Close to the Machine_Technophilia and Its Discontents Read online

  We had been discussing the local produce markets. “Keystrokes?” I asked.

  “You know, on the computer. The keys. Can you keep a record of every key someone enters?”

  I was so surprised by this question that I believe we went through a quarter-circle revolution before I answered. “Well, yes. You could. Yes, there are ways to do that.”

  “What would it cost us to do it?”

  “To keep keystrokes? I don’t know offhand. But why? Why would you want to do that?”

  William Banner dug into his ice cream, which had just been put down before him. “Well, take Mary. I’d like to know everything that Mary does in a day.”

  Mary was the receptionist and general office manager. She was William Banner’s oldest employee, twenty-six years. As I recalled, Mary knew every one of the company’s clients by name. For the first several years of her employment, when Mr. Banner’s kids were small, she used to pick them up from school, take them home, and pour them milk.

  “But why do you want to keep on eye on Mary? She’s doing very well with the system. I mean, is there a problem?”

  “Oh, no. No problem,” said William Banner, “but, you know … . Well, I’m just curious. All those years she’s been out there running things, and now I can find out exactly what she does.”

  “So you want to know about Mary just because you can?” I asked.

  William Banner swirled his ice cream around like a kid, then licked a big wad off his spoon. “Hmm. That’s it, I suppose. The way I look at it, I’ve just spent all this money on a system, and now I get to use it the way I’d like to.”

  I watched William Banner finish his dessert and coffee, and a certain dizziness came over me, as if we were suddenly revolving too quickly. What if he found out that Mary made mistakes, as she surely did? What would he do if he didn’t like the way she did the invoices before the checks, the account reconciliations before the journal entries? Would he intervene minutely in her working day? Would he risk upsetting twenty-six years of loyal service? Would he wind up firing her?

  “I don’t think keystroke monitoring is a good idea, Mr. Banner,” I said.

  “Eh?”

  “Keystroke monitoring. It’s a bad idea. The system is a tool to help people do their work, not a watchdog. If people feel they are being watched, they put their creative energies into hiding things.”

  “Oh, well, that’s possible. But when I saw the system running, I thought to myself, ‘I bet this thing can tell me what everyone is up to all day.’”

  The system was installed, it ran, and it spoke to him: you can know every little thing you always wanted to know. You can keep an eye on the woman you trusted to pick up your kids from kindergarten. You can count every keystroke, and you want to count them simply because it’s possible. You own the system, it’s your data, you have power over it; and, once the system gives you this power, you suddenly can’t help yourself from wanting more.

  “Your system installation has gone extremely well, Mr. Banner. I can’t recommend too strongly against this idea of keystroke monitoring.”

  “Well, I could always hire a local kid to do it.”

  “Well, I suppose you could.”

  Many years and clients later, this greed for more data, and more again, had become a commonplace. It had become institutionalized as a good feature of computer systems: you can link them up, you can cross-check, you can find out all sorts of things you didn’t set out to know. “I bet this thing can tell me what everyone is up to all day,” said the insurance agent whose employee of twenty-six years knew all his customers by name. “The people who own this system have a right to good data!” said the woman who had set out to do a favor for sick people.

  I’d like to think that computers are neutral, a tool like any other, a hammer that can build a house or smash a skull. But there is something in the system itself, in the formal logic of programs and data, that recreates the world in its own image. Like the rock-and-roll culture, it forms an irresistible horizontal country that obliterates the long, slow, old cultures of place and custom, law and social life. We think we are creating the system for our own purposes. We believe we are making it in our own image. We call the microprocessor the “brain”; we say the machine has “memory.” But the computer is not really like us. It is a projection of a very slim part of ourselves: that portion devoted to logic, order, rule, and clarity. It is as if we took the game of chess and declared it the highest order of human existence.

  We place this small projection of ourselves all around us, and we make ourselves reliant on it. To keep information, buy gas, save money, write a letter—we can’t live without it any longer. The only problem is this: the more we surround ourselves with a narrowed notion of existence, the more narrow existence becomes. We conform to the range of motion the system allows. We must be more orderly, more logical. Answer the question, Yes or No, OK or Cancel.

  Our accommodations begin simply, with small workarounds, just to avoid the bugs: “We just don’t put in those dates!” said the very sensible users of the Jerry system. Then, slowly, we incorporate the whole notion of systems: we’ll link registration data to surveillance, to contract compliance, thought the director. Finally, we arrive at tautology: the data prove the need for more data! We think we are creating the system, but the system is also creating us. We build the system, we live in its midst, and we are changed.

  I had been on the AIDS project for a year and a half; it was time to move on. “I don’t think I’m long for this job,” I told the director.

  “I understand,” she said, relieved, I think, to see me go.

  I am saved by a phone call. Two consultants I’ve worked with before have recommended me for a contract. Would I like to talk about designing a networking management tool, asks the caller.

  It’s a start-up company that has been taken over by its venture capitalists—“VCs,” as they’re known. When many millions have been invested in a company, and there is still no prospect of taking it public—and the VCs believe they have a product worth saving—they send in the salvage squad. This time the salvage squad is a man and woman my former colleagues once worked for. The woman is an heir to the fortune of a large paper company—she turns trees into Chanel suits, is how my consultant friend put it. The man is her usual right-hand-man, a guy who rolls up his sleeves and learns how to log on to the system. Once he can log on and look around at the software, he fires the company’s executives and managers, then fills in until he can hire new executives and managers. In the interregnum come the consultants—me and people like me.

  The office has the disheveled, temporary-encampment look of any start-up recaptured by the VCs. Old files are stacked in cartons along the walls. A Ping-Pong table has been set up in the empty space where the partitioned cubes of fired employees have been taken down. The corner offices are empty. In the kitchen are stacks of Diet Pepsi, mounds of bagels, moguls of cream cheese—all the signs that the programmers who have not been fired rarely leave the place.

  My interview takes barely half an hour. I’m hired, and immediately I am released from the indignity of end-user-dom. This time, on this contract, I will be working only with programmers and networking people. As to what flows over the networks—it’s no longer any of my concern. Let them send information about sick people or nudie shots. Shrug. None of my business. I will be paid some egregiously large sum of money plus fully vested stock options to give advice on the way the program should look and operate. As I sign the nondisclosure agreement, I remember the lie I told my acquaintance who has her own venture-financed company, the lie I let her believe. Start-up company. Networks. Non-D. Watch out what you lie about: your lie may come true.

  10:30 AM: programmer commute hour on the freeway. South toward Silicon Valley, the remnants of the fog are just lifting off the bay, and the sky breaks through, a washed-blue-jean blue. Four sparsely filled lanes, stock-option sports cars like mine pushing 80, delivery vans riding at the limit—a freeway the
way God meant it to be. The car in front of me tailgates everyone out of the way, then zooms off. The carpool lane, defunct at this hour, has turned back into the fast lane, and its painted diamonds stretch out ahead for miles.

  “Can you edit this field?”

  “No.”

  “Then it should be a—”

  “Oh, yeah. A different control—”

  “A label.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And what about finding devices for connections?”

  “Well, that’s a binary operation—”

  “You’re right. These other operations here are all—”

  “Unary.”

  “Right. Unary operations. So should we—”

  “—represent them with the same interface?”

  “Or is there something distinct about—”

  “—about binary operations.”

  “Yeah, so we should define some other—”

  “—some other interface paradigm.”

  Nine hours with the programmers go by and I have no sensation of time passing. When I glance at the window, I’m surprised to see that the light is oblique and the sky’s blue has deepened. My first day on the new contract has come and gone, and it’s as if I’ve always worked there, so quickly do the programmers and I find our common language. Now I drive north back to the city, and again I’ve missed the traffic. My little car hums along at an effortless 75. I play a Vivaldi chorus—loud—on the CD. Just as I round the edge of the bay, the last lines of fog are catching the edge of the sunset, writing a furious red calligraphy across the sky. The city glows in the last light, the sky darkens and—Magnificat!—the red strokes blaze above the skyline.

  [5] NEW, OLD, AND MIDDLE AGE

  IT HAD TO HAPPEN TO ME SOMETIME: SOONER OR later I would have to lose sight of the cutting edge. That moment every technical person fears—the fall into knowledge exhaustion, obsolescence, techno-fuddy-dud-dyism—there was no reason to think I could escape it forever. Still, I hadn’t expected it so soon. And not there: not at the AIDS project, where I had fancied myself the very deliverer of high technology to the masses.

  It happened in the way of all true-life humiliations: when you think you’re better than the people around you. I had decided to leave the project; I agreed to help find another consultant, train another team. There I was, finding my own replacement. I called a woman I thought was capable, experienced—and my junior. I thought I was doing her a favor; I thought she should be grateful.

  She arrived with an entourage of eight, a group she had described on the telephone as “Internet heavy-hitters from Palo Alto.” They were all in their early thirties. The men had excellent briefcases, wore beautiful suits, and each breast pocket bulged ever so slightly with what was later revealed to be a tiny, exquisite cellular phone. One young man was so blonde, so pale-eyed, so perfectly white, he seemed to have stepped out of a propaganda film for National Socialism. Next to him was a woman with blond frosted hair, chunky real-gold bracelets, red nails, and a short skirt, whom I took for a marketing type; she turned out to be in charge of “physical network configuration.” This group strutted in with all the fresh-faced drive of technocapitalism, took their seats beneath the AIDS prevention posters (“Warriors wear shields with men and women!” “I take this condom everywhere I bring my penis!”), and began their sales presentation.

  They were pushing an intranet. This is a system using all the tools of the Internet—Web browser, net server—but on a private network. It is all the rage, it is cool, it is what everyone is talking about. It is the future and, as the woman leading the group made clear, what I have been doing is the past. “An old-style enterprise system” is what she called Jerry as I had built it, “a classic.”

  My client was immediately awed by their wealth, stunned silent by their self-assurance. The last interviewee had been a nervous man in an ill-fitting suit, shirt washed but not quite ironed, collar crumpled over shiny polyester tie. His entire programming career had been spent in the nonprofit sector, doing desktop programming. For him, the AIDS project would have been a large technical step up. He was eager and attentive and respectful. Now here came these new visitors, with their “physical network configuration” specialist, their security expert, their application designer, and their “technology paradigm.” And they came with an attitude—the AIDS project would be lucky to have them.

  It was not only their youth and self-assurance that bothered me, not simply their high-IQ arrogance (at one point, to our disbelieving hilarity, they proposed fingerprinting AIDS clients “to help with the ID problem” 14). It wasn’t just their unbelievable condescension (“For your edification, ma’am,” said one slouch-suited young man by way of beginning an answer to one of my questions). No, all this was common enough. I’d seen it before, everywhere, and I’d see it again in the next software engineer I’d meet. What bothered me was just that: the ordinariness of it. From the hostile scowl of my own programmer to the hard-driving egos of these “Internet heavy-hitters”: normal as pie. There they were on the cutting edge of our profession, and their arrogance was as natural as breathing. And in those slow moments while their vision of future Jerry was sketched across the whiteboards—intranet, Internet, cool, hip, and happening—I knew I had utterly and completely lost that arrogance in myself.

  I missed it. Suddenly and inexplicably, I wanted my arrogance back. I wanted to go back to the time when I thought that, if I tinkered a bit, I could make anything work. That I could learn anything, in no time, and be good at it. The arrogance is a job requirement. It is the confidence-builder that lets you keep walking toward the thin cutting edge. It’s what lets you forget that your knowledge will be old in a year, you’ve never seen this new technology before, you have only a dim understanding of what you’re doing, but—hey, this is fun—and who cares since you’ll figure it all out somehow.

  But the voice that came out of me was not having fun.

  “These intranet tools aren’t proven,” I found myself saying. “They’re all release 1.0—if that. Most are in beta test. And how long have you been doing this? What—under a year? Exactly how many intranets have you implemented successfully?”

  My objections were real. The whole idea wasn’t a year old. The tools weren’t proven. New versions of everything were being released almost as we spoke. And these heavy-hitters had maybe done one complete intranet job before this—maybe. Probably they were getting by with many late nights spent fiddling with code. But in the past none of this would have bothered me. I would have seen it as part of the usual engineering trade-offs, get something, give up something else. And the lure of the new would have been irresistible: the next cover to take off, the next black box to open.

  But now, no. I didn’t want to take off any covers. I didn’t want to confront any more unknowns. I simply felt exhausted. I didn’t want to learn the intranet, I wanted it to be a bad idea, and I wanted it all just to go away.

  “And what about network traffic?” I asked. “Won’t this generate a lot of network traffic? Aren’t you optimizing for the wrong resource? I mean, memory and disk on the desktop are cheap, but the network bandwidth is still scarce and expensive.”

  More good objections, more justifications for exhaustion.

  “And intranets are good when the content changes frequently—catalogs, news, that kind of stuff. This is a stable application. The dataset won’t change but once a year.”

  Oh, Ellen, I was thinking, What a great fake you are. I was thinking this because, even as I was raising such excellent issues, I knew it was all beside the point. What I was really thinking was: I have never written an intranet program in my life, I have never hacked on one, I have never even seen one. What I was really feeling was panic.

  I’d seen other old programmers act like this, get obstructionist and hostile in the face of their new-found obsolescence, and there I was, practically growing an old guy’s gut on the spot. But the role had a certain momentum, and once I’d stepped on the path
of the old programmer, there seemed to be no way back. “And what happens after you leave?” I asked. “There just aren’t that many intranet experts out there. And they’re expensive. Do you really think this technology is appropriate for this client?”

  “Well,” answered the woman I’d invited, the one I’d thought of as my junior, the one I was doing a favor, “you know, there are the usual engineering trade-offs.”

  Engineering trade-offs. Right answer. Just what I would have said once.

  “And, like it or not, this is what will be happening in the future,” she said. “This is where all the new tools and languages are headed.”

  The future. Right again. The new: irresistible, like it or not.

  But I didn’t like it. I was parting ways with it. And right at that moment, I had a glimpse of the great, elusive cutting edge of technology. I was surprised to see that it looked like a giant cosmic Frisbee. It was yellow, rotating at a great rate, and was slicing off into the universe, away from me.

  “What do you think?” asked my client after the presentation.

  We sat, exhausted, beneath the AIDS posters. What did I think? What did it matter if I was staring down the road of my own obsolescence. I was leaving anyway. “Hire them,” I said. “If you can afford them, hire them.”

  I learned to program a computer in 1971; my first programming job came in 1978. Since then, I have taught myself six higher-level programming languages, three assemblers, two data-retrieval languages, eight job-processing languages, seventeen scripting languages, ten types of macros, two object-definition languages, sixty-eight programming-library interfaces, five varieties of networks, and eight operating environments—fifteen, if you cross-multiply the distinct combinations of operating systems and networks. I don’t think this makes me particularly unusual. Given the rate of change in computing, anyone who’s been around for a while could probably make a list like this.