In 1845 Friedrich Engels set out to describe the conditions of the working class in the prototypical industrial city of London, England.  It was clear to him that the marvels of civilization had forced Londoners to sacrifice the best qualitites of their human nature; "that a hundred powers which slumbered within them have remained inactive, have been suppressed in order that a few might be developed more fully."  Charles Dickens was there, too, to place this city into prose form, but Engels continues with unsurpassed reflective insight into the crowd:

[A]re they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? And have they not, in the end, to seek happiness in the same way, by the same means? And still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance.

Whether or not it rings true today as an accurate description of the prototypical post-industrial city does not seem a relevant question in light of the more striking fact:  Silicon Valley has no narrative culture.  The smokestack grasps a truth that the computer somehow cannot.  This may be the first social environment in the history of the world that does not produce, or even attempt to find, a voice through writing or any other cultural phenomenon.  We know the Harlem Renaissance in New York; we know James Baldwin in Chicago; London we’ve gotten from Dickens all the way to Kureishi; Baudelaire in Paris; Bukowsi in LA.  But no one writes Silicon Valley.  How does this place achieve the impossible fact of resisting representation? 

To begin facilitating a narrative culture I submit a homework assignment to all Entrepreneurial City readers:  Answer the following question to the best of your ability.  To you, what does Silicon Valley smell, taste, look, sound, and feel like?