One day John Carter came to Mountain View for a close look at Noyce's semiconductor operation. Carter's office in Syosset, Long Island, arranged for a limousine and chauffeur to be at his disposal while he was in California. So Carter arrived at the tilt-up concrete building in Mountain View in the back of a black Cadillac limousine with a driver in the front wearing the complete chauffeur's uniform—the black suit, the white shirt, the black necktie, and the black visored cap. That in itself was enough to turn heads at Fairchild Semiconductor. Nobody had ever seen a limousine and a chauffeur out there before. But that wasn't what fixed the day in everybody's memory. It was the fact that the driver stayed out there for almost eight hours, doing nothing. He stayed out there in his uniform, with his visored hat on, in the front seat of the limousine, all day, doing nothing but waiting for a man who was somewhere inside. John Carter was inside having a terrific chief executive officer's time for himself. He took a tour of the plant, he held conferences, he looked at figures, he nodded with satisfaction, he beamed his urbane Fifty-seventh Street Biggie CEO charm. And the driver sat out there all day engaged in the task of supporting a visored cap with his head. People started leaving their workbenches and going to the front windows just to take a look at this phenomenon. It seemed that bizarre. Here was a serf who did nothing all day but wait outside a door in order to be at the service of the haunches of his master instantly, whenever those haunches and the paunch and the jowls might decide to reappear. It wasn't merely that this little peek at the New York–style corporate high life was unusual out here in the brown hills of the Santa Clara Valley. It was that it seemed terribly wrong.

A certain instinct Noyce had about this new industry and the people who worked in it began to take on the outlines of a concept. Corporations in the East adopted a feudal approach to organization, without even being aware of it. There were kings and lords, and there were vassals, soldiers, yeomen, and serfs, with layers of protocol and perquisites, such as the car and driver, to symbolize superiority and establish the boundary lines. Back east the CEOs had offices with carved paneling, fake fireplaces, escritoires, bergères, leather-bound books, and dressing rooms, like a suite in a baronial manor house. Fairchild Semiconductor needed a strict operating structure, particularly in this period of rapid growth, but it did not need a social structure. In fact, nothing could be worse. Noyce realized how much he detested the eastern corporate system of class and status with its endless gradations, topped off by the CEOs and vice-presidents who conducted their daily lives as if they were a corporate court and aristocracy. He rejected the idea of a social hierarchy at Fairchild.

Not only would there be no limousines and chauffeurs, there would not even be any reserved parking places. Work began at eight a.m. for one and all, and it would be first come, first served, in the parking lot, for Noyce, Gordon Moore, Jean Hoerni, and everybody else. "If you come late," Noyce liked to say, "you just have to park in the back forty." And there would be no baronial office suites. The glorified warehouse on Charleston Road was divided into work bays and a couple of rows of cramped office cubicles. The cubicles were never improved. The decor remained Glorified Warehouse, and the doors were always open. Half the time Noyce, the chief administrator, was out in the laboratory anyway, wearing his white lab coat. Noyce came to work in a coat and tie, but soon the jacket and the tie were off, and that was fine for any other man in the place too. There were no rules of dress at all, except for some unwritten ones. Dress should be modest, modest in the social as well as the moral sense. At Fairchild there were no hard-worsted double-breasted pinstripe suits and shepherd's-check neckties. Sharp, elegant, fashionable, or alluring dress was a social blunder. Shabbiness was not a sin. Ostentation was.

Much has been said & made of Californian Ideology, that West Coast blend of techno-optimism and liberatory self-expression, psychedelic vision and futurism which guided Mondo2000 and Whole Earth, Burning Man and Apple, which fueled Stewart Brand’s long anti-career arc and saw John Perry Barlow straddling the Grateful Dead and Electronic Frontier Foundation.

But there is also a California Metaphysics,4 not so much a coherent position as an axis of conflict between NorCal and SoCal, its Mason-Dixon cutting somewhere between Pismo Beach and Los Olivos. Silicon Valley5 and Haight-Ashbury versus Hollywood and the Elysian Heights. Santa Cruz joint smokers clad in drug rugs, versus the bronzing dab-men of Venice Beach. In the balmy Mediterranean climes south of Pismo, a classical attitude towards masks and persona reigns. Personhood itself is a front, a face, a performance. Where a NorCal hippy might grow out body hair in a back-to-nature move, some reclamation of lost authentic states, the SoCal hustler sees one more fashion trend, one more set of symbolic postures. (“The Jesus-look is in.”) Peel away the surface, some Californian metaphysicians (shrugging) tell us, and you’ll just find another surface. The landscape of the interior is one more social strategy, a disposition in service of performance. Or—if some hidden and privileged interiority is ceded—it’s looked down upon the way a nineteenth century cranium-measuring aristocrat might condescend to natural impulse. Surfaces are ennobling, aspirational. Get back to nature and all you’ll find are animals.

Not that either camp are proper relativists. The promise of psychedelics lies in their ability to de-naturalize the ready-at-hand, to present alternate surfaces and make explicit our structuring interpretive schemas. Beach-bum SoCalites are liable to hedonistic languor, soaking in the brightened colors and tracer viz, tripping just one more performance. NorCal hippies, though, are liable to take those new surfaces and slogans as deeper and underlying truths, to take every new perspective as “the” perspective. Until you dose, you just won’t get it. LSD is paradisal, the trip either life-changing inflection point, or the sort of temporary glimpse of Eden’ll drive a man insane just chasing it forever. Everything changes—until the next morning, when the newly converted fall back on old habits or get reabsorbed by intelligent social webs. Because men are made by their moments, habits are solutions to problems, and none of those problems have gone anywhere.

Pynchon’s novels, which in content treat Californian Ideology and its failings, in form play out a strange psyched-out, ontologically-hip rendition of California Metaphysics’ mystico-philosophical stance. His detectives chase after some transcendental breakthrough like a Flammarion engraving6—some vision of the Other Side, the true nature of things, an Authoritative Representation. All they manage to find is one more partial vision. That’s what a representation is, after all—partial, in both senses of the word. Pynchon liked to quip, in the golden old days, that Murphy’s Law was just a natural corollary of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Representations leave things out,7 and then the left-out excess rises up to spank the hubris of the would-be systematizer, see also James C. Scott.8 Plus there’s the time-honored problems of pragmatism, the “What would it even mean to find a true metaphor?” that rears its head alongside the 20th century’s “reflexivity”—all complicating the epistemology of a 19th century Arthur Conan Doyle.

There is a peculiar, eerie, indescribable loneliness in all of California. It permeates everything. Maybe it’s just the water. Maybe there are other places of the same sort in other places on Earth. But California could be special, the place where the early European-American settlers, upon arriving—if they got there, realized they would never get back. California is the end of the Earth. That feeling is passed on from generation to generation without anyone recognizing that it is part of them. And it is passed on to the most recent arrivals. Even today in the previous palaces of Malibu, in the vast developments between Los Angeles and San Diego, in the spreading domestic comfort of the San Francisco Bay area it’s there. It poisons our movies and TV shows. It generates the most violent and interesting mystery novels. Even now jet travel doesn’t cure it. It comes down on you hard when you get off the plane and step outside the terminal. It drives some people mad.