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 monogamistlong 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.