Neal Stephenson has also written some of the best geek books ever. My personal favourite: Cryptonomicon which is in the same general vein as the article.
Thank you so much for posting this! This was the list where I originally found the Mother Earth Mother Board article, but I only just remembered that after seeing your post.
We first met Jim Daily and Alan Wall underneath that big Carlsberg sign,
sitting out in a late-afternoon rainstorm under an umbrella, having
a couple of beers – “the only ferangs here,”
as Wall told me on the phone, using the local term for foreign devil. Daily
is American, 2 meters tall, blond, blue-eyed, khaki-and-polo-shirted, gregarious,
absolutely plain-spoken, and almost always seems to be having a great time. Wall
is English, shorter, dark-haired, impeccably suited, cagey, reticent, and dry.
Both are in their 50s. It is of some significance to this story that, at the end
of the day, these two men unwind by sitting out in the rain and hoisting a beer,
paying no attention whatsoever to the industrial-scale whorehouse next door.
Both of them have seen many young Western men arrive here on business missions
and completely lose control of their sphincters and become impediments to any
kind of organized activity. Daily hired Wall because, like Daily, he is a
stable family man who has his act together. They are the very definition
of a complementary relationship, and they seem to be making excellent progress
toward their goal, which is to run two really expensive wires across the
Malay Peninsula.
Since these two, and many of the others we will meet on this journey, have
much in common with one another, this is as good a place as any to write a
general description. They tend to come from the US or the British Commonwealth
countries but spend very little time living there. They are cheerful and outgoing,
rudely humorous, and frequently have long-term marriages to adaptable wives.
They tend to be absolutely straight shooters even when they are talking to
a hacker tourist about whom they know nothing. Their openness would
probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch
intrigue that is public life in the United States today. On the other hand,
if I had an unlimited amount of money and woke up tomorrow morning with a
burning desire to see a 2,000-hole golf course erected on the surface of
Mars, I would probably call men like Daily and Wall, do a handshake deal
with them, send them a blank check, and not worry about it.
This has been republished in Stephenson's book Some Remarks [1], which also includes a bunch of his other non-fiction (as well as a couple fiction short stories). Highly recommended.
God that article was/is riveting. I still recall the first time I read it, in one sitting, this ridiculous fat magazine in my hands. The world would be a better place if it had more journalism like this.
Makes me nostalgic for the early days of WIRED. This article was one of the best. It blew me away when I read it the first time-- so much so, I read it twice just for the sheer enjoyment of it.
At a little over 42 thousand words, each of them documenting a fascinating story, this is well on its way to a Masters (Research) thesis in a sociology related field, and superior to many I've read.
And rightly so.
Neal Stephenson has also written some of the best geek books ever. My personal favourite: Cryptonomicon which is in the same general vein as the article.