kinsley: This is the proper form of salutation in Washington.") The same informality applies to dress, which in this world--where style is set by barely socialized young computer geeks--has moved beyond the studied informality of "business casual" to truly casual. Inside the Washington Beltway, meanwhile, people still swim through swamplike summer heat and humidity wearing dark wool suits and damp white shirts, their air supply constricted by a tight Windsor knot.

Neither Bellenson nor Sasson spends any time in Washington. Sasson has been there twice as a tourist and once on business when he worked for Bechtel. "It reminded me of Rome," he says, meaning the pomp and not the classical beauty of its architecture. He adds that it "has no relevance to high-tech industries." Bellenson has been there a few times for conferences and "sensed it's a closed environment...I was struck by how oblivious they are to the conditions of the poor, though they work with the poorest of the country right nearby." Sasson describes himself firmly and comfortably as "a liberal"--which itself distinguishes him from people in Washington these days--but says he is not politically active, "beyond voting." Bellenson is "not interested in conventional politics" and would like "a politics that would facilitate social progress." He says these progressive sentiments make him "an aberration" in Silicon Valley, but they lead, in any event, to the same result as Sasson's lack of interest: no involvement in electoral politics. Bellenson also feels, for all his radical sentiments, that government has nothing to contribute to the development of his business, which is his real passion, and can only get in the way.

So are these guys in it to improve the world or make money? "It's one of those situations where they coincide," Bellenson says. Sasson won't get sucked into highfalutin moral speculation, commenting only on the excitement of the intranet. America's high-tech culture has indeed combined doing well and doing good--getting rich and making the world a better place--with more success, probably, than any similar-size group of people in the history of the world. And for biotech, especially, the miracles are just beginning. If the citizens of this Other Beltway wish to believe they're doing more good for the world than their counterparts in the Washington Beltway, they can make a good case.

But the moral equation is not so simple. The Washington Beltway is full of people who went there with the intention of making the world better, by their own lights. They may have failed at this or abandoned it, or their vision of a better world may be faulty. But some form of idealism is part of what brought them to Washington, and often some of it remains. That counts for something. A comically touching example of Washington idealism is the group that might be called celibates of the church of greed: denizens of conservative think tanks who have selflessly devoted their lives, at moderate incomes, to lightening the burden of taxes and regulations on those who've chosen a more self-interested path--including those inside the Other Beltway.

That Other Beltway, by contrast, gets part of its flavor from the naive egocentrism of brainy teenage boys. (Bellenson and Sasson are not good examples. Check out the Website of software billionaire Paul Allen if you want a taste.) Inside this Beltway some grownups in their 20s and 30s are still obsessed with Captain Kirk. If they have any political interest, it's a lingering passion for Ayn Rand. And this Beltway's spectacular success keeps it, and them, every bit as isolated from the rest of the country as the Beltway at the other end of Highway 50. Neither Beltway has a monopoly on virtue. Each could be improved by knowing a bit more about the other.