YESTERDAY, we briefly touched upon some of the impacts Microsoft has had on the Seattle area.
It’s brought thousands of bright, ambitious people and billions of the world’s dollars into our once supposedly backwoods region.
It changed the world’s image of Seattle from gritty to glamourous–and from poilte to predatory.
Among MS employees and even many perma-temps, any digression from official Bill-approved thought is increasingly treated as heresy. (Repeat, droning, over and over: “Freedom to innovate… freedom to innovate…”)
Boomtown Seattle’s behavioral trends (the hustling, the dealmaking, the backstabbing, the delusions of Godhood in God’s Country) seem, on the surface, to constitute a complete break from the town’s prior stereotype as The City of the Nice.
But actually, as I’ve noted on prior occasions, the new NW Aggression has deep regional roots.
It goes directly at least as far as the Nordstrom corporate culture; which applied ’70s “motivational training” shticks into an all-enveloping system of rewards, punishments, dominations, and submissions.
At the peak of what was known as “Nordy-ism,” you could not merely be a Nordstrom employee. You had to be a Nordstrom believer.
You had to cheerfully “volunteer” for unpaid overtime and off-the-clock tasks. You had to meet seemingly arbitrary sales or work goals. You had to regularly submit to performance reviews that judged not only your results but your team-player attitude. You had to attend est-like training seminars to become immersed in the mentality of Total Service (and servitude).
You had to work like hell. And you had to love it more than anything else in the world.
People I know who work at Nordstrom these days claim the manic excesses of Nordy-ism have been toned down a bit–partly to avoid lawsuits, partly to appease key workers in a tight labor market.
But its legacy lives on regionally in the ultra-aggressive cultures of Microsoft, Nike, Amazon, assorted dot-coms led by ex-MS principals.
Earlier in this decade, Seattle had a reputation nationally as a haven for nihilistic young cynics eager to proclaim a no-future of eternal ennui. (Though those guys were really quite entrepreneurial.)
Out-of-towners who never realized how assertive the “grunge” people were often mistakenly see it weird that the same small city would suddenly become the city whose suburbs house the company known by many PC-biz observers as “The Evil Empire.”
But cults, especially cults rising at the turns of their respective centuries or millennia, have often had an end-O-the-world aspect to their doctrine and their fervor.
In the case of the Bill Gates personality cult, the doctrine’s a millennial variant on the old-conservative stereotype of “Government Bad; Business Good.”
In the MS religion, Bill is the Great and Omnipotent Force rising to smite evil Government, reform backward Old Business, unleash the cleansing forces of New Business, tame the chaotic Internet, trample competing high-tech cults, and impose by his will (and the work of his minions) the dawn of a new era in civilization.
An era of one world, united by its dependence upon one operating system.
No wonder S/M’s so popular in Seattle.
It’s only appropriate for the fetishes of old empires (Rome, Britain) to become the favorite public sexual displays in a town increasingly populated by those who would build new empires.
P.S.: Some of you may remember “Building Empires” as the title a home-video collection by local hard-rockers Queensryche. They took it from railroad baron James Hill, who called himself (and his flagship passenger train) the Empire Builder. Another example of how the Northwest wasn’t all as progressive or egalitarian as it’s now supposed to have used to been.
P.P.S.: For a fictionalization of the Nordstrom corporate culture (and, hence, of the MS corporate culture), check your TV listings this month for Ebbie, a 1995 shot-in-Vancouver TV movie. It’s a sex-change Christmas Carol with Susan Lucci as “Elizabeth Scrooge,” who runs a fashionable department store by grinding her staffers into the rug and expecting them to love it.
(Of course, the only nightmares our real-life local slavedriver bosses are probably getting these days involve the Spirits of WTO Protesters Past.)
P.P.P.S.: We previously mentioned a local indie movie, Doomed Planet, a broad comedy in which an end-of-the-millennium Seattle is the battleground for a couple of ruthlessly competitive religious cults. When I first saw it a couple months back, I thought it was just a comedy, with little real-world satirical meaning. In retrospect, the videomakers may have been more allegoric than I gave them credit for.
TOMORROW: Boomtown Seattle’s architectural legacy–real-world monuments bought by cyberspace money.
ELSEWHERE:
