Close to the Machine_Technophilia and Its Discontents Read online

  One VC proposed a toast. “Work hard!” he exclaimed.

  Another raised his glass. “Work long hours!” he said.

  The programmers looked surprised but drank down. “Make us a lot of money,” I murmured under my breath.

  For in those days I had a low view of these venture capitalists. I wondered why they didn’t circulate among us and find out who we were. What else were they buying but the intelligence of fifteen engineers? Experienced managers and a good business plan weren’t going to get very far without some programming talent. Later, I met one of them on an airplane flight. A single empty seat was between us, and we would be near each other for the next six hours. I introduced myself as a senior engineer at the company. I felt certain he would strike up a conversation with me; I was sure he would want an engineer’s view of how the product was progressing. Five and three-quarter hours later, he had not said a word to me. After we landed, he waved and said, “Good luck.”

  In the first round of financing, the VCs gave the company two million dollars. The founders held a party to celebrate. At the party, someone took a Polaroid of the president then later pinned it to the bulletin board over the coffee pot, where it hung for months. In the picture, the president is holding the check up to the camera with both hands. The check is actually made out in the amount of two million dollars. The president is clearly drunk. On his face is a sloppy, boozy, greedy smile.

  Exactly eleven years and three months later, long after I’d quit, I went back to the company. This time, I was there to meet with the new vice president of external affairs, who would see to it that Project Jerry received a generous donation of software, training, and service. The company president—the very same boozy, greedy one from the picture—had gone out of his way to arrange the donation.

  I put on a good suit and real pearls. I parked the car I had bought with the company’s stock. I stepped out, looked up and stopped: there before me was the very materialization of success. A corridor of palm trees. A line of black-glass buildings. A brand-new office park, headquarters of the company I had worked for when we squatted in the vacated medical suite, each office with a sink. Stretching out to the north, more buildings holding the company’s name, warehouses and offices, trucks coming and going from loading docks. Somewhere in all those buildings, and in others around the world, were thousands of employees. Fifteen of us had built the entire first product; what were all those employees doing, I wondered?

  I had always imagined that wealth was something to be amassed—something that previously existed and was then accumulated, and therefore had to be taken away from someone else. I never held much truck with the libertarian idea that wealth could be created—created where there had been none. This idea of theirs seemed a self-serving dream, a salve on the conscience which permitted someone to become rich without care or guilt.

  But if wealth could not be created, how else to explain all that had happened since I left the company: the line of glass-cube buildings, the spanking-new office park, the thousands of employees, the millionaire programmers, the manager I once reported to (former mailman-bartender-librarian), who was now a multimillionaire philanthropist? How to account for my car, my loft? If wealth could not arise like life out of the primordial soup, where else did it come from? How had the efforts of fifteen people gone on to become (according to the company’s publicity department) “the sixth-largest independent software company in the world?”

  And what was I doing to spread around the wealth? With my little virtual company expanding and contracting, never paying a salary—what was I doing? I looked back at my rebellious self who had hated the venture capitalists. Though it’s difficult to like people with extraordinary amounts of money, still I had to admit: they weren’t just sitting on their yachts.

  The office park was deserted, except for a few delivery vans and maintenance workers. Walking by the perfect trees and clipped hedges, the few people about looked like figures in an architect’s rendering. Then, something about the unreal landscaping and fake-looking people and the black-glass buildings gave me a brief, scary vision. Inside the buildings it seemed there were nothing but knowledge workers, and outside, stuck in this bizarrely perfect place, were all the people who existed to serve the knowledge-force. It was like a vision that would sometimes come to me in Manhattan: an island of very wealthy people surrounded by the people whose role in life was to take care of their children, pick up their dry cleaning, and deliver Chinese take-out. As I made my way across the parking lot and stepped into the cool entranceway, it seemed to me that I’d crossed the great divide and could not go back. I was on the inside now. I was on my way to see a vice president of the sixth-largest software company in the world.

  The vice president of external affairs had described himself on the phone as “a dumb right-wing Republican,” and he was a little afraid of anything to do with AIDS. It was for him that I had put on the good suit I was wearing and the real pearls, the shoes from France and my father’s gold watch. After asking my way through a maze of corridors, I found his door. He looked up, saw me in my excellent clothes, and visibly relaxed. I was one of his, said the image I offered up in the doorway.

  My first impulse had been to show up in black leathers—to give the dumb, right-wing Republican a good fright. The fact that I didn’t: Was it all because of the stock? Did I feel obligated for what I’d been given? Had the grumbling, rebellious programmer who left behind a fortune in stock options been changed that much by her unexpected pile of money? And, if I had changed, was it a good thing or a bad one?

  “You know, you were almost the food-irradiation heiress,” said my father.

  He made this statement to me one morning, completely out of the blue. I was in New York one winter for a visit home. We had been sitting in silence all through breakfast (my father was then in his mid-seventies, still working, on his way to the office), when he stood up, cleared the remains of his sardines and pot cheese, and started talking about food irradiation.

  “Just what in the world is a food-irradiation heiress?” was the natural thing for me to ask.

  My father laughed, which in him was a sort of mild cough. “Well,” he said, putting the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher, “if Semi and I hadn’t been so ahead of our time, you’d be on your way to inheriting an entire empire of food-preservation plants.”

  The story came out as the dishwasher filled. My father and his younger brother—Seymour, called Semi—had met some man who knew someone who was an engineering professor at Princeton. This man convinced my father and his brother that the future of food processing was in low-level doses of radiation, which would sterilize and preserve anything, he said. In exchange for the rights and means to develop the process of food irradiation, the brothers had invested twenty-five thousand dollars each.

  “And do you know what fifty thousand dollars was in those days?” he said.

  He was talking about the early sixties. “A fortune,” I said.

  “Ach! You don’t know. We had the equipment ready, we had the building leased—this was in Connecticut—and we had a contract with the Navy. Fish.”

  “Fish?”

  “Fish. The Navy wanted us to preserve fish. So it would last on ships.”

  “So what happened?”

  “What happened? The people in the town heard about the whole thing and got scared. You know, radiation. It scared them. What a mess! They blocked the permit, we lost the lease, and there went your future as the food-irradiation heiress.”

  Looked at this way, having avoided a future where I might have poisoned, or at least terrified, an entire town in Connecticut, I was rather glad not to have become the food-irradiation heiress. But I couldn’t say that. My father took any disagreement as a sign of ingratitude. He was a man who liked to give, to provide; and he liked his providees to be grateful.

  “Was this around the time that you and Uncle Seymour did that thing with the coin counter?” Now that I thought of it, I remembered that my f
ather somehow got in the business of manufacturing a plastic device for counting coins, an idea he’d gotten from watching cashiers handle money in some diners he’d invested in (one of the diners had—well—burned down). And this memory triggered another: of my father sitting at this very kitchen table trying to convince a distantly related son-in-law, a doctor, to “invent some pill to put in a ketchup bottle to make it come out faster.” These moments had occurred to me in childhood as single, unconnected events. Suddenly, with the revelation of food irradiation, I realized that my apparently traditional, conservative father—who had always counseled everyone to invest safely and carefully—had himself been something of a financial wildman.

  “Come to think of it, Dad, you got involved in some pretty strange things.”

  “Are you complaining?” He lifted his chin to me. “You had such an insecure childhood?”

  I had everything, I was supposed to say. “I had everything,” I said.

  “Uhmm. And then some.”

  “And then some.”

  He let that hang for a minute. At one time, this would be the place where he’d bring up the trips to the toy store, later the Ivy League college I went to, later a certain relationship I had with the shoe department at Barney’s. By now, though, he didn’t need to say a word. A pause was enough for me to fill it in by myself.

  “But the food-irradiation business—well, that was something else. Something … .” He paused, looked out the window, sighed. “Oh well, too bad. Because we were going to make money in that one. A lot of money.” Another pause. “Real money.”

  What a very odd thing for him to say: real money. I had never known my father to talk about money. And especially not like this: as an object of desire. In our house, we were supposed to understand that money was for security, that my father made more than enough of it, that the making of money was his sole and uncontested province, and that he ruled his province very, very well. Beyond that, the matter was not to be directly mentioned. Now, suddenly, here he was at the kitchen sink one winter morning, on his face a look of intense pleasure and regret at the memory of his (and my) lost fortune.

  “Come in the den,” he said, “I want to show you something.”

  The den—family room and office—was dark at this early hour and empty of family. My father switched on the light over the desk. “I want you to know where everything is,” he said.

  He opened the middle drawer and pulled out a wide, well-worn leather ledger. “This is where I record all the income,” he said. It was the book I had seen him writing in all those years, or another just like it. “For example, see here? Last month. This is a list of all the partnerships and their deposits.”

  He ran his hand down the penciled column and recited the names of partnerships. “Gotham, Southbury, Ullman and Company, Miller and Ullman, A. Ullman and Sons, Ullman Realty, Ullman 63”—names that once rang through my childhood as echoes of my father’s other life, sounds overheard during the business calls he took at the dinner table, names I understood dimly even then, with my father old and me at the entrance of middle age.

  “But you know I can’t read your handwriting!” My father wrote in a cramped, odd hand that looked like a collection of stick figures.

  “What do you mean, you can’t read my handwriting?”

  “Just that: I can’t. It’s impossible. You know that! No one can.”

  “Is that so? I had a whole office full of people working for me and you’re telling me no one could read my writing?” He laughed. “You’ll figure it out.” He was as certain as ever that I could do anything; I had been left alone most of my life to “figure it out.” But about this at least he was right. When he died, his business affairs in a mess, no lawyer hired, I was the one to go through his desk and his files. I was the one to follow the trail of his money, which he had left in transit, as if he thought that, if his funds were still afloat, he could not die.

  “And in this drawer are all the checkbooks—”

  “But what are those back there?”

  “More checkbooks.”

  The tour continued. “Here is where I keep deposit receipts”—a drawer with slips of paper thrown in—“and here are invoices”—a jammed file.

  And so went the great unlocking of the fortress desk, promontory from which my father spent his life surveying his family and his money. Here the statements, there the canceled checks—its secrets revealed as ordinary paper, mundane matter, plain stuff. A wave of disappointment came over me: I didn’t want this coming down to size, I realized; I wanted my father to remain forever a mysterious, distant figure of busy wonder. And if I were to finally know him, I wanted some extraordinary moment, a grand declaration of our stiff-necked love for each other. But immediately I was aware of the yellow cone of light circling us in the dim room. I felt the quiet of the house around us. This was my father, I saw. He was not a man for grand declarations. If I kept hoping for that, I would always be disappointed. How else could he reveal himself to me except like this: in money and papers and accounts.

  I didn’t know then that my father’s business had started to fall apart. I wasn’t aware that he had tried and failed to reach a retirement agreement with his partners, and the feud that was to drain his last years had already begun. It was only after he died that I understood what had prompted this unexpected set of revelations, why he had this sudden need to talk to someone who still thought of him as powerful, to someone like me, who was still deep down afraid of him.

  “Now look in here,” said my father, opening a small loose-leaf binder filled with columnar paper. “These are the accounts for the real estate, the rents and operating expenses and so forth.” Again came his finger down penciled columns, again the recital of familiar names—tenants, janitors, suppliers—more echoes from the telephone.

  He flipped through the pages and became pensive, as if he were remembering something or looking for something. Finally, he opened to a page where a yellowed paper was folded over and clipped.

  He removed the clip, opened the paper carefully. “This is it,” he said, holding the book up to me as if it were the key to all mysteries, the explanation for everything.

  “This is what?”

  “The spreadsheet where I figured out I could afford to buy John Street.”

  John Street: Our building. Our piece of Wall Street. Our fortune, the one that did happen.

  “Do you know what you’re looking at? See this here? That’s what I started with: ten thousand dollars.” He repeated the three words individually. “Ten … thousand … dollars. That was it. All I had. Do you know what leveraging is? Debt! It’s debt. A great big load of debt. Biggest crapshoot of my life.”

  Debt. Crapshoot. Had this been inside him all these years? Did all his accountant’s perfect navy blue suits cover the soul of a gambler?

  “It was a risky business. But it paid off. Do you know what it’s worth now?” The market was yet to crash; Wall Street was yet to become unpeopled; our fortune was still intact. “Your dear father made this happen. Everything we have now started right here. Money, Ellie. Real money. You see, it’s not the accounting business that interests me. I got bored by that years ago. It’s the deals, Ellen, the deals.”

  It was as close to a moment of passion as my father had ever shown. So here at last was what drove him. Here was what had kept him at that desk all those nights while the TV played. Here was what made him take all the phone calls at dinner. Deals: it was the deals.

  Just then, for the first and last time, I saw the young man in him. I saw the ambition, the drive, the virile desire that had attracted him to the making of money—real money. And I saw the enormous, dominating ego that lived under the unassuming look of the prosperous accountant. There, exposed, was the stubborn force that I had sparred with—at a distance, by proxy—all my life. Real money. I did it. I made it. The deals. There it was: the life overheard from the wrong end of the phone, an almost dangerously determined manhood played out in the wilds of money.r />
  “Jack!” came my mother’s voice from the upstairs bedroom. “Jack!”

  The silence around us dissolved. The enclosing dark of the room descended to ordinary day. The early morning was over: my mother was awake. “Jack! Don’t tell me you’re going to the office today! It’s going to snow.”

  My father looked at me. This was the other side of his life.

  “She has a point, you know,” I said. “You are seventy-five, after all. Why don’t you stay home with her?”

  “Jack!” came again, insistent and annoyed.

  “Yes, Mother dear,” my father called out, playing the role of henpecked husband he liked to affect with my mother.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  And he closed the desk drawers, switched off the light, and obediently went up to her. And, after they had the usual exchange of words about this subject, he brought her coffee to her. Then he folded the business section of the Times, put it in his briefcase, and went to the office.

  What makes a man spend his whole life making money? What makes him risk everything, forsaking hobbies, interests, friends, even family? I took the elevator up to the eighth floor of an exclusive building in Pacific Heights to ask this question of a very rich man.

  The building held one apartment to a floor, and the family name—which I’ll call Charles—was listed on a plaque in the elevator. I had met both Mr. and Mrs. Charles at the office party of a money-management company I’d worked for. Holding glasses of good cabernet, we had discussed his private men’s club, something like the exclusive Bohemian Club but more discreet. I was amazed to find myself talking with a man who was so extremely wealthy but whom I did not immediately despise. I even enjoyed him, so much so that his wife had to come looking for him to drag him away. John Charles was an adviser to CEOs. He’d been born in Denver when it was still a mining town, and had started up companies ranging from ticket services to manufacturing. He went on to become a turnaround specialist before getting involved in the CEO-advising business. Now he was a rich man who counseled other rich men on how to become even richer: the perfect source to help me penetrate the mysterious drive to make money. I called and told him I was writing something. Could I come over and talk with him about what motivated the men he worked with? He remembered me from the party. He’d read some articles I’d written about technology companies. And he was flattered. He said yes.