Silicon Valley today: Get lean, get stripped down, live on nothing. Bare bones. Focus. Be a fighter. Stamina. Ration yourself to one Snickers bar, one jacking off, and one Dilbert cartoon daily. Forget about love that nourishes. Forget about food that satiates. Forget about long conversations that get good only late in the middle of the night, when the third bottle of wine is uncorked. Forget about poetry: the whisper, the leaf, the tuck of hair. Forget about politics: the bilingual ed revolt, the dams diverting more water south.

Get ready for ultracapitalism.

"No, when I make my first twenty million, forget about it," says Thierry.

"Forget about it?" I ask.

"No, forget about it."

"You won't be here?"

"No, I'll go home. Maybe here in small doses only. Those people you write about -- they make twenty million, and it is not enough for them. I am not greedy like them."