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Pirates of Silicon Valley
Oct. 6th, 2011 07:25 pmSo, every writer 'round the world is now able to take out the Steve Jobs tributes and obituaries they'd likely written months... or years... in advance.
Me, I'm flashing back to a different place and time-- the early summer of '99, at the north end of that region of California once known as the Valley of the Heart's Delight, now better known as Silicon Valley. It was the end of my sophomore year, and I was eyeball-deep in slash fandom... and TV had just added some grade A fuel to the mental fire.
On the surface, a film about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates sounds like the opposite of sexy. I mean... Bill Gates, man. Come ON. But this particular TV drama, Pirates of Silicon Valley, had Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates... and Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs.
I didn't give a shit about Noah Wyle until I saw him impersonate Jobs. I hated ER and all of its ilk. But Pirates had an unmistakable sexual subtext that caused my teenage self to gape at the screen, thinking, "Am I really seeing this?" For me, that was the moment at which I started thinking of slash as something that might plausibly be mainstreamed. And the concept of these two young, searingly ambitious, ambiguously amoral characters locked in a technical, economic, political, and sexual deathmatch was a big, big, turn-on.
Now, Pirates came out at kind of a weird time-- again, it was '99. Apple had just come back from the brink. I was using a first-run iMac. Microsoft ruled the world, Bill Gates was Public Enemy #1 in the books of many of my friends, and there was no such thing as iTunes, much less iPhones or iPads. These days, it's the other way 'round; Jobs became the big polarizing figure, as hated and feared as Gates ever was, but also loved in a way that Gates never was and likely never will be.
I think it's time for a sequel. Ring up Hall and Wyle and let's roll with it, baby.
Me, I'm flashing back to a different place and time-- the early summer of '99, at the north end of that region of California once known as the Valley of the Heart's Delight, now better known as Silicon Valley. It was the end of my sophomore year, and I was eyeball-deep in slash fandom... and TV had just added some grade A fuel to the mental fire.
On the surface, a film about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates sounds like the opposite of sexy. I mean... Bill Gates, man. Come ON. But this particular TV drama, Pirates of Silicon Valley, had Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates... and Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs.
I didn't give a shit about Noah Wyle until I saw him impersonate Jobs. I hated ER and all of its ilk. But Pirates had an unmistakable sexual subtext that caused my teenage self to gape at the screen, thinking, "Am I really seeing this?" For me, that was the moment at which I started thinking of slash as something that might plausibly be mainstreamed. And the concept of these two young, searingly ambitious, ambiguously amoral characters locked in a technical, economic, political, and sexual deathmatch was a big, big, turn-on.
Now, Pirates came out at kind of a weird time-- again, it was '99. Apple had just come back from the brink. I was using a first-run iMac. Microsoft ruled the world, Bill Gates was Public Enemy #1 in the books of many of my friends, and there was no such thing as iTunes, much less iPhones or iPads. These days, it's the other way 'round; Jobs became the big polarizing figure, as hated and feared as Gates ever was, but also loved in a way that Gates never was and likely never will be.
I think it's time for a sequel. Ring up Hall and Wyle and let's roll with it, baby.
