Close to the Machine_Technophilia and Its Discontents Page 6

  In my world, it was so easy to forget the empty downtowns. The whole profession encouraged us: stay here, alone, home by this nifty color monitor. Just click. Everything you want—it’s just a click away. Everything in my world made me want to forget how—as landlord, as programmer, as landlord/programmer helping to unpeople buildings like my very own—I was implicated in the fate of Morty and the bag shop.

  “You know,” I said, picking up a wallet, “I think I need a new one.”

  “Morty’ll give you a nice discount,” said the manager, smiling.

  Morty was not smiling and did not offer me a discount. I put down the wallet. “Maybe next time,” I said.

  “Now I’ll show you the lofts,” said the manager.

  The lofts. They are in the other building, around the corner, above a tiny dress shop. They are wrecks. No one has used them for sixty years. The manager had some scheme where we “sell” a ninety-nine-year lease to a developer who improves the lofts then rents them as condos. “This area’s so bad now, it’s become ripe for residential,” said the manager. “This way, you make less money but you turn the building into something like a bond. The developer deals with the tenants, and you get a fixed payment every month.”

  We climbed the dark back stairs. I stepped over loose floorboards. I looked at cracked windows, crumbling brick walls, falling-down tin ceilings, plugged chimneys. I inhaled dust from the days of my father’s boyhood.

  Was it possible: could this pile of decomposing matter really be turned into money?

  “Sell them,” I said.

  “Sell them,” said my sister.

  “Do it,” I said, imagining that I could go back to the years when my father was still alive and New York was still the middle of the capitalist universe. I convinced myself it was possible to go back to a time when sons of socialists could leverage their way into big deals and real estates, so that, years later, ex-communist programmer consultant daughters, living far away in California, could clip their coupons by electronic transfer. I imagined I really could turn this collection of mortar and bricks into a kind of bond, not a thing but an asset, that I might undo its very realness, convert it into something that will come to me in one of Brian’s dustless, encrypted, anonymous, secure transactions. It would be money freed of ancient violations and struggling tenants, distilled into a pure stream of bits traversing the continent at network speed, just a click away—hardly money at all, but some new measure of value: logical, dematerialized, clean.

  “We’re setting up an offshore porn server,” said Brian.

  We were having dinner together a few weeks after my return from New York. Brian stopped eating and waited to see my reaction.

  “In Mexico,” he added.

  The Mexican waiter serving us tapas put a plate on the table and seemed to freeze there. Finally the waiter let go of the plate and walked off.

  “It’s our way of raising venture capital,” Brian went on. Again he waited for my reaction, grinning, in a kind of dare.

  I waited for my own reaction, and waited some more. Eventually it came tumbling at me from all directions. But, outwardly, as far as Brian was concerned, I had not moved. Finally, to do something, I shrugged. “None of my business,” I said. Shrug.

  My reaction tested, Brian disappeared into the arcana of his cross-border traffic. In his usual dreamlike detail, he talked about anonymous remailers and other network deception tricks I promised to keep secret but which I could not explain if I wanted to. The whole complicated business of international pornography had devolved, in Brian’s thinking, to the level of a mathematical problem, some famously difficult proof, a challenge of the mind. He seemed neither attracted to nor repulsed by the content of the stuff he would be sending around. To him, it was just bits, stuff on the wire—my building turned into a bond or a picture of a woman tied up and raped—none of his business either.

  Meanwhile, tapas getting cold in from of me, Brian spinning dreams of techno-deception, I replayed my reaction to myself. Shrug. I cast off twenty years of feminist debate. Shrug. The battles of my mid-twenties, the groups of women dividing and subdividing over this issue. The slogans, the shouting matches: Sexual freedom! Take back the night! Anti-sex! Pornography hurts women! A decade when I was in collectives large and small, in parties and formations and factions, all of them intending to change the world. Shrug. I let it all go. How could he understand anyway? Why go into all that now? Shrug. All the old politics fell away so easily, like scales off a dead fish. And what did it matter? I had no particular liking for what Brian was doing, but I couldn’t imagine a world I’d want to live in where it should be illegal. The argument could only be moral, some private decision a person must come to alone, and, right then, just come from a round of landlording, I was fresh out of moral superiority.

  “Who’ll do the groundwork for you?” I asked, to change the subject. “Setting up an office, leasing, getting phone lines. I mean, it’s not exactly Switzerland. Do you know Mexico at all?”

  No, Brian had never been to Mexico. He didn’t know that Mexico was one of the last places on earth where a wall mural of Che Guevara is not pop art. But his business partner knew the country and “had the corruption problem all figured out,” according to Brian. Their plan was to set up servers in two cities just across the border. When the police in one city asked for bribes, they’d say that the police in the other would take less. “We’ll play the police in one city off the police in the other,” said Brian. “We’ll say, ‘If you don’t cut this deal, we’ll just pull the plug and do business elsewhere.’”

  Brian picked up an olive, studied it, and ate it the way he ate sushi. “Man! Don’t you just love olives! OH, MAN!” Then he sat back in his chair with a look of immense satisfaction. “That way we deal with corruption by using arbitrage.”

  Arbitrage. That word again. What a useful concept. It seems there’s a way to make money from everything.

  “We’re arbitraging corruption,” he said. The thought amused him thoroughly. Pop: another olive. Then he laughed.

  [4] SOFTWARE AND SUBURBIA

  I’M UPSET, SO I’M TAKING APART MY COMPUTERS. If I were a poet, I’d get drunk and yell at the people I love. As it is, I’m gutting my machines.

  My computers are not broken, but at times like these I like the look of delicate circuit boards open to the naked air. Several hours ago, in a fit of restlessness, I decided to install a pre-release version of a new operating system. Then there seemed to be problems with some of the internal devices. So I took them out, one after the other. Now they lie all around me—cards, wires, memory modules, screws—all in a jumble. To test components, I do what I’m absolutely not supposed to do: run the machines with the covers off. I’m supposed to discharge static electricity before touching anything. But I scuff around on the carpets, grab things with two hands, hold metal to metal. I recognize the nastiness of this mood, reckless and rebellious, as if I could get away with breaking the laws of physics.

  There’s a perverse comfort in broken machinery. Even as things get worse—for a time I can’t even get to the power-on self-test—I look forward to the mean mood I’ll be in while I tinker. I have a tendency to curse broadly when hardware and software won’t work. I take their malfunctioning as a personal slight. “Stupid fucking engineer,” I mutter to the guy who wrote the code. “How could you be so blind?” I think of the stupidity as a male sort of perfectionism, a refusal to plan for a user’s small inattentions or mistakes. If women designed machines, begins my thought, imagining maternal allowances for the electronic equivalents of spilled glasses of milk. But immediately I let the thought go. There’s no denying that I suffer fools as badly as anyone, female though I am. Like any of the boy engineers, I enjoy cursing at the machine. It makes me feel superior: smarter than the hardware, smarter than the software, smarter than everyone who built it.

  The last screw goes in and the system boots up. The drives spin up to speed and fill the room with a sound like sighs. There
, I think, my edginess leaving me. It works … .

  I was not ready to think about Brian. I especially didn’t want to think about the fact that, after the dinner where I learned about his porn server, I went home with him, and we had hours of sex, night and morning. The truly difficult thing to accept was how good it was. I don’t mean only the physical pleasure of bodies and positions, but a certain presence to one another, a certain close attention, which does not happen as often as people imagine it does. So it was all the more confusing to find it there, with this too-young man, who had no real emotional ties to me, nor I to him, and whose values I found disturbing.

  This time, the sense of mechanism and distance was gone, and in its place Brian showed surprising awareness: to the small cues that say yes there and more here and no more. And there was a genuine sweetness in him, a still-not-cynical hope for the communion of sex and a sense of its extraordinariness. We talked. We made love. We talked more and made love again. We wanted to please each other. And we did. And later, as we slept, when he let go of me for a while, he apologized.

  By the next evening, back home in my own life—not certain if or when I would ever see Brian again—I was sorry I had seen that sweetness. It was easier to think of him as a selfish brainy kid. I preferred the idea of him as some fascinating cyborg. But if he was sweet and could be present, then he acquired realness, and his sudden realness released something wholly unexpected in me. It was a scary starved ferocity that came pouring out: for men, for the great dark otherness of sex with them, for the whole night side of me I’d shut down so I could stay for eight years with a very kind woman. And somehow this was mixed up with my attraction to Brian’s very unsweet side, to his “moral-less universe” so defiantly selfish, an attraction that might have been a type of liberty, or a form of self-destruction, or both. I found myself in the car, radio loud enough to cause pain. “You are the perfect drug, the perfect drug, the perfect drug,” went the song, but the “you” was no one in particular; or maybe I was the “you,” seen from a long way off and through a suspect memory.

  I had taken this whole thing far too lightly. I had entered this belief-test on a lark. While I was busy unearthing what Brian thought of the world, I’d run smack into something I believe most unshakably: there is no such thing as a casual relationship.

  Another thing I didn’t want to think about was my building, which did not turn into a bond. As much as I wanted it to become a financial instrument, the building remained solid, material, hopelessly real. Even worse, to cover the brokerage fees and the costs of clearing the violations, we had to take out a loan. In the end, we didn’t receive checks; we sent them.

  Meanwhile, the property manager seemed to have lost interest in our lofts. “I’m into a deal on a smart building,” he told me on the phone. “You know, all wired up for little companies like yours.” I tried explaining to him that I’m not much of a company, but he was in full blush of first technophilia: “T1s and ISDNs in every room, and what-do-they-call-it? Etherset—”

  “Ethernet.”

  “That’s right, Ethernet. In every room. Plugs—”

  “Jacks.”

  “What about your father, dear?”

  “No. I didn’t say ‘Jack.’ I said ‘jacks.’ They’re not called ‘plugs’ they’re called ‘jacks.’”

  “Whatever. We got it. This plug and that jack. Too bad your building isn’t … .”

  “It isn’t a smart building.”

  “No. It isn’t. It just isn’t—”

  “—not suitable for high-tech start-ups.”

  “No, it’s not. But it is a—”

  “—landmark—”

  “—a headache! Why did your father—”

  “Why did my father buy a landmark? Oh, he was proud to own a landmark. He loved New York. He was thrilled to own a piece of it, and a landmark! A building with a plaque! He sent me a picture book—”

  “He sent me the same one, with the picture—”

  “Yeah. Of the building—”

  “—which you now cannot touch the outside of because it’s a—”

  “—landmark.”

  “A landmark! Headaches!”

  Months later, the property manager’s “smart building” wasn’t nearly leased. It seems there aren’t enough “little companies” like mine to fill up all the emptiness of Wall Street. Money may move at the speed of electrons, but properties and cities, streets and buildings, change on the scale of human generations. My family will have to sit tight; the lofts will remain dust.

  Even Wall Street wants to leave Wall Street now. Some months after I got back from New York, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal: the New York Stock Exchange needs more space for its computer equipment and is talking about moving out of the city. More empty storefronts loom on Wall Street, on the actual Wall Street, the place that once anchored a city. What will they call it, I wondered, after they move: www.wallstreet.com?

  But why shouldn’t the Exchange move away? Why shouldn’t the market makers live like the vice presidents, telecommuting from nice homes in Connecticut? The NASDAQ is just a big computer system, so why not the NYSE? The building at Wall and Broad, just around the corner from us, might perhaps be turned into a tourist attraction. Maybe some actual traders could stand on the floor in traders’ shirts and shout into microphones for voice-recognition transmission into the system. Why not? Cities seem to have turned into franchised amusement parks. Megastores on Times Square, the very same Virgin and Gap and Disney stores on Union Square in San Francisco, on the Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona, along the Champs-Élysées. The same Levis and Mickey Mouses and hamburguesas. So why not an NYSE megastore?

  Brian is right about money: there’s no need for us to hold it anymore. Bits on wires, units of something transferred between electronic accounts—that is the true nature of money. There’s no longer a need for marble palaces and pillared properties. Morty and his son and their bag shop should just set themselves up on the Internet.

  Last week I went to an old downtown branch of my bank. Although this branch is the closest one to where I live, it’s not my branch. As one of the tellers explained, the concept of an account having a “home branch” is obsolete. The portion of the account number that used to be coded as the home branch is now just an account category. “You can be anywhere and bank anywhere!” the teller exclaimed.

  Like my father, I can’t resist the lure of city centers. He had his office steps from Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, and bought his first building around the corner from Wall Street; and, like him, I like the sense of being in the middle of human activity, the idea that everything passes by and anything might happen to you there. I take the trouble to bypass the drive-up ATMs elsewhere, I walk through actual streets with real humans walking on them, all to get to my downtown palace of money. Its entrance is a pillared rotunda. Granite steps shadow the curve of the rotunda. Inside heavy brass doors is a plantation of marble pillars. The ceiling looks like gold. To open their stations, the tellers push back little gates of glass edged in bronze. A small bronze lamp circles each station in a private pool of light. We wait in an aisle of velvet ropes. Then, in a dim echoey hush, we exchange slips of paper, our money and its representations, with all the solemnity of a Eucharist.

  After I finish my business, I linger for a while. There is a bench made of veined white marble. Carvings cover every surface with swirls and curlicues. Below the armrests are lions’ heads, growling. On the seat and back are cushions of fine brown leather. I sit down; rub my hand along the smooth, cool arm. I think about a time when children sat on this bench while mothers waited for hallowed transactions in the velvet line. I remember going to the bank with my own mother: the sound of her high heels on marble, the suggestive dark of the little room where she retrieved jewelry from her safe-deposit box. I recall the scent of her perfume, White Shoulders, as it rose, heated, in the closeness of the little room, in the excitements of jewels and marble and money.

  The wo
rld has no use for all this anymore, I think. Women don’t wear perfume just to go to the bank, and money doesn’t live in vaults with twirling handles like ships’ helms. Money lives in Brian’s universe of e-cash, as everyone at my bank knows, as they rush past me toward a line of ATMs at the far end of the vast room, which look bizarrely metallic and sleek in this marble cathedral of cash.

  Which bank is “real”: the one of marble or the one with silvery sleek technology? Neither, as Brian understood. Both are constructions designed to reassure us. You can trust us. Give us your money. Once we were impressed by buildings; now we are impressed by virtual on-line spaces, that’s all.

  Perhaps in the new on-line banks, we will each be able to create our individual idea of money, our personal private virtual bank-space where we can mix whatever we wish into the excitement of money. It can be a world like my first night with Brian: all externalized masturbation fantasy. Yours can look like a white-cube art gallery, yours a secure spare vision of double-doored Eurobanks, mine a robber baron’s idea of opulence. In my bank fantasy, I walk through streets crowded with pedestrians: beautifully dressed Parisian women with their thin, thin legs, their lovely soft boots fastened at the ankle; gentlemen of sixty from Barcelona, in long, pencil-slim cashmere coats, cigarettes in gloved hands; handsome Italian men of twenty-five, camel-hair coats draped on shoulders and flying behind them like capes. At the entrance to the bank, up the granite steps below the rotunda, will be two beggars, two perfectly typecast homeless people (click here to give them money), just a small dose of discomfort, so that I sigh with relief as I push open the heavy bronze door and step into the vast dim hush of my money.