Close to the Machine_Technophilia and Its Discontents Read online

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only.

  You may not make this ebook publicly available in any way.

  Copyright infringement is against the law.

  If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at:

  us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Three short sections of this book, in a slightly different form, were first presented as the commentaries

  “On Becoming an Old Programmer,” “My Virtual Company,” and “In Their Fifties” on the National Public Radio program All Things Considered.

  This book describes real people and events.

  In many cases, however, names and identifying details have been changed, and events slightly arranged, to give a measure of privacy to the individuals involved.

  CLOSE TO THE MACHINE.

  Copyright © 1997 by Ellen Ullman.

  Introduction copyright © 2012 by Jaron Lanier.

  All rights reserved.

  For information, address

  Picador,

  175 Fifth Avenue,

  New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.picadorusa.com

  www.twitter.com/picadorusa www.facebook.com/picadorusa

  Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Farrar, Straus and Giroux under license from Pan Books Limited.

  For book club information, please visit www.facebook.com/picadorbookclubor e-mail [email protected].

  Design by Nancy J. Peters

  eISBN: 978-1-250-02458-9

  First eBook Edition : March 2012

  Picador ISBN 978-1-250-00248-8

  First published in the United States by City Lights Books

  First Picador Edition: March 2012

  For Nancy

  To my father

  With unending gratitude for the help of

  Clara Basile and Jeanette Gurevitch.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  [0] SPACE IS NUMERIC

  [1] TRANSACTIONS

  [2] SUSHI

  [3] REAL ESTATE

  [4] SOFTWARE AND SUBURBIA

  [5] NEW, OLD, AND MIDDLE AGE

  [6] VIRTUALITY

  [7] MONEY

  [8] THE PASSIONATE ENGINEER

  [9] DRIVING

  Also by

  About the Author

  Notes

  Introduction

  THIS PIERCING BOOK RECORDS WHAT IT FELT LIKE when humans were first engulfed by artificial computation.

  There are precious few opportunities to peer through digital noise. Digital experience becomes so baroque as to become virtually opaque. Close to the Machine presses “Control+Z” and undoes some of the filigree, peeling back time to expose clear origins.

  When people are interested in twentieth-century music, they are likely to become fascinated with moments of origin, like when Robert Johnson approached the crossroads. It is hard to read the literature of the twentieth century without becoming curious about what Paris was like in the 1920s. In the same way, anyone immersed in social networking or any of the rest of life on the Internet at present might naturally be curious about what Silicon Valley was really like just before it all got so big and important.

  We all know about the famous players, but what was the texture of experience on the ground? Seeing that purely is how we can see beyond the encompassing clichés that always blind people to the present.

  Try to do this online and you’ll fall into a void. The Internet remembers its own digital traces, though less perfectly than is widely understood. As the digital sphere began to rise, the old world didn’t know what was important enough to record in the emergent nerdosphere, and the Internet wasn’t really there yet to start its own sort of obsessive quantity-oriented recording. So there is a lost lull from just before the storm. It’s hard to get a fix on what computer culture was like in the years before it was networked and went pop. Yet that is where we must look if we are to find the fetal dragon, the fractal seed that would soon overwhelm the interstices between all recordable experiences.

  For all the global roar of the Internet’s regard of the Internet, a plain account of living with computation is hard to come by. There are precious few.

  Fred Brooks wrote a book called The Mythical Man-Month from the perspective of a manager of programmers back in 1975, which was the first book to be honest about what computers are really like, and what it’s like to cope with that. There have been a handful of other examples, but almost none from a personal perspective.

  Awaiting your eyes is a remarkable document that is both the best account of the intimate experience of computation by a person, and a saved slice of historical memory, of that almost lost moment before everything went digitally nuts.

  I remember being amazed when the first edition was published. It proved that at last there was a bridge between reality at large and the empire of nerds, which seemed nonreactive and immune to subjectivity, beauty, love, or the acknowledgment of fundamental frailty. Here was a computer nerd who could write. Beyond that, Ullman could write about computers and her true life within a unified narrative. No one had done it before, and no one’s done it as deeply since.

  To see clearly you have to have the access of an insider, but also be an outsider. You have to be right there and still have enough distance to see. Ullman had just the right mix of there and not there when she wrote this book. She was attached to Silicon Valley, but at a bit of distance, living in San Francisco. And she is a grown-up woman in a culture favoring youth, in a world where women programmers were all too rare.

  Women’s contributions to computing, a series of “firsts,” have mostly been erased from our collective memory. We might recall Ada Lovelace, who was the first to grasp and articulate the promise of a general-purpose computer. During World War II, it was six women who set by hand the thousands of switches on ENIAC, the first all-electronic digital computer. These women were called “computers,” a term that had been applied for centuries to the profession of tedious tabulation and calculation by hand.

  Grace Hopper, a computer scientist and Naval officer, led a team of women who created the first modern programming language, as well as the compiler, a now indispensible tool that translates code to machine-readable bits.

  I met Grace while she was alive, and she was one no-nonsense, tough broad. No one was ever going to mess with her. She coined the term “bug,” and if I were a computer bug, I would fix myself before I’d face her.

  After World War II, the men came home, took jobs, and the women were expected to forget how to code. Baby Boom nerds grew up in a world where code was a male thing. Baby Boom programmers grew up in a world where code was a boy-nerd thing. There were precious few girl-nerds in pre-Internet Silicon Valley.

  The particular quality of male nerdiness might be described as a whiff of autism spectrum disorder. Not full-on communal Asperger’s syndrome, but just a bite, as Ullman describes it in a scene with the ultra-nerd Brian. She asks him if he’d like to listen to Palestrina or Beethoven. And Brian replies, “Classical music is not yet in my data banks.”

  The autistic spectrum is somewhat correlated with men, and in a way, the nerd world is a world made by men for men. The nerd flavor of masculinity has overwhelmed the macho kind in real-life power dynamics, and therefore in popular culture.

  What is nerdism like? There is a tendency to reject outward appearances, which has its kindnesses. There is a purpose of life in the nerd wor
ld, which is treating reality as code, and optimizing it. Life becomes a problem-solving activity, and the problem is some sort of lack of optimization. Of course this imperative breaks down on close examination, but they all do.

  Back when Close to the Machine came out, one of my reactions was that it might portend the beginning of a consilience many of us expected. We expected the real world, the world of relationships, experience, and mortality, to overtake the abstract little nerdy bubble of Silicon Valley. Our little era of computer-modulated living would be remembered as one of those exceptional chapters in human affairs, kind of like lesbian warrior empires or gypsy migrations. Instead what happened was the opposite. The whole world bought in to our nerdy way of life. Everyone now uses UNIX-speak to socialize and spread news. We define ourselves as being in relationships, or not, on social-networking sites as if we are setting bits in a program. The nerds took over.

  So instead of this book serving as a memorial to a peculiar time, it has come to serve as a rarified glimpse into the source point of what has become too familiar to notice.

  I now find myself using the phrase “close to the machine” to mean “rich and powerful.” The closer you are to a big server on the Internet, the richer you are. The server might run high frequency trades, a search engine, a social network, a supply chain (Walmart, I’m looking at you), a botnet, or a traditional national spy agency. Unless you have an oil field, it is the means to wealth in modernity.

  The culture of computation has always been a cult of youth, which doesn’t prioritize remembering. Youthfulness is a natural enough fit, since young minds are better at the tedious side of dealing with computation. What is remembered tends to be seductive stories about kids who made good with computers: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, and so on.

  Another reason for the neotenous quality of computation is that the trifecta of sex, drugs, and rock and roll had failed right around the time computers got plentiful, leaving a vacuum to be filled. Sex and drugs became authentically dangerous at that time of AIDS and underworlds, and rock and roll, while ever popular, could hardly be associated exclusively with youth anymore.

  Computer culture, while often fashioned to be anarchistic, populist, and anti-elitist, seems to unfortunately secure its memories around iconic heroes instead of the experiences of ordinary people. But it is only the history of the ordinary that can help us understand the present of the ordinary. To not seek out that history is to choose a form of blindness.

  It is imperative that we care about the past of computer culture. This is because computers, while they seem ever new, actually have a mechanistic way of limiting what we see and know, locking us into the present, all the while creating an illusion that we’re all-seeing.

  To illustrate with an example, let’s consider what computers do to words. When you (my reader being a person, I presume) want to understand a word well, it’s useful to look into its past. I find it helpful to remember the origins of the word “computer,” for instance.

  A modern, digital computer can be programmed to “understand” a word. “Then something different happens,” Ullman writes. “The irregularities of human thinking start to emerge … . The human mind, as it turns out, is messy.”

  Natural-language software mines the vast databases of existing translations and usage patterns found online, and from that automated research, statistical correlations are derived. Whether this constitutes something that should be called “understanding” at all is a matter of debate, but at any rate, the combination of big data and statistics yields useful effects like discernible, though imperfect, automatic translation between natural languages.

  As computers mediate human language more and more over time, will language itself start to change?

  Suppose it becomes commonplace to use Internet services to translate between Chinese and English. Is it not likely that native speakers of either language might, after a while, start to emphasize those turns of phrase that translate most reliably? Might the grooves of the translation software start to gradually alter the languages that are being translated?

  We don’t know the answer, since the experiment is only now beginning and its effects must take place on a massive scale to have meaning.

  Should it turn out that widespread use of computer translation transforms languages even when spoken privately between native speakers, then an odd, present-tense feedback loop will be instantiated.

  This is what I mean about how computers can lock us into the present. We create programs using the ideas we can feed into them, the ideas in circulation at the time of programming, but then we live through the program, so we can forget the arbitrariness of the moment. We accept the ideas imbedded in the program as facts of nature.

  This happens all the time with computers. People fashion their social identities around the particular multiple-choice database entries a programmer placed in a social networking service like Facebook. What could feel more natural than something that engulfs?

  Whether this is a bad thing or not is not my concern here, but I do want to promote the quest for truth, as best we can approximate it, and surely we ought to do our best to be aware of the ways we’ve chosen to be engulfed.

  The Internet can give you an illusion of omniscience, but you are in a mirror bubble. To get context, to see where you are, you must find a way out of the thing that sometimes seems to be everything.

  There are two ways to find your bearings. One way to approach the puzzle is to go back in time, as with understanding the origin of the word “computer.”

  There is another way, however, which is to go internal. Find the quiet to report honestly what you feel, to escape the iron force field of social expectation for just a moment. That’s amazingly hard to do. It can be helpful to read the words of someone else who has done it, and that’s one reason literature is so important. Rather than the mash-up of the social web, it’s the truth of the individual voice.

  Amazingly, this book takes both paths at once. Here is a personal voice, a true and articulate voice, and the story is about that dawn moment, just when computation engulfed us.

  This book provides a unique and beautiful way to set aside the power and status games of the moment in order to consider what it means to repattern your life within the strange logic Grace Hopper made up so long ago.

  —Jaron Lanier

  [0] SPACE IS NUMERIC

  I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TIME IT IS. There are no windows in this office and no clock, only the blinking red LED display of a microwave, which flashes 12:00, 12:00, 12:00, 12:00. Joel and I have been programming for days. We have a bug, a stubborn demon of a bug. So the red pulse no-time feels right, like a read-out of our brains, which have somehow synchronized themselves at the same blink rate.

  “But what if they select all the text and—”

  “—hit Delete.”

  “Damn! The NULL case!”

  “And if not we’re out of the text field and they hit space—”

  “—yeah, like for—”

  “—no parameter—”

  “Hell!”

  “So what if we space-pad?”

  “I don’t know … . Wait a minute!”

  “Yeah, we could space-pad—”

  “—and do space as numeric.”

  “Yes! We’ll call SendKey(space) to—?

  “—the numeric object.”

  “My God! That fixes it!”

  “Yeah! That’ll work if—”

  “—space is numeric!”

  “—if space is numeric!”

  We lock eyes. We barely breathe. For a slim moment, we are together in a universe where two human beings can simultaneously understand the statement “if space is numeric!”

  Joel and I started this round of debugging on Friday morning. Sometime later, maybe Friday night, another programmer, Danny, came to work. I suppose it must be Sunday by now because it’s been a while since we’ve seen my client’s employees around the office. Along the way, at odd times of day or
night that have completely escaped us, we’ve ordered in three meals of Chinese food, eaten six large pizzas, consumed several beers, had innumerable bottles of fizzy water, and finished two entire bottles of wine. It has occurred to me that if people really knew how software got written, I’m not sure if they’d give their money to a bank or get on an airplane ever again.

  What are we working on? An artificial intelligence project to find “subversive” talk over international phone lines? Software for the second start-up of a Silicon Valley executive banished from his first company? A system to help AIDS patients get services across a city? The details escape me just now. We may be helping poor sick people or tuning a set of low-level routines to verify bits on a distributed database protocol—I don’t care. I should care; in another part of my being—later, perhaps when we emerge from this room full of computers—I will care very much why and for whom and for what purpose I am writing software. But just now: no. I have passed through a membrane where the real world and its uses no longer matter. I am a software engineer, an independent contractor working for a department of a city government. I’ve hired Joel and three other programmers to work with me. Down the hall is Danny, a slim guy in wire-rimmed glasses who comes to work with a big, wire-haired dog. Across the bay in his converted backyard shed is Mark, who works on the database. Somewhere, probably asleep by now, is Bill the network guy. Right now, there are only two things in the universe that matter to us. One, we have some bad bugs to fix. Two, we’re supposed to install the system on Monday, which I think is tomorrow.

  “Oh, no, no!” moans Joel, who is slumped over his keyboard. “No-o-o-o.” It comes out in a long wail. It has the sound of lost love, lifetime regret. We’ve both been programmers long enough to know that we are at that place. If we find one more serious problem we can’t solve right away, we will not make it. We won’t install. We’ll go the terrible, familiar way of all software: we’ll be late.