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Postcard No. 1 from the Silicon Valley, California 159

love (or fun) of it, it elevates your being and frees your spirit. There are
echoes in this way of working that suggest true satisfaction. At our best, or
at our most human, we are all like amateurs when we work, or increasingly,
dedicated idealists who work toward a cause, skillfully harnessing global
networks for change.

THE EXAMPLE OF AMATEURS

Idealistic amateurs are nothing new of course. Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar
Men tells a story of a group of amateur inventors, scientists, and manufac-
turers paving the way for the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Most were nonconformists and freethinkers, who pur-
sued scientific questions out of curiosity. Albert Einstein engaged in science
in addition to his duties as a patent office clerk. Samuel Morse, the inven-
tor of the Morse code, was a book publisher and a famed portrait painter.
More recently, amateur activity was manifest in the Homebrew Computer
Club, which spawned Steve Jobs’s and Steve Wozniak’s ideas for a personal
computer in the 1970s. To quote its convener Gordon French, the club was
“the damned finest collection of engineers and technicians that you could
possibly get under one roof.” (The roof was French’s garage during the
inaugural meeting on March 5, 1975.)
The word amateur is a complex one. By one meaning, it indicates lim-
ited skill and amateurishness, as opposed to professionalism. Yet its older
meaning comes (via French) from the Latin word love (l’amour). Thus the
word can mean doing something for the love of it, as a pastime perhaps,
but with dedication. Amateurs engage in activities they are passionate
about. Amateurs today—whether computer programmers contributing to
open source projects or the grassroots volunteers contributing to political
campaigns—are predominantly well educated and very informed, and they
have professional skills. The “amateur” virtuosi have proven themselves
capable or exceptional in their professional fields and now wish to apply
their skills to causes they care about in new fields. Indeed, the capabilities
of professionals and amateurs can overlap significantly (Önkal, Yates,
Simga-Mugan, & Öztin, 2003).