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THE JOKE OF SILICON VALLEY, by Judith Stone
You could say that Jeffrey Armstrong has moved beyond wetware and software,
beyond hardware to har-dee-har-hardware. And that's about all you could say,
because once Armstrong gets rolling, there's no chance to do much else but
make the sign of the monitor and shout hallelujah. But hush. He's telling
the congregation how it came to pass that he quit his marketing job at a
California computer company to become a full-time stand-up saint.
"One night, as I was home in Santa Cruz, working on my computer, lightning
struck the satellite dish on the roof of my house. I was rendered
unconscious, and when I awoke, the Keyboard Prayer was on the screen--'Our
program who art in memory, HELLO be thy name....' I was given the name Saint
$ilicon, and the Giver of Data, G.O.D., instructed me to start the Church of
Heuristic Information Processing, CHIP, the first user-friendly religion."
"That was in 1984. Since then, the cherub-faced, 40-year-old Armstrong,
a.k.a. Saint $ilicon, the fourth-quarter prophet and strict fun-damentalist,
has been ministering to "the data-distressed, the unwired masses, the D-based
and D-filed," mostly at corporate events like sales meetings, motivational
seminars, and conventions of computer-store owners. One of his favorite gigos
(garbage in, gospel out) was Apple's Christmas party.
Usually Saint $Silicon preaches to the sort of people who actually
understand those Wang commercials in which attractive young computer jocks
howl with laughter over what the MIS guy does after they take a DEC
workstation and, via a Wang PBX, get it talking to his own mainframe through a
Wang VS. But tonight not one of his flock sports a nerdpack. There is a guy
wearing a rather large, four-sided healing crystal in a deerskin shamanic
pouch; Saint $ilicon is the guest speaker at the High Frontiers Monthly
Forum, a new-age Chautauqua sponsored by the more-or-less quarterly magazine
that's devoted to "the cutting edge of science, technology and/or
psychoactivity."
Among the men and women gathered in the meeting room of Shared Visions
Bookstore in Berkeley, California, are a stockbroker who's going back to
school to become a therapist, a software designer who's going back to school
to become a therapist, a therapist, a holistic video engineer, and a man whose
card says REVERSING ENTROPY IS EVERYBODY'S BUSINESS. The crowd is friendly,
technohip, bright. Okay, a couple of people are having an animated discussion
about the mystical acoustic properties of tarantula spider silk, but basically
it's heartening to see the sixties rebooted, laid back but on-line.
The lectern's been transformed into a red-velvet-draped pulpit for Saint
$ilicon, who wears a white suit with a button on the lapel that says HAS YOUR
DATA BEEN SAVED? At his neck is a clear plastic brooch with flashing green,
red, and yellow lights controlled by a voice-activated computer; it looks a
bit like a petri dish surrounded by tiny Christmas bulbs. Oh yeah, and a
silicon chip is stuck to his forehead. ("The MIT group wear their chips on
their shoulders," he tells the crowd.)
In the compelling twang of a down-home Bible Belter, Saint $ilicon rocks
into the Sermon on the Monitor. "Dearly C-loved, we are assembled here
together because PCing is believing. We're here to console you; ASCII and ye
shall receive. We say there is a life worth debugging. Data, data,
everywhere, but not a thought to think, that's the problem.... Friends,
perhaps you know someone out there with a terminal illness, some poor hacker
with bloodshot eyes in data distress who's been attacked by the evil one,
Glitch, and his wicked helper, Missingstuffinfiles. Even if your data has
been blown all to HAL, there's not a thing we can do to bring it back. But we
can solace you in your hour of need.
"And that is why the Giver of Data has downloaded to me, from the heavenly
host mainframe, the Keyboard Prayer for the data distressed. Now let us make
the sign of the monitor (a square traced in the air, if you'd like to try it
at home), bow our heads, and pray responsively."
The crowd mumbles good-naturedly: "...Forgive us our I/O errors as we
forgive those whose logic circuits are faulty. Lead us not into frustration
and deliver us from power surges. For thine is the algorithm, the application
and the solution, looping forever and ever. Return!"
Saint $ilicon holds aloft a Binary Bible, which, he says, he translated
from the ancient Geek, and reads from its first book, Sysgen I:i: "In the
beginning, the Giver of Data generated silicon and carbon and the system was
without architecture, and uninitialized, and randomness was upon the
arrangement of the matrix...." Then come announcements. For the "Cathode-
lics" in the audience, CHIP is opening a new high school, Our Lady of
Perpetual Upgrades ("We don't have nuns, we have nulls") and a new junior high
school, PC Jr., the Immaculate Deception.
Papal bull isn't the only kind Saint $ili slings. He's an equal
opportunity tease, offering to perform circuitcisions and bar-code mitzvahs;
he quotes the Ten Commands ("Thou shalt not pirate programs") and the Twenty-
third PROM--for programmable read-only memory--("Yea, though I commute to the
Valley each day, I fear no evil, for my Mazda is running. You prepare a desk
for me in the office of my competitors..."). For Bootists, there's a mantra
(Ohms EPROM RAM ROM); for CMOSlems, readings from the glorious Core-RAM; and
for aging hippies, Beep Here Now, by RAMDOS.
"Let us turn to hymn number 1101101," the saint cries, exhorting the
faithful to make a joyful noise. "Amazing space," they sing. "how sweet it
is, to have a disk like thee, My files were lost, but now they're found.
There's room on my PC."
During intermission, when Saint $ilicon has finished hawking such holy
relics as posters, buttons, and tapes, he talks about the true message of his
on-high-tech antics. "Essentially, I created Saint $ilicon, the patron saint
of appropriate technology, to save myself from the adverse effects of working
seven years in the computer industry," says Armstrong. "He's the embodiment
of a certain idealism."
Like most saints, $ili/Armstrong has an odd resume. The Detroit native
holds degrees in psychology and creative writing from Eastern Michigan
University, and in history and comparative religions from the University of
California at Santa Cruz. A former street poet and vice president of a
garment company, Armstrong was planning to teach when federal budget cuts
dried up positions in the humanities. To support his wife and daughter (ten-
year-old Guenevere, who thinks his act's a scream), Armstrong became a Middle
East sales representative for Apple. Later he was marketing manager for
Corvus Systems, then Nestar Systems, two Silicon Valley firms.
"My job was to help customers understand what the engineers were doing. I
was what I call an intelligent interface between end users and the people who
were creating the technology. I'd go to the engineers and say, 'What does
this do?' And they'd say 'Do?' They got so cut off from the rest of the
world. I learned that's the only danger of technology--disconnecting from
reality. That's when you hurt yourself and other people.
"Science and traditional religions run on algorithms--that is, rigid rules.
Following rules blindly, inflexibly, leads to danger. I developed the Church
of Heuristic Information Processing to teach a model of thinking for the
technological era: Heuristic thinking is flexible and varied, offering rules
of thumb, not strict, specific laws. Our generation is challenged to absorb a
lot of new information, while staying rooted but not rigid."
The best way to keep people supple, he thinks, is by getting them to laugh
at themselves. There will be no salvation for the computer industry until it
prepares to meet its mocker.
Tonight's audience is ready to laugh, even when they don't get it all.
"I'm just a beginner with computers," says the man with the crystal the size
of Big Rock Candy Mountain. "Some of it was over my head, but he's funny."
The saint's career is going divinely. He seems to be a solid hit on the
circuit circuit, where the silicon-savvy get all the in-jokes--and hang around
after the sermon to tell some of their own. ("One I heard recently was, how
is Ronald Reagan like Pascal programming? They both use a semicolon.") He
does two weekly radio spots, one heard in the San Francisco Bay area and the
other in New York, and he is publishing his own Binary Bible. Several
European firms have booked him, including the Vatican, though the boss won't
be there. And he's running for president on the Technocrat ticket. "We're
neither left nor right," he explains. "We're light. Our motto is, Lighten
up!"
After intermission, Jeffrey Armstrong addresses the group as himself,
something he doesn't do with the corporate crowd. He discusses his desire to
integrate the linear thinking of the technological age with the cyclical
thinking of the agricultural age, leads an esoteric discussion of Boolean
algebra, and recites poetry. But it's Saint $ilicon who sends them out the
door, warning folks to watch for the signs of PCness envy--the fear that the
other guy's system packs more RAM than yours--but ending with the promise of
Nerdvana and words that restoreth the scroll: "There's no need to abandon
hope, all ye who press Enter; in the end everything will be right justified."
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