(These are some notes and quotes on Ellen Ullman’s memoir Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents )
Annotations
- About the programming process and how the experience descends from the portrait of concise plans and propositions to chaos managing, she writes:
“The project begins in the programmer’s mind with the beauty of a crystal. The knowledge I am to represent in code seems lovely in its structuredness. For a time, the world is a calm, mathematical place. […] Yes, I understand. Yes, it can be done. Yes, how straightforward. Oh yes. I see. […] Then something happens. The irregularities of human thinking start to emerge. Now begins a process of frustration.”
- Programming is a terribly immersive activity, that swallows you away from any clear goal or intention that doesn’t reside in the machine. “The goal becomes the creation of the system itself.”
- She approaches the topic of life as a performance attached more to its context than to its performer (you are and do what you think you are supposed to, not what you deeply intend) when discussing revolutionary positions, pg 29.
- “He has the relentless, cheerful smoothness of the salesman, which makes me distrust him implicitly.” - This especifically reminds me, deeply, of some real estate agent Alfonso and I had to interact with to rent our flat in Madrid. I felt about to be scammed since the moment he looked at me. Trust was an antinatural exercise.
- “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 digitized compendium, some electronic library of Alexandria — if only they could figure out how to use it. But they just sit and click, and look disconcertedly at the junk that comes back at them.” - Written before 1997, this is just uncannily appropiate to describe the contemporary Internet and how we all dwell in it.
- “We think we are creating the system, but the system is also creating us.” - Understanding and considering this could be a part of software design. Software plays the role of an extension of our psyche, of ourselves. Excelent software allows us some excellence, treating it as a deliverable piece of trash makes us trashy.
- “We function well in a sea of unknowns. Our experience has only prepared us to deal with confusion. A programmer who denies this is probably lying or densely unaware of himself.”, “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.” - How much of this is impostor syndrome and how much reality? How different are other fields really? I also feel any new programming task as something foreign, for which I am not ready, basically undoable from my position. But at the same time consider myself able to get into anything and everything, and of fixing and building whatever that can be done. I cannot figure out any straight explanation for such senseless duality, nor feel I adopt the same position for anything else in life.
- “He just wasn’t very good at making contact, which you really can’t hold against someone, much as you’d like too.” - What can be hold against people? Intentions, skills? Where do merit and responsibility start and finish?
- I love how everything Ellen discusses ends up falling together. The style is organized, properly structured, somehow correct. Is this what happens when a programmer can write?
Review
If you found out about Ellen Ullman after reading some of her shorter pieces online, this will live up to your expectations. The book is a memoir about her life as a software contractor in the dot-com bubble era. More specifically, about her relationship with code, the culture that was being solidified around it and its contextualized creation process. Her ramblings about programming and the experiences and feelings you get from it are just so engaging, and the personas she describes across the stories are surprisingly similar to what you would find nowadays. In fact, her full portrait of “computer culture” felt uncannily atemporal when I realized the book was written before I was born.
I also love the openness and sincerity with which she discusses most topics, as the moral inconsistencies she finds on herself and her job. She feels eloquent but close and real, and that’s refreshing in this world. Can’t wait to read everything else from her.