The Nudist on the Late Shift by Po Bronson - 27 September 1999

This post is part of a series of vignettes about the things I've bought on Amazon since opening my account in September 1998. For more details about my Amazon purchases and the book I've been working on, have a read of this post.

In 1999, reading about Silicon Valley and the revolution that was taking place there was like dipping into a book of exotic travel writing, a glimpse of a tribe emerging from who knows where with different values, customs, codes and beliefs. 

Penguin Books, despite being pretty much the most progressive publisher around, was still very much an analogue business. Manuscripts were printed out and annotated by hand. Email had not yet supplanted snailmail. Some editorial secretaries took dictation from their editors and typewriters were still in use around the office.

I’d first used the Internet in 1993, logging onto gopher servers at London’s City University and trying to visit early websites including Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web (later Yahoo) and the Trojan Room Coffee Pot, the world’s first known webcam. That year I also bought my first copy of Wired magazine from the basement racks at the long-departed Tower Records megastore on Piccadilly Circus. Its colourful, cyber-chic design was a riot of neons and metallic inks and it didn’t read like anything I’d come across before either. For Wired, the internet wasn’t just a technological advance, it was a paradigm shift in culture, media, money and power. Reading it was my awakening.

From my desk at Penguin I continued to scan the horizon for the impending tech tsunami. I had internet access on my computer and knew how to use it which meant that I could access e-zines and the nascent blogosphere - mainstream media in the UK largely relegating internet coverage to the business pages. At Penguin we weren’t yet publishing books about internet culture - most publishing efforts were aimed at helping people get online rather than explaining why they should be online in the first place - but thanks to my newly acquired Amazon account I could buy books recommended by Wired and have them delivered to my desk, even if they were not available from UK publishers in UK bookshops.

Nudist on the Late Shift was the first ‘internet culture’ book I bought from Amazon. Written by Wired contributor Po Bronson it is a collection of gonzo-style pieces about the prospectors who were mining Silicon Valley in search of fortune and glory. I remember very little about it and have no idea whether I liked it or not, but Kirkus Review says that “after reading this entertainment, you’ll think you understand the slang, the jargon, the gibberish, and the buzzwords of the valley” which makes it sound like it would have well appealed to a North London nerd, sitting at a desk thousands of miles from the future.