Close to the Machine_Technophilia and Its Discontents Page 12

  For me, the layoff started a time of wandering. I went to a start-up company, then on to my virtual, consulting ways. My boss took a job with a computing research group at Pacific Bell—a big company, a solid company. The phone company, for heaven’s sake, bound to be around forever, right?

  Twelve years after my former boss took his job at the phone company, a major telecommunications deregulation bill became law. Layoffs are occurring everywhere in the telephone industry. AT&T has already shed tens of thousands of workers, and Pacific Bell is being acquired. I’ve begun to worry about my former boss: twelve years on the job, and what will happen to him now?

  And then here I am, rootless and wandering, my company wavering in and out of existence. I used to think that I was the infantile one, that I couldn’t accept reality like my former boss and just settle down. But now I feel he will be more fragile. Unprepared for chaos, he must go out into the hurly-burly I’ve been in all these years. In the end, which of us is better prepared for the world as it has turned out to be?

  I’m bad at letting go. Even after projects end and I should let associates fade out, I try to hold on, sometimes to a fault. I was not ready to let go of Joel, for example. We had shared minds that night before the AIDS-project release, and mind-share, for me, is the hardest bond of all to break.

  Joel and I met for dinners. It turned out we both had a passion for good wine and fancy restaurants. I liked that he would appear in a suit and tie, his good-biz-school self fitting right into the sort of places I like to go to.

  One night we met at a restaurant in my neighborhood. It was down a little alley, behind a gate. Our confirmed reservation, and Joel’s good suit and overcoat, got us past the crowd at the door and into the inner dining room, where we were seated at a table with softly upholstered chairs. The room was filled with flowers, huge vases with three-foot stems and blossoms inches in diameter.

  We chose the food and the wine—planning our orders as a single meal—and soon turned to the subject that occupied the largest part of our lives: work. That night, Joel had a complaint. In the face of new government regulations, the company where he had been a contractor for years was talking about forcing him to become something terrible: an employee.

  “Why does the government give a damn what I am?” said Joel. “If the company is happy and I’m happy, why should it be any of their business?”

  “Joel, it’s the government’s business because contracting is so often abused.”

  “What do you mean? What’s the difference? If you want to work for yourself, why should anybody stop you?”

  “You want to work for yourself. But what about someone who doesn’t want to?”

  Joel looked at me with utter incomprehension. “Why would someone not want to work for himself?”

  Joel wasn’t a proper libertarian; his individualism wasn’t studied and rationalized like Brian’s. But he was the same age as Brian, thirty-one, and I decided that their obliviousness toward the average working life had to be some by-product of their age and time. They didn’t want to make films or write novels, the way my friends did at thirty. They wanted to build companies, be in charge, on their own. Somehow, having your own business had become cool.

  “Benefits,” I said. “That’s why people want jobs. And companies don’t pay benefits to contractors.” He still didn’t quite get it. “Don’t they teach labor history in school anymore?”

  I had to explain that companies would make everyone a contractor if there weren’t laws against it; that they would jump at the chance to unload the cost of medical coverage, overtime, holidays, sick leave.

  “You think so?”

  “Jesus, Joel. Companies don’t give benefits because they like to. People had to die in the streets—literally—to get these benefits.”

  “Did they?” Suddenly he seemed suspicious of me. Maybe I was indeed a decently successful software developer. Maybe I did read The Economist. Maybe we did get along quite well in nice restaurants. But there I was talking dead people in the street, just like some sort of commie.

  We sat in the beautiful restaurant. Before us was a bottle of old, red wine. The vases of fresh cut flowers surrounded us. I lifted my glass. I talked labor history of the ’20s. For the five-day work week, people did indeed get shot by company thugs and die in the streets; and there we sat, two independent contractors who brag about working all the time. Virtual employer and virtual employee, sipping their wine.

  Finally Joel just gave up. “Whatever. I’m sure you’re right. I mean, I take your word for it.”

  I had a vision of my so-right self sitting behind the remains of my gigot en chevreuil.“Oh, please don’t take my word for it, Joel. These days I’m liable to say just about anything.”

  The dining room began to empty. The ghost scents of food, flowers, and coffee rose around us. We finished the bottle. We shared a dessert. When we left the table, I instinctively brushed my arm around him, and he circled my waist. Zing. Rush. How strange: that mind-moment we had shared on our long night of programming, that little thought-charge—it was still there.

  I decided that Joel could live without a real job because he had a fake one: he was an “independent” contractor who had a whole little society to live in. Every day for years, he went to an office and sat at the same desk in the same cubicle. The same people were there to say good morning and how are you and did you see a certain movie. There was someone to eat lunch with and chat with and help pass bored time. When things went wrong, he had a companionable ear for gossip and complaint.

  He had his home in the postmodern village: the workplace, the last place where your position in the order of things is still known, where people must put up with you on a regular basis, over a long period of time, and you with them. Families scatter, marriages end, yet the office and the factory have hung on a bit longer as staple human gathering places. Maybe this is why the decline of industrial work and the downsizing of corporations have produced such anxiety: the final village is dissolving, and those of us without real jobs or fakes—where will we meet each other now?

  On line, I suppose. As virtualized creatures swimming alone in private pools of time.

  In this sense, we virtual workers are everyone’s future. We wander from job to job, and now it’s hard for anyone to stay put anymore. Our job commitments are contractual, contingent, impermanent, and this model of insecure life is spreading outward from us. I may be wrong, but I have this idea that we programmers are the world’s canaries. We spend our time alone in front of monitors; now look up at any office building, look into living-room windows at night: so many people sitting alone in front of monitors. We lead machine-centered lives; now everyone’s life is full of automated tellers, portable phones, pagers, keyboards, mice. We live in a contest of the fittest, where the most knowledgeable and skillful win and the rest are discarded; and this is the working life that waits for everybody. Everyone agrees: be a knowledge worker or be left behind. Technical people, consultants, contract programmers: we are going first. We fly down and down, closer and closer to the virtualized life, and where we go the world is following.17

  While I was still on the AIDS project, I took my virtual company out to lunch. Danny the desktop programmer, Mark on the server, Bill the network specialist, the user support guy, me. (Joel hadn’t started working with us yet.) To celebrate making our first major project milestone, we drank some very nice Veuve Clicquot, ate an excellent meal at my expense, praised each other, teased one another, and generally had a fine time. But, even with two excellent bottles of wine after the champagne, we knew to hold back. We were careful not to say too much about ourselves, careful not to make assumptions about the future. We were all practiced virtuals. We knew better than to get involved.

  After the lunch, I went home to my office. The floor was covered with boxes, new hardware to be installed. As I snaked cables under desks, I thought about how I would eventually lose touch with the guys who’d been so funny that day over the pasta, and
how the hardware I was cabling, soon to be wired and communicating, would stay.

  I had a rush of affection for the machines. They had a presence, a solidity, that made the empty office feel occupied. On the network, each one had a name. I called them Janeway and HomePlanet, Pride and Hubris. In the virtual company, these were my real companions. They’d be here for me when others moved on. When they got sick, though, I could junk them without regrets. When they got old, I’d just scrap them. Why bother messing up good friendships? What’s the point of all these people coming and going in your life? And who needs to work with family anyway? Your good pals could just as well pitch you out of your own company someday. I was a bit woozy, I realized. Too much champagne in the afternoon. “You machines will be obsolete long before I will,” I said aloud with stupid bravado.

  The machines didn’t say anything, of course. Janeway beeped when she came up. HomePlanet had a boot error. Pride and Hubris—they just sat there.

  [7] MONEY

  ONE DAY, THE PING-PONG TABLE DISAPPEARED. I arrived for a meeting at the networking-software company, and the only evidence that there ever was a Ping-Pong table was a crumpled ball hiding in the corner. In its place were cubicles: a row of four cubes along the window, four more facing them across a newly invented narrow corridor, ten more stretching down toward the hallway, even one in the corner of the large room where the programmers usually did technical design, and which was now strewn with half-assembled equipment.

  I couldn’t find anyone I knew. “Where has everybody gone?” I asked the first person to come along, someone I didn’t recognize. He waved vaguely at the cubicles. “Oh, I don’t know. Just look around.”

  The offices that had been vacant were now full of strange people. “Isn’t this Steve’s office?” I asked a heavyset man sitting in what used to be the product manager’s office. “Oh, Steve’s in one of the cubicles,” said the man. He seemed harried and not inclined to introduce himself. “And you are … ?” I asked him. “From upstairs,” he said, “Sales.” Again he ignored me, clearly wishing I’d just go away. But where were all the missing people?

  “Is everyone who was in an office—”

  “Is in a cubicle,” he said.

  “And everyone now in an office—”

  “Is from sales, marketing, finance. Everyone from upstairs and across the hall.”

  “What happened, I mean—”

  “We’re consolidating,” he said, “Anyway, I have to make a call, so … .” He shut the door behind me.

  I went back to the receptionist and asked after the senior engineer and product manager I was supposed to meet with. “They’re not in today,” said the receptionist, who was also new to me.

  “Are you sure?” I said, “We had a meeting scheduled for—”

  “Sorry. They’re not in.”

  She smiled in a way that told me I wouldn’t get any explanations here. “Well then, here’s my card. Please tell them—”

  “Of course,” she said.

  There was nothing for me to do but start the long drive back north to the city. I spent two hours in creeping traffic. I vowed to bill the company for the entire day.

  This happened on a Friday, after which I went away for the weekend. I enjoyed myself and nearly stopped thinking about the bizarre state of affairs at the networking-software company. Then, when I checked my messages on Sunday night, there was a call on my work line which had come in on Friday night. It was from the representative of the venture capitalists, the salvage specialist who had hired me.

  “I’m going on vacation Monday,” said the message, “so give me a call before then. I should be here until midnight, same on Saturday.” Then he left his home and cell phone numbers and repeated the instructions to call him. Uh-oh, I thought. No one calls at ten on Friday and asks for a call back until midnight, unless he has something bad to say.

  I left messages for him on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. No calls back. Finally, on Thursday, there was an answer on his cell phone.

  “Hey, there!” said the salvage specialist, a former Navy frigate commander who sounded exactly like that. “Greetings from Death Valley!”

  “Is that where you are, Death Valley?”

  “Yes, indeed. Here with the family. And the weather is hot and fine. We’re camping. You should see it: we’re out in the middle of nowhere.”

  I imagined him standing in the middle of the desert with a cell phone to his ear. “I’m very sorry to disturb you on vacation but—”

  “No problem! No problem!” he said in such good spirits that I wondered if I had been wrong about the bad news.

  “Well, things have gotten very strange down in San Jose, and I was wondering if—”

  “I could explain? Hey, that’s why I called you!” he said, again in expansive spirits.

  But his good mood must have come from the vacation; the story he had to tell was dismal enough. The venture capitalists had based their last two rounds of financing on the hiring of a new company president. The new president, a short, slight man of about forty, had come aboard, hired his buddies, started opening an office close to his home then—in less than a month—he quit.

  “That was fast,” I said.

  “Well, he and we had different ideas about the company’s future.”

  With the departure of the president and his team, the venture capitalists were reconsidering their investment. They were not going to fund another round just yet. The interim vice president had two weeks to come up with a plan that would get the company to the first release of the product I was working on—without any additional funding.

  “What are the chances of that succeeding?” I asked.

  “Well, I wouldn’t write this thing off just yet,” he said, but he sounded dubious.

  “So much for stock options,” I said.

  “You’re not the only one,” he said.

  “And should I continue to—”

  “No. Better stop working and see what happens.”

  It took a moment for this news to sink in: I could be out of a job. This sudden unemployment made me think of my two outstanding invoices. “I hate to seem self-serving at a time like this,” I said, “but do you think I’ll get paid?”

  “Oh. Don’t worry,” he said, again in his hale, frigate-commander voice, “We are very good about things like this. We always do an orderly shutdown.”

  “I’ll get paid?”

  “Orderly shutdown. As I said, we’re very good at things like that.”

  I had forgotten that start-up companies could fail. Like the rest of the world, I had let myself become intoxicated by Silicon Valley’s aura of high-tech riches. I had started thinking that the offering price of my stock options might be ten, twenty, thirty dollars—why not fifty? a hundred? Two companies I’d worked for had gone public, so perhaps I can be forgiven my unthinking sense of entitlement.

  Before any of this happened—before I had experienced the heady fright of watching a company go public—I imagined that the options or certificates I held would make great bathroom decorations. I even had some proper frames. I looked forward to the cool cachet of having worthless stock hanging over the towel rack.

  Then came the first IPO, then the second. Both began with letters from lawyers reminding everyone of the rules: the certificates had to be registered, you can’t sell for six months from the date of the initial public offering. It’s then strange that no official letters come from the lawyers on the actual date. It’s only when someone calls—breathless, giggling; the most staid antimaterialist you know suddenly gibbering at the thought of riches—it’s then you realize that the impossible has truly happened. Your stock is not toilet paper.

  Now come the awful six months of waiting. The stock price is sickeningly volatile. The underwriters push the stock: it goes up. A quarterly report comes out: it goes down. Programmers suddenly become technical analysts. They order newsletters. They open accounts at Charles Schwab. They chart the stock and plan their “sell targe
ts.”

  Not everyone becomes fabulously wealthy, of course. I left before I had vested all my options. My stock earnings were enough for a sweet, fast sports car and a good-sized down payment on a loft, for which I am immensely grateful. It is an extraordinary thing to be living your life more or less as you would anyway, then receive an unexpected pile of money.

  I knew someone who was an early employee of Sun Microsystems. He was a shy writer of compilers18 who tended to wear flannel shirts. A few years out of engineering school, he had taken a job at the then-unknown company. Eight years later, Sun was a leading technology corporation, and my friend was probably worth tens of millions of dollars.

  “But why are you still working?” I asked him one day.

  “Life would have no meaning if I didn’t work,” he said. “Besides, I like writing compilers.”

  My first start-up company began in a decrepit suite of former doctors’ offices. There were six of us: the four founders, an administrative assistant, me. For offices, we each had a tiny examining room, every one with its own sink and stainless-steel examination table. On Friday nights, starting with my very first one, we had a wine-and-cheese party—this was the sort of company that had wine glasses and a corkscrew before it had staplers.

  Within months, about twenty more engineers and a skeleton executive staff were hired. We moved to real offices. The entire company stopped going out to lunch together; the programmers now went with programmers, management with management. But the Friday night parties continued on schedule—after which everyone was expected to go back to work.

  Soon venture capitalists began coming to the Friday night parties. Up until then, the company had been running on the founders’ investments, which would not last us much longer. The first night the VCs appeared, they emerged loose-tied and jacketless from a closed-door meeting that had gone on all day. They made their way to the table, staying bunched up among themselves. The administrative assistant poured them wine and served them food.