Close to the Machine_Technophilia and Its Discontents Page 10

  “Throw it away,” said Brian. “It’s ancient.”

  “Well, it’s old but—”

  “Throw it away!”

  “What do you mean, throw it away? It’s history. It’s valuable.”

  Brian laughed at me. “It’s trash.”

  “No, it’s not trash. It’s interesting.” I held in my hand the little knowledge base that had made me an engineer. The whole curve of my life, my conception of myself, my sense that I could go deeper into the technical—all that came after I read that small white-covered book. How could it be trash, and so soon? I had a sudden vision of myself as a doddering codger showing off the stamp collection to junior. “It’s worth looking at again,” I protested. “I mean, don’t you think it’s bizarre that now I could fill this room with manuals, read every one of them, and still not understand the UNIX operating environment? Don’t you think it means something about what’s happening to our profession?”

  “It’s useless. Throw it away.”

  I didn’t want my experience to be useless. I wanted it to be of value that someone could remember the lovely compactness of Release 3.0. I didn’t dare show Brian my collection of manuals for ANSI-Standard COBOL, Z-80 and 8080 assembly language, System 370 Job Control Language, standard FORTRAN (“a problem solving approach”), and a 1979 Pick operating system implementation called “Reality.” He would see it all as landfill, fit companions to my long disposed-of Kaypro II personal computer, first letter-quality daisy-wheel printer, and 300-baud modem with acoustic coupler.16 But all this history had to be worth something, I felt. There had to be some threads, some concepts, some themes that transcended the details, something in computing that made it worth being alive for more than thirty-five years.

  “Okay,” said Brian, finally. “The cover is history. Tear off the cover and frame it. But throw the rest away.”

  I put the book back on the shelf. I changed the subject. A few hours later, we were in bed. Exploratory sex: province of youth, place of forgetfulness.

  Old: we don’t know what to do with the word. We throw away old hardware. Old programmers are supposed to give way to twenty-year-olds. The new is what we desire, and the newer yet.

  Only software gets to age. Too much time is invested in it, too much time will be needed to replace it. So, unlike the tossed-out hardware, software is tinkered with. It is mended and fixed, patched and reused. Software is almost homey, our approach to it almost housewifely. We say it has a “life cycle”: from birth, to productive maturity, to bug-filled old age.

  I once worked on a mainframe computer system where the fan-folded listing of my COBOL program stood as high as a person. My program was sixteen years old when I inherited it. According to the library logs, ninety-six programmers had worked on it before I had. I spent a year wandering its subroutines and service modules, but there were still mysterious places I did not dare touch. There were bugs on this system no one had been able to fix for ten years. There were sections where adding a single line of code created odd and puzzling outcomes programmers call “side effects”: bugs that come not directly from the added code but from some later, unknown permutation further down in the process. My program was near the end of its “life cycle.” It was close to death.

  Yet the system could not be thrown away. By the time a computer system becomes old, no one completely understands it. A system made out of old junky technology becomes, paradoxically, precious. It is kept running but as if in a velvet box: open it carefully, just look, don’t touch.

  The preciousness of an old system is axiomatic. The longer the system has been running, the greater the number of programmers who have worked on it, the less any one person understands it. As years pass and untold numbers of programmers and analysts come and go, the system takes on a life of its own. It runs. That is its claim to existence: it does useful work. However badly, however buggy, however obsolete—it runs. And no one individual completely understands how. Its very functioning demands we stop treating it as some mechanism we’ve created like, say, a toaster, and start to recognize it as a being with a life of its own. We have little choice anyway: we no longer control it. We have two choices: respect it or kill it.

  Old systems have a name. They are called “legacy systems.” In the regular world, “legacy” has an aura of beneficence. Parents leave a child a legacy: fortunate child. A brother gets into a fraternity because of his older brother’s earlier membership: a legacy admission. A gift. An enrichment. The patina of age, but goodage—venerability, the passing on from generation to generation. A gift of time.

  In computing, however, “legacy” is a curse. A legacy system is a lingering piece of old junk that no one has yet figured out how to throw away. It’s something to be lived with and suffered. The system is unmodifiable, full of bugs, no longer understood. We say it’s “brain dead.” Yet it lives. Yet it runs. Drain on our time and money. Vampire of our happiness. Legacy.

  In early 1980, I interviewed for a job with a man who had made his peace with his own obsolescence. He was the Information Systems manager of a large financial-services company. “I suppose you already know about our ancient system,” is how he introduced himself to me.

  His system was written in something called 1401 Autocoder. Before the moment I met him, I had never even heard of 1401 Autocoder. It was something older than COBOL, older than BASIC, said the manager, a tall, weary-looking man who was probably forty-five. At the time, he looked quite old to me. I was thirty-one.

  The interview was brief. I knew the job was mine, if I wanted it.

  Near the end of the interview, the manager lit a cigarette—this was back in the days when people still smoked—and offered me the pack. I never smoked at interviews, but the eyes looking back were deeply sad. I took a cigarette.

  “Yeah. It’s hard to find bright people who’ll work on this thing,” he said, sliding the ashtray between us.

  “Uhmm,” I said.

  “I’d pay any amount of money. You’d have a department working for you.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “1401 Autocoder. I’ve never used it.”

  “You’ll learn. I mean, you could if you wanted to.”

  We smoked.

  I was supposed to say I wanted to. He was practically begging me to say it. And it was a rule for me in interviews: always pretend to want the job. Still. A system before COBOL.

  I didn’t have to say anything. He knew: I would not take this job. He also knew it was time to end the interview. But I could tell he wanted me to stay just a bit longer. There was some camaraderie he felt with me, some confidence he was going to share. We smoked, and finally he went on: “The system’s become something of, I don’t know, a point of honor for me.”

  “Honor?” I asked.

  He leaned forward and squinted at me through a veil of smoke. “I am going to be the last human being on earth who knows how to program in 1401 Autocoder.”

  He said this with the grim and pointless determination of a man setting off for the South Pole on foot. He encouraged me to consider joining him. There was a perverse dignity in knowing obsolete arcana, he insisted.

  But he knew it was hopeless. We stubbed out our cigarettes, he shook my hand, and he wished me good luck.

  “Good luck,” I echoed.

  When I was at the doorway, he called out, “You’re younger than I am. You’d outlive me. You could be the one: the oldest living programmer of 1401 Autocoder. Think about it!”

  On a rainy Sunday afternoon, a waiter is serving me a half bottle of Pauillac, my second. “I had this wine on my twenty-fifth birthday,” says the waiter, “It’s good.”

  I stare at him for a few seconds. He’s good-looking, in a wan, pony-tailed sort of way. “That was three years ago, right?” I say. I am right, perfectly. I am very good with men’s ages, for some reason. But, now in middle age myself, I have trouble with women, perhaps because I don’t know how old I look anymore. I look at the young and wonder, Do I still look like you?; at the old
, thinking, Not yet. I don’t yet look like you.

  “Okay. How old am I?” I ask him. He’s disconcerted for a moment; he’s my waiter, after all. “No, no. Don’t be polite,” I say, “Be accurate. How old am I?”

  He leans over and peers down at me. I feel as if every wrinkle, every mark of time, is under a cold white light.

  “Forty-six,” he says.

  “Very good!” I say, for exactly one microsecond truly appreciating our mutual ability to guess ages, as if we could team up and get jobs as carneys at state fairs.

  But I can’t take this in. I want the conversation to move on. “And the women next to us,” I say, “how old are they?” I had been looking at them, wondering if I were there yet.

  He looks. “They’re in their fifties,” he says. For a moment I feel relief: I look younger, Oh good, I’m not there yet. But I can’t erase the sound of the word “fifties”—the tone, the mild disdain, the dismissal, as if those women had crossed over into another reality, so that I can’t for long glow in the knowledge that I look younger than they do. In their fifties: it speaks volumes of resignation, another country, a depressed, uninteresting region where older women are supposed to go.

  And, by the reckoning of my twenty-eight-year-old waiter on a rainy Sunday afternoon, I am four years away from them, a blink by my stars, what amounts to two new operating systems and three new languages, practically no time at all. All in a day’s work from here to that dull country where nothing interesting is ever supposed to happen to me again.

  [6] VIRTUALITY

  WHEN THE AIDS PROJECT ENDED, THE PROGRAMMERS went away. Joel and his electric mind went back to a contract at a hospital. Bill the network guy broke up with his girlfriend, and, after we had a couple of talks in a café, I lost track of him. Mark would probably come back to work with me on another database project—this was our second time together—but we soon stopped returning each other’s calls. Danny the desktop programmer completely disappeared from my existence. The user support guy hired by my client had some sort of personal crisis. He stopped working, moved, and never gave me his new phone number; I had no use for it anyway.

  Now all that was left to do was clean up the office. I had been through it before, the closing rituals designed to ease my way out of a project, and I dutifully went through it all again. I sent out my final invoice. I reprogrammed the autodial buttons on the telephone. I took down the contact list from over the desk. I sorted through the paper files, put them in a box, and carried them down to the storeroom. I backed up the computer files. Then I purged them from my system.

  But nothing ends all at once. Every project leaves behind a distinctive echo: a rhythm of energy, a way of speaking, a circle of relationship. For weeks I was certain I had calls to return, meetings to attend. I had gotten used to the weekly meetings with my client, with their printed agendas; to the large task-force meetings that were like performances in a play; to the meetings with the programmers, where I had to reassure them, as if they were my children, that I loved them all the same. It doesn’t matter that you tell yourself you are a consultant who will go away. You’ve shared your working life during a time of stress, which is a precise form of intimacy. Consulting is like any relationship: it is impossible to stay in it for any length of time if you don’t come to care.

  And so ending a project is like the end of any relationship. I had to let go of the arguments that kept me engaged with the director. I had to let subside the anger that always keeps you tied to someone, though you tell yourself you wish to get away. I had to stop arguing with her in my head. I had to accept that my life and the life of all those people associated with the project would not intersect anymore.

  Most of all, I had to accept that I was now on my own. The place I had come to before and would come to again: alone. After two weeks of intense interaction with the programmers at the networking-software company, the true nature of my new contract became clear. I sat in my loft all day staring into my computer. I designed software. Now and then, I sent the designs to the programmers by e-mail or fax. Once or twice a week, I drove down to their office through traffic made hellish by road construction. My most intense relationship became the one with my car.

  I had not anticipated this return to aloneness. Sitting in my sun-filled, 1600 square feet of architectural cool, I felt light-shocked, stunned. The sudden huge quiet unnerved me. Now I spent my days in the company of machine hum. Now I worked whenever, got dressed when I had to. Time on the face of the clock meant less and less as the weeks went by. I was all unmoored again. My company and my life had devolved to their inevitable essence: me and my machines.

  For I have a virtual company. Projects come and go like images in a screen saver, lovely and vibrant, one image fading into another, a steady flow of change it does no good to try to capture. The AIDS-project instantiation of my company—Joel and Danny, Mark and Bill—had been pleasant and engaging. But they were consultants themselves (each with his own little virtual company), and it was time for them to move on. Our coherence dissolved. A new image emerged: a mature product designer who drove down to Silicon Valley twice a week in a red sports car. An odd woman who appeared out of nowhere and, after a few months, would return to nowhere. Best not to think about it too much. Best just to let the old image fade and the new one form. Then to let that new fade out as well.

  Clients think I’m smart for doing business like this. I have the correct “business model,” as a Captain of Industry told me. “Virtual is the only way to go for consulting,” he said. “Hey, you get the skills you need when you need it. And you don’t get all involved in their doctor bills.”

  “What do I do when they get sick?” I asked.

  “Get somebody else,” Industry Captain said.

  My clients hire me to do a job, then dispose of me when I’m done. I hire the next level of contractors then dispose of them. Layers of virtual companies. Piles of disposables. Be smart or be landfill.

  There was a time (still in living memory) when “virtual” was a free word in the English language. It meant “almost true” or “for all intents and purposes, but not completely, not truly.” One could say, “I was virtually happy.” Were you truly happy? No, you weren’t, because adhering to the “virtually” was the sense of the false note, something missing, an ineffable quality of not-quite-happy. To say, then, “I have a virtual company” should mean I have a not-quite-real company, something close to the reality of a company but with some essential element missing. Other people, for instance.

  The word “virtual” no longer roams freely in the English language, however. It has been captured by computers. To say “virtual” means living in the not-quite-here-ness of the machine and its software. The word retains the sense of the missing, the not real. But somehow this not-ness has become a good thing. To be ephemerally existent, to float in some indefinable plane now known as cyberspace—that’s supposed to be grand. The demigods, the digerati, live there. “I have a virtual company”—good, great, grand.

  In my heart, I know I’m not really in business until the day I have to meet a payroll. I often think of my father starting up his accounting practice during the Depression. He didn’t have a virtual company. He hired guys right out of school and kept them on into their dotage. (He complained about them, but he kept them on.) He gave young men part of the business, cut them into deals. His employees were like family; I called some of them “cousin.” There was something in this long-term commitment, this human putting up with one another, that I know has passed away, along with a whole generation of striving immigrant sons like my father.

  Then again, maybe my father’s practice was a little too much like a family. He had to be in control, and the young men had to grow up. In the end, the “cousins” went their own ways, the employees like sons rebelled, and, when my father reached his own dotage, they complained and they didn’t keep him on: they pitched him out of his own company. Maybe the new way is better, I think. Maybe Industry Captain is r
ight. Just live by your wits and expect everyone else to do the same. Carry no dead wood. Live free or die. Yeah, surely, you can only rely on yourself.

  This idea of self-reliance doesn’t mean we’ve given up entirely. We’re human after all; we want our compatriots around us. But a contract or a start-up company doesn’t leave much room for the sentiments. Sometimes we just have a job to do.

  “We’re in the middle of firing my friend,” said Brian. We were on our way into a restaurant the second time I saw him. “Divorce,” Brian went on. “He’s really been messed up. And his work has gone to trash.”

  “He’s really messed up and so you’re going to fire him?” I asked.

  “Yeah. He’s all right with it. He agrees he’s screwing up.”

  “But how can he possibly be all right with it?”

  “Oh, he’s very smart. Smart enough to know when his work is bad.”

  “Even so. Won’t this hurt your friendship?”

  He shrugged. “No. Like I said, he’s all right with it.”

  This seemed impossible to me. Or else Brian and I had very different ideas about friendship.

  “I once had a bad time with a friend I hired,” I told him, “and things were never the same between us.”

  “Uh?”

  “I felt terrible, she felt terrible. In the end, the job wasn’t worth all these terrible feelings.”

  “Uh-huh,” Brian mumbled. Then he turned abruptly and walked off a ways, literally marching away from the subject of firing friends.

  So I didn’t tell him how my friend had sat stonily when I tried to tell her that I thought it was only a question of her motivation, only a problem of her time; that I was sure she could do the job if she wanted to. How I kept talking and talking, and I watched her turn my words into sharp, metallic things then withdraw into a closed, self-protective anger. “Talk to me,” I’d said, but she was far away and unreachable by then.