Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents

Introduction

I no longer remember where I first encountered Close to the Machine, or what intuitive soul might have handed it to me, sensing my need for a buoy. It was sometime in early 2013, and I had just started working in the tech industry. So much about the workplace culture was inaccessible to me, a low-level employee with no technical background, and Ellen Ullman’s memoir of her time as a software engineer in Silicon Valley during the first dot-com boom felt like a map, or a legend. I insisted that my employer, a small startup, create a book club, and that the first selection be Close to the Machine. It seemed critical, urgent, that everyone read it. The only person who came to the meeting was an iOS engineer. It’s like poetry, he said.

I understood that for some of the software engineers I knew, programming had depth and meaning beyond its immediate applications, even beyond its remunerative capacity; it is the rare twentysomething who is genuinely stoked to contribute to business-to-business software. Something else was afoot. Ullman’s writing illuminated the underlying obsessiveness and curiosity that—along with the prospect of staggering, life-changing wealth—drew many of my colleagues to their work.

Engineers tend to love this book. If they don’t love it, they tend to argue about it, which for some of their ilk is a kind of affection. Sometimes the argument is over Ullman’s inclusion of a personal narrative in a book that is ostensibly about coding, in which case it’s more of a literary misunderstanding, or just a familiar flavor of misogyny, also endemic. I can’t claim to understand entirely why it hits such a nerve, though I suspect it has something to do with the rare experience, and pleasure, of having one’s own thoughts articulated with precision and elegance. Software engineers in Silicon Valley have no trouble being taken seriously, but it’s much less common for them to see their work described like this:

The world as humans understand it and the world as it must be explained to computers come together in the programmer in a strange state of disjunction.

The project begins in the programmer’s mind with the beauty of a crystal. I remember the feel of a system at the early stages of programming, when the knowledge I am to represent in code seems lovely in its structuredness. For a time, the world is a calm, mathematical place. Human and machine seem attuned to a cut-diamond-like state of grace. Once in my life I tried methamphetamine: that speed high is the only state that approximates the feel of a project at its inception. Yes, I understand. Yes, it can be done. Yes, how straightforward. Oh yes. I see.

As for how Ullman seems to feel about programmers—it’s complicated. Close to the Machine began as an essay, written in 1994 and published the following year in a collection titled Resisting the Virtual Life. That essay, Out of Time: Reflections on the Programming Life, took a cautionary, ambivalent position. Ullman wasn’t warning against the personal computer revolution, exactly, so much as issuing an alarm about the dissemination of the engineer’s assumptions and presumptions, in which all services would be available on demand, and all interactions reduced to exchanges between end users and computers. We don’t need to involve anyone else in the satisfactions of our needs, she wrote. We don’t even have to talk. We get our services when we want them, free from the obligations of regularly scheduled time. We can all live closer to the machine. The logic of computer systems, she concluded, reproduces and reenacts life as engineers know it: alone, out-of-time, disdainful of anyone far from the machine.

The memoir continues this inquiry, elaborating on the programming life—or, at least, Ullman’s programming life—along with the personal and social ramifications of internalizing the incentives and internal logic of the software industry. Programmers, in her depiction, operate at a remove. They are arrogant; their passions can outrun them. We computer experts barely know what we’re doing, she writes. We’re good at fussing and figuring out. 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 else is densely unaware of himself. Whether or not these depictions are flattering depends on your perspective.

Computers are a refuge and a source of tremendous dissatisfaction for Ullman. She seems to perceive that the engineers of the new economy, for all their hubris and idealism, may shoulder a certain weight. The book has a core understanding of loneliness, and the way obsession—with work generally, and with programming in particular—can often pull a person out of society. Yes, he was weird, she writes of a young libertarian cypherpunk with whom she becomes lightly romantically entangled. Yes, he barely belonged to this world. But a part of him knew all too well that he was odd, and he suffered from it. This is balanced by scenes of her quiet camaraderie with fellow engineers—the natural rhythms of sustained collective effort, and the unparalleled feeling of getting one’s own creation off the ground. Thrilling things happen in stale-aired rooms littered with takeout packaging. Technical collaboration becomes a kind of haven.

There are parts of Close to the Machine that are unapologetically, joyfully niche. There are asides on operating systems and user interfaces. For the nostalgists, there are mentions of modems, IBM mainframes, and the novelty of intranet programs. There is talk of UNIX. There are riffs on the techno-utopian fantasy of traceless, borderless, unregulated digital currencies; what else is new. There are simply so many pleasurable, tangible details about hardware, software, and systems engineering that a person could be forgiven for thinking this was a book about computers.

When Close to the Machine was reissued in 2012, Jaron Lanier, the technologist and futurist, praised Ullman as a computer nerd who could write. This was a compliment, but it seems to me an inversion. Ullman is a writer who, by circumstance and for largely practical reasons, became a computer nerd. She wrote from and against the material of her own life, as many writers do. The memoir is an unusual and important snapshot of a critical era and geography, but the book’s preoccupations—connection, alienation, modernity, obsession—are almost more novelistic than journalistic or ethnographic.

Another preoccupation is obsolescence: technological obsolescence, but also sexual, professional, and cultural obsolescence. Ullman wrote and published Close to the Machine in her mid-forties, and there is a depth to her perspective that feels hard-won. This is not just because her professional milieu was one that tended to fetishize newness and youth, or because she was a woman working in a male-dominated industry. The memoir covers a brief window of time during which Ullman was navigating seismic changes in her personal life, including the death of her father and the end of a long-term relationship. For all her clarity, confidence, and occasional swagger, the narrator of this book is a little unmoored, adrift, and uncertain. Working from home one evening, the television on for company, Ullman slips into a memory of her father, and his hospitalization and death. She reflects on the process of tending to the dying—how caretaking, like dying itself, is often tedious and slow. For a moment, the boredom of death and the dullness of work intersect, she writes. Am I earning a living, I wonder, or just trying to fill a very large, self-made solitude?

Here, middle age is depicted as a slow-motion transition, but it materializes abruptly in the professional realm. It had to happen to me sometime: sooner or later I would have to lose sight of the cutting edge, Ullman writes. That moment every technical person fears—the fall into knowledge exhaustion, obsolescence, techno-fuddy-duddyism—there was no reason to think I could escape it forever. Still, I hadn’t expected it so soon. The realization that she has lost track of the cutting edge comes during a meeting with a group of young consultants, whose arrogance was as natural as breathing. Watching them pitch an intranet to her client, she is startled to notice that her own arrogance—a job requirement—has been lost. She misses it; she wants it back. I had a glimpse of the great, elusive cutting edge of technology, she writes. 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. She sees herself being transferred from the cutting edge of computing to the margins; from the cusp of the future to the past.

Close to the Machine also captures an important cultural shift. Ullman, who began programming in the late 1970s, started her career at a time when Silicon Valley still had a countercultural veneer. No matter that the industry was born of the military-industrial complex; professional programming culture adopted—or subsumed—the ethos of hackers and makers. By the nineties, the industry had hardened into something much more financialized, monied, explicitly libertarian. The United States was transitioning to the new economy: a digital, mediated, deceptively disembodied, transnational network of data exchange. It would not be the ‘content makers’—the artists, writers, multimedia makers—who would be making the money, Ullman wrote of the then-emergent digital economy. Of course, the ones making the money would be the owners of the transaction itself. The new breed of entrepreneur: Net landlord.

It is tempting to depict Ullman as prescient, even prophetic. (The twenty-first century sharing economy—a model of exchange mirroring the renter/rentier relationship—was more than a decade out when she wrote that.) But she wasn’t forecasting, nor, in her writing, was she assigning herself retroactive knowledge or revisionist naivete. It matters that the book was written and published years before the dot-com bubble burst; that the major financial crisis referenced in the text was the stock market crash of 1987. At the time, Ullman was just doing what good writers do: observing, translating, and making legible the murky currents that surge through interpersonal relationships and impersonal systems. She was taking in the things around her, and following them to their logical conclusion. Neither futurist nor Cassandra, she was simply someone with a rare quality of attention—and, at a time of hype and froth, a lucid point of view.

What looks like prescience might also be attributed to an acute understanding of the industry’s internal logic and ambitions, and the reverberations these could have more broadly on politics and social life. As an engineer, Ullman could appreciate the complicated human mess that hummed beneath the slick veneer of new software products, including the consumer internet; she could also appreciate that those software products would be used by, and have an impact on, other similarly messy and complicated humans. Out of Time, the essay that became the memoir’s kernel, ended with a provocation. Engineers, Ullman wrote, seemed to prefer the asynchronous life: one lived outside of the collective rhythms of any social project, in which the satisfactions of transacting meaning with a mature human being, in the confusion of a natural language, together, in a room, at a touching distance, were automated, replaced by software programs and graphical interfaces. But what about the rest of us? she asked. Soon, we may all be living the programming life. Should we?

A brief interlude on the writing itself. His lovemaking was tantric, algorithmic, Ullman writes, of the libertarian cypherpunk.

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 … I should have called it off. For a time, I even looked fondly at the neat monogram on my pajama pocket where it lay on the dresser top. But again I gave in to curiosity and tenderness. He has been with himself too long, I thought.

Improbable, but it works. It works—how? Bemused, but not cruel; intimate, but not gross. It’s a true window into the narrator’s mind, which flicks from ornate programming analogies to a sort of patrician yearning for monogrammed pajamas. It’s deeply funny. This kind of writing is unusual, not least because it’s incredibly hard to pull off. Most people wouldn’t dare try.

Close to the Machine has long enjoyed a cult following, but when the book was first published, it was miles ahead of its deserved audience. In the twenty-five years since, there has amassed a small corpus of first-person writing about working in the tech industry, including my own. The commercial appetite for these stories is relatively new—a consequence, perhaps, of the industry’s increased wealth, power, and ubiquity, as well as the widespread adoption of Silicon Valley values, norms, and culture. (Technology moves faster than social change, but publishing trends might be slowest of all.) I think that there is value and utility in documenting the mannerisms, ideologies, vocabularies, and lifestyles of people working in influential industries; even the smallest details can be explanatory. But these things tend to move with their times. In 1997, Ullman captured something more durable: the emotional experience of being both an insider and outsider to an indifferent, high-flying professional culture. She did so in a way that remains exciting and undeniably original. Intranets, LINUX, whatever. The timelessness of this book comes from its interiority.

I suspect this is why I have so far tried to avoid addressing the fact of Ullman’s gender, though it almost certainly informs her perspective as an outsider—even if the industry she entered in the seventies looked different, demographically, from the one she left in the nineties. Gender is not belabored in Close to the Machine, but it seems unavoidable in the context of contemporary conversations about women in tech. The trouble with these conversations, specifically those generated within the industry, is that they are often cautious, bloodless, and flattering to existing power structures. They’re corporate. This makes them easily co-opted, as polemic or for profit. Though Ullman has reflected, from time to time, on the need to diversify the industry—and, in her writing, has dryly commented on certain juvenile, puerile, or unappealingly boyish mores—she rarely writes explicitly about being a woman in tech. It doesn’t seem like her core subject. She seems more concerned with the tangle of making a life, being