Aside from the simple geographical designation, Silicon Valley is the name for a psychological obsession found anyplace where people believe that instant fame and fortune can be gained through silicon chips and Web sites, or lotteries or stock-market trading. This dream nourishes itself on an addiction to money, power, and instant gratification. And like heroin and cocaine, it is highly illusory, promising total happiness, but often ending in disarray and despair.

[...] Workers and bosses? Those were twentieth-century phrases, according to the CEOs. They were outmoded, old-fashioned, irrelevant concepts. Their new mantra was: "We're all equal, we're all a team, we all work as owners of the company because we all have stock options. So unions are passé, since we all are owners who have a common interest: the harder you work, the more the company will grow, and the more money you will make. Unemployment is a meaningless word in our new economy. Our growth is permanent, so there is never any reason for company layoffs. Place your faith in the company, which will never let you down."

This sounded very reasonalbe to the young high-tech engineers [...] knew little about employment practices in the real world, since the Valley jobs were usually one of the first in their careers. The Valley companies made a specialty of hiring new or recent college graduates rather than seasoned workers in the high-tech industry. These young people were naive, malleable, and could be employed at a cut-rate wage scale. [...]

Not far away, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is building a $40 million-plus replica of the Japanese Katsura palace on 23 wooded acres. Presumably, he'll be parking his new Marchetti Italian jet fighter elsewhere - perhaps next to the aerobatic plane he just bought as an eighth-grade graduation gift for his son. In Atherton, Tom Proulx, a co-founder of Intuit, recently bought three neighboring lots so he could build a 9-hole golf course in his backyard. One Woodside programmer bought 24 acres just to land his helicopter. "Keeping up with the neighbors in Silicon Valley is getting weird," says Daniel Case III, president and CEO of Humbrecht & Quist, Inc., It's not, "do your kids go to private school." It's "do they have a private jet?"

[...] Kaleil had just quit his high paying job at the prestigious Wall Street firm of Goldman Sachs. But he and Tom felt "ordinary" because they hadn't yet become millionaires at the age of twenty-eight. They had an idea they thought was the key to fame and fortune: they would establish a Web site that made it easier to pay parking tickets, pay taxes, and buy licenses through their GovWorks Web site. They kept convincing themselves that they were right and speculated how wonderful it would be for people to use their Web site at three in the morning to buy a fishing license from home or attend a town meeting from a Web site while in their underwear.

In the warp speed time of less than two years the tangible sixty-million-dollar investment turned into congealed snow. As the film documents their business descent into oblivion, the two entrepreneurs are shown in psychologically naked disarray, in contrast to their euphoric beginning. When their start-up began, there is a scene in a cab where both of them look at each other in amazement, with supernal delight in their faces. They say to each other: "We're going to become billionaires!" That is the high point of their ideals. It is evident then that creating a company as a public service had been the farthest thing from their minds. The money and power it gives was their driving force. (The curtain of public benefit is dropped in another scene in the film where a board of directors member speaks on how valuable a service the company is giving, and then says at the end, "And of course, make a lot of money!")

Later [...] Tuzman puts his hands together in prayer, and it's evident that he is not praying for peace in the world but for the survival of his business income [...] (GovWorks had never made a profit; it only generated the illusion that it would eventually make a profit. This is typical of all the startups that self-destructed at the start of the new millennium.)

Their obsession to become billionaires had defined their identity as human beings. And when they saw that dream of who they were to become vanish, the fallout from their disillusionment began. It took the form of a bitter breakup between two young men who were practically blood brothers since their high school days. To preserve his CEO status, Tuzman fired Herman, and Herman left in bitter, stunned disbelief. Tuzman's girlfriend broke up with him, for he devoting all his time to business, and she felt irrelevant.

The end of this documentary film leaves the two entrepreneurs as shells of human beings. They had invested their entire sense of themselves as men who had the potential of being admired for their wealth and power, but all they were left with was congealed snow in their hands.

[...] they were feeling depressed; while the stock market soared, their souls were plummeting. They were unhappy, but the media was telling them that the size of their bank accounts and the prestigious jobs they held qualified them to be exceptionally happy. They were feeling guilty because they "should" be happy by the standard our society dictates for happiness. And because they weren't, they felt guilty, since they played by society's rules and yet did not receive the emotional benefits they thought they were entitled to. They had conformed to society's criteria of happiness (that is, wealth and a good job as the tickets of entrance to an exciting life filled with love, emotional satisfaction, and a future of ever-expanding possibilities for triumphing over new challenges life would present in the subsequent years).

The men and women we saw who expressed to us their depressive feelings in the face of material success thought they were exceptions to the rule and felt something was wrong with them for feeling the way they did. [...]

They were looking for answers in all the wrong places. For they weren't abnormal people [...] unhappiness was - and is - a national problem, not a sign of individual failure. [...]

The companies they worked for created wombs in which all their creature-comfort needs could be satisfied. It seemed great at the time they started their employment, but three or four years later [...] began to understand that a career was just a career, and a company was only a company, not a lifetime culture. For it is the very nature of a company to be solely concerned about its own profits and stock-market price. A company's loyalty is to its own bottom line, not the welfare of its workers. If the welfare of its workforce enhances the bottom line, fine. If not, increased productivity demands and downsizing will substitute for workforce creature comforts. [...]

The twenty-somethings, not having developed a long-term sense of self that enabled the older men and women to prevail over expected economic tribulations, were vulnerable to psychological onslaughts on their sense of self [...] They had graduated in complicated technological arenas and felt smug about that fact [...] they had a skillful relationship with things; they delighted in solving technical programs, repairing, building, and creating new tools [...] The challenges were endless, and the delight in overcoming those challenges was enormous. It could be the best drug in the world and more satisfying then eating a decent meal or sleeping as salve to the soul. A king-of-the-world feeling.

With few exceptions, these twenty-somethings had boxed their lives into a tiny corner of experience: they were only high-tech workers who thought that their title was the key to the universe. Most of them had chosen a high-tech career because they felt it was a safe place to exist. In school they had been called geeks and nerds by students in the social sciences and humanities, who were adept at connecting their lives with other human beings. But the "geeks or nerds," labeled as such by their fellow classmates, felt demeaned as outcasts. They were "weird," which was the operative word the more socially oriented students used to describe them. [...]

There were many reasons why this kind of self-isolation felt safe and comfortable in contrast to associating with the world where people connected with each other [...] Best to isolate oneself and get away from threatening interpersonal relationships. Machines were the solution: they didn't talk back, neglect you, abuse you, or demean you. Since you were in control of the machines instead of them controlling you, they were safe. Isolation was safe; nobody could harm you.

All of these avenues of anguish were ways they were protecting their long-developed self-images that they were valuable human beings solely because they were high-tech careerists. For hadn't they had the last laugh on all of their former high-school and college classmates who thought they were weird? They had been making $75,000 a year, with options added, while their former classmates were lucky to make $30,000. They could flaunt their economic superiority as payback time for their being shunned in earlier years by their classmates.

But now their self-esteem was under attack. Many felt their stomachs turning into empty pits of fear. If they had no career identity, then they were nothing! That feeling is the equivalent of death. [...]