CONTINENTAL DIVIDE

In Washington, Highway 50 goes along the Mall, past the National Archives, the National Gallery of Art and other grand government buildings that celebrate the permanence of the institutions they house. Across the country, just before it enters the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, Highway 50 (by now merged with Interstate 80) passes a nondescript office building where a fifth-floor suite is the temporary home of a 1995 cyberstart-up called @Large Software. @Large has about 15 employees going on 40--and, it hopes, hundreds--so it is moving soon to a larger space on the other side of the highway. If the company succeeds, it will move again and again.

Stable, permanent democracy and tumultuous, ever changing capitalism: the two pillars of the American miracle, and each helps make the other possible. But they are different worlds. Two Beltways. The office nameplates along @Large Software's one short hallway are an inspiration. They read like a 1990s version of Hollywood's World War II bomber crew. There's Andy Bang, Co Huang, Sharam Sasson, Maurizio Gianola. Edward Montgomery shares an office with Yuri Zhovnirovsky, Roberto Jeres bunks with Jen Yu, and Alex Sherstinsky is doubled up with Samir Elias. Pamela Reilly, Karen Cooper and Steven Kishi are down the hall.

In a way, then, this tiny company is a living celebration of American diversity--and immigration, an increasingly unfashionable cause back in Washington. But in another way, all these folks share a culture to which most Americans, and nearly everyone in D.C., are strangers. Islands of this high-tech entrepreneurial culture dapple the country. But they reach critical mass in and around San Francisco.

In C.P. Snow's famous 1959 essay, "The Two Cultures," the British novelist and social critic described the huge gap in mutual understanding and shared knowledge between two groups. "Literary intellectuals at one pole--at the other scientists... The degree of incomprehension on both sides is the kind of joke which has gone sour."

The life of the mind in America, 1997, is not what it was in Britain four decades ago. But, with some fiddling, the concept still applies. For literary intellectuals, substitute "Washington," in the metaphorical sense of the world of public affairs that has, to some extent, replaced literary intellectual life as a focus of ambition and status for brainy nonscientists. For science itself, substitute "Silicon Valley," in the metaphorical sense of the entrepreneurial world that is steadily encroaching on the labs and clinics of scientific academia. And the "two cultures" problem remains.

The analogy is not perfect. Snow described two cultures that were mutually suspicious or even hostile. Today the suspicion and hostility mainly run only one way. Silicon Valley shares the contempt of Americans generally for Washington and sometimes imagines that Washington is hostile to it. But in fact the dominant attitude in Washington about the high-tech world is one of swooning admiration. Nevertheless, swoon and scorn alike are based on astonishing ignorance inside each Beltway about the life and concerns of the other.