Notes for Ellen Ullman Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents
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[0]
Space Is Numeric
(15)
Some part of me mourns, but I know there is no other way: human needs
must cross the line into code. They must pass through this
semipermeable membrane where urgency, fear, and hope are filtered
out, and only reason travels across. There is no other way. Real,
death-inducing viruses do not travel here. Actual human confusions
cannot live here. Everything we want accomplished, everything the
system is to provide, must be denatured in its crossing to the
machine, or else the system will die.
[1]
Transactions
(29)
Maybe it's only revolution we're addicted to. Maybe the form never
matters – socialism, rock and roll, drugs, market capitalism,
electronic commerce – who cares, as long as it's the edgy thing
that's happening in one's own time.
(29) I'm inclined to think I
always believed in the machine. For what was Marx's “dialectic”
of history in all its inevitability but a mechanism surely rolling
toward the future? What were his “stages” of capitalism but the
algorithm of a program that no one could ever quite get to
run?
(29-30) And who was Karl Marx but the original technophile?
Wasn't he the great materialist – the man who believed that our
thoughts are determined by our machinery?
[2] Sushi
Animal responses and lgorithmic lovemaking.
(39-40)
For Brian was giving me a gesture so bizarre, so inappropriate, that
to this day I can hardly believe what I saw. His head was thrown
back, his eyes were half closed. He sniffed at the air – once,
twice, three times. Then he actually snorted. Though I'm sure I'd
never seen anything like it in the whole of my life, I only needed to
be a primate to understand its meaning: Brian wanted to fuck me.
(49)
His lovemaking was tantric, algorithmic. I once thought that love
could not be programmed, but now I wondered. This sex was formulaic,
had steps and positions and durations, all tried and perfected, like
a martial arts kata or a well-debugged program. My own role in it was
like a user-exit subroutine, an odd branch where anything might
happen but from which we must return, tracing back to the mainline
procedure.
(50-51) The new breed of entrepreneur: Net landlord.
Content is worthless, art is just an excuse to get someone to click;
meanwhile, artists watch their work circumnavigate the globe while
“value arbitrageurs,” the Brians of the world, pick off a
fractional cent at every click, making a fortune.
[3] Real Estate
[4]
Software and Suburbia
(69)
Money may move at the speed of electrons, but properties and cities,
streets and buildings, change on the scale of human generations.
(72)
What bank is “real”: the one or 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.
(72-73) 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.
(76-77)
When I watch the users try the Internet, it slowly becomes clear to
me that the Net represents the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer.
The users seem to believe that they are connected to some vast
treasure trove – all the knowledge of our times, an endless
digitalized compendium, some electronic library of Alexandria – if
only they could figure out how to search it properly.
(77-78) What
is it about the Internet, with its pretty graphics and simple clicks,
that makes users feel so inundated; and about the spreadsheet – so
complicated a tool – that makes them so bold? The received wisdom
about user-friendliness is challenged here. Human beings, I think, do
not like to be condescended to.
Human spreadsheet relationship is one of informing.
(78) In the relationship between human and computer that underlies the spreadsheet, the human is the repository of knowledge, the smart agent, the active party. . . . It is the end user who creates information, who gives form to data, who informs the spreadsheet.
She notes the comparison of Internet to the library, with the absence of librarian role in searching.
(78) The relationship between person and machine is completely
reversed on the Internet. The Net is the knowledge repository, and
the user can only search it.
(80) I begin to wonder if there isn't
something in computer systems that is like a suburban development.
Both take places – real, particular places – and turn them into
anyplace.
(82) Something similar happened with the AIDS project.
Despite the idealism of the programmers, the good intentions of my
client's staff, the hard work of the users, what we created in the
end was not the “system of care” we set out to build. In the end,
what we created was only a system.
Compare to von Neumann analysis of the differences between natural and artificial automata.
(84) I tried to warn her that the machine cannot keep rounded edges;
that its dumb, declarative nature could not comprehend the small,
chaotic accommodations to reality which kept human systems
running.
(89) 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.
[5] New, Old, and Middle Age
Dedicated serial monogamist; hard on emotions, good profile for technology.
(101) This process of remembering technologies is a little like trying to remember all your lovers: you have to root around in the past and wonder. Let's see. Have I missed anybody? In some ways, my personal life has made me uniquely suited to the technical life. I'm a dedicated serial monogamist – long periods of intense engagement punctuated by times of great restlessness and searching. As hard as this may be on the emotions, it is a good profile for technology.
State of perpetual learning by maintaining posture of ignorant humility.
(101)
I've managed to stay in a perpetual state of learning only by
maintaining what I think of as a posture of ignorant humility.
(107)
So I never did hear the older one explain how you get used to it
after a while, how it becomes normal to discard your certainty and
hunker down into the newest thing, how it is no fun but there is a
certain perverse satisfaction in reorienting your brain at a right
angle to its previous position. And there, lost, you go ahead anyway.
And there, somehow, you make it run.
(110) The corollary of
constant change is ignorance. This is not often talked about: we
computer experts barely know what we're doing.
(110) Over the
years, the horrifying knowledge of ignorant expertise became normal,
a kind of background level of anxiety that only occasionally
blossomed into outright fear.
Value of historical computing experience could be for philosophizing, which is what she is doing with this book.
(115) 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.
Homey approach to software emphasizes pervasive social character (Mackenzie).
(116)
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.
(117) 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.
At least for custom, special purpose software like automation systems, nobody understands an old one; is it not the same for discourse systems, at least in the humanities?
Imagine early groups of scribes working on the massive collection of Platonic works as such cranky old software systems.
(117) 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.
[6] Virtuality
(124-125)
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. . . . My most intense relationship
became the one with my car.
(125) I was all unmoored again. My
company and my life had devolved to their inevitable essence: me and
my machines.
(125) For I have a virtual company.
(126) 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.
Virtual as living in the not-quite-here-ness of the machine and its software; compare to other ontological formulations.
(126-127)
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.
(127) 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.
(129) The skill-set changes before the person
possibly can, so it's always simpler just to change the person. Take
out a component, put in a zippier one. The postmodern company as PC –
a shell, a plastic cabinet. Let the people come and go; plug them in,
then pull them out.
(131) Beyond a certain tone of voice, the
facade of constructed reality is entirely electronic – and
therefore revirtualized.
(131) And, once your own electronic
existence is established, you start to notice how many of their
entities around you are similarly electronic and therefore as suspect
in their reality as you are. Spotting other home and small businesses
becomes so easy it's no sport. But what about the larger business
world? What is Charles Schwab but a giant computer connected to a
telephone?
(136) My father was presented to us as a model human
being, and he was always working. But what I am surprised to learn is
this: how much he wanted the isolation of work, and how much I
don't.
(137) What drifts back at me is the horrible boredom of
death, which no one ever talks about, but which exists all the same:
the hours spent sitting on a hard plastic chair in a tiny hospital
room while the television, ignored by the dying, plays on for those
attending. For a moment, the boredom of death and the dullness of
work intersect. Am I earning a living, I wonder, or just trying to
fill a very large, self-made solitude.
(141) No one who goes
through a layoff is ever the same again. Some faith is gone, some
comfort level is lost. You learn how delicate your place in the world
is.
Meeting in the online village easy connection to recent Turkle.
(145) 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?
(145) On line, I suppose. As
virtualized creatures swimming along in private pools of time.
(146)
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.
[7] Money
(173)
In the middle of the demo, I realized how fortunate we were to be
engineers. How lucky for us to be people who built things and took
our satisfaction from humming machines and running programs.
[8] The Passionate Engineer
Lost track of number of lovers.
(178-179) I could
no longer count the number of lovers I'd had. I could only remember
the time when, with great surprise, I'd realized that the number of
men and women had become about equal. After that, I'd let go of the
ordinals, the list of names, in sequence, and what remained was a
flickering serial memory of making love, and the constant amazement
at how different it was with every single person.
(180) But Brian,
I knew, started out with an idea: this will go only so fare and no
farther. We started out on a road that already had its dead end. . .
. Why bother with all the difficulty of another person if it could
not go somewhere unexpected?
[9] Driving
Driving a fast car to unknown destination where anything can happen.
(189) I race past the trucks, the hills shine deep green in the clear light, and, for the moment, I'm just where I'm supposed to be: driving a fast car to a place I don't know yet, where anything can happen.
Ullman, Ellen. Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents : a Memoir. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997. Print.