by Ellen Ullman
Strangely, once it was clear that things between me and Brian were over, we relaxed. We lay in bed that morning and had our first friendly, truly personal conversation. All the pillow talk we did not have before—where we came from, our families, our past lovers, the ones we liked the best—now came freely. I saw that I had not been wrong to have those poignant moments over Brian. Because under all his determination to be a pornographer, to have his “polyamorous” relationships, to be a cool cypherpunk, he really was trying to make contact as best he could. He just wasn’t very good at making contact, which you really can’t hold against someone, much as you’d like to.
Still, it took me a bit to get over the reasons I’d wanted to see Brian “sometime when we didn’t have to get up and go to work.” I’d had my delusions: I had visions of us lying on the sofa on Sunday morning reading the Times. I had this idea we would listen to Glenn Gould playing Bach’s G Minor piano concerto. I imagined I would show him the way into this music, the slow movement’s aching play of major against minor, the intense miracle of logic which, somehow, with all its precision and balance, still burst with passion. “Here is how I know God is a passionate engineer,” I thought I might tell him.
But what could I have been thinking? Brian was a cryptographer, a specialist in hiding. He dreamed of creating a universe of anonymous transactions. Scrambled facts, anonymity—these are not the makings of someone who can attach to anyone. He wanted to hang out with his cypherpunks. He wanted to divide the world into the “main” and the “casual.” Even before he could get near the sweet terrors of the possible, he tried to cordon himself off. He had a girlfriend from whom he needed “a lot of psychic distance.”
I drove him to the train. In the car, he looked at me intently. “You know, I really do like you,” he said.
“Of course you do,” I said, patting his hand. “And I like you, too.”
I let him off at his stop and got out to say goodbye. He hugged me, then held on for one last squeeze. “I’ll call you in a couple of days,” he said.
I thought it was sweet that he knew to say he really liked me, sweet that he knew to hug me goodbye, sweetest of all that he knew to say he would call. But as I watched him walk away—funny backside-twitchy walk under long hair and cowboy hat—I knew it would be best if we didn’t call and we didn’t try to see each other again.
And we didn’t.
[9] DRIVING
INEVITABLY, THERE IS ANOTHER CONTRACT. IT begins, like the others, with a phone call. Someone I worked with recommended me. Am I available to design a new product? “Windows front end,” murmurs the voice on the phone; “Internet,” he says. But he doesn’t really need to entice me. “Yes,” I say, “I’m available.” Yes.
This time, instead of going south to Silicon Valley, I drive east across the Bay Bridge. 9 AM: the road is clear and fast, and I’m across the bridge in no time. The freeway then heads south, through cities I’ve always known are there but have forgotten all about, then east again, toward Stockton. Just after the freeway takes a big turn inland, a line of semis merges from the left. They’re like a wall moving toward me, fifty thousand pounds of roaring diesel momentum on a downhill ride to Central California. My car isn’t as high as their wheels. It’s not at all clear they see me. As I slip through them, moving left and left again as they move right, I remember why I bought this fast little car: when trouble comes, I have the choice of yielding or accelerating. I accelerate.
The company is in an office park built in a former pasture. A low haze still rests on the land, and for a moment I can see that this was ranch and farm not so long ago. There’s still scrub; birds are busy in scraggly hedges. But in every direction are construction cranes and frames for new buildings just like the one in front of me. The birds won’t be here for long.
I meet with the vice president of software development and the project manager. They tell me what they want from me: I’m to look at some software they’re modifying and make suggestions; if “things work out,” they want me to design some new software. I name a ridiculously high hourly rate. They agree. We all shake hands.
They take me into a conference room, where a computer and monitor are set up. Eight other people are already there: vice presidents, managers, programming leads. They all sit behind me. They are all there to watch me look at their software. It’s an audition, I see. Twenty minutes ago, I didn’t even know what this company did, but now ten people I’ve never met before will see if I have anything intelligent to say about software for payroll processing, electronic paycheck direct-deposits, wire-transfer filing of payroll taxes with the IRS—subjects I don’t know much about.
“So the payroll is transmitted raw,” I say.
“Yeah,” says the lead, “Just a flat data stream—”
“And you do the calculations, the deposits—”
“—the deductions, taxes—”
“Then you turn around and transmit—”
“—the direct deposits, the taxes quarterly, the updated company files.”
“Cool,” I say.
“Yeah,” says the lead.
Four hours go by. Somewhere in there, sandwiches appear and get eaten, cookies appear and disappear. Ten years ago, I would have been in a state of terror. But now the fear energizes me. I see down and down again toward the place where imagined money disappears into hardware and software. The world of money explodes. I feel like I’m taking off in a rocket.
“What is the primary work-flow paradigm?” I ask.
“We need you to help us define it,” says the product manager.
“Are you committed to rewriting—?”
“Everything. From scratch.”
Diet Cokes, coffee, cakes: two more hours go by.
“And do you have an idea for this Internet piece?”
“We thought it could be the same as the new client software.”
“Oh, no. It can’t be. There’s a completely different expectation on the Web.”
“What are you doing for the next year and a half?” asks the product manager.
Things have “worked out.” I have passed the audition. I leave the meeting wired with thought waves, shake hands in a daze, hit the parking lot buzzed. I’m in a mental methedrine high that feels like exaltation.
But even as I drive home—T-bar roof open, wind that feels like the rushing going on in my brain—I see how this phase will pass into the next. Soon enough, the computer will take me back to its own place, where the system and its logic take over. I’ll start to worry about the payroll clerks using the software I design. I’ll wonder what I’m doing helping the IRS collect taxes. It will bother me that so many entities—employer, software company, bank, IRS—know so much about the simple act of someone getting paid for labor delivered. I’ll think about the strange path of a paycheck direct-deposit, how it goes from employer to bank, company to company, while the person being paid is just a blip, the recipient’s account a temporary way station, as the money flows through the bank’s hands into the hands of a borrower, then out again through the great engine of commerce.
And I’ll have to muddle through without certainties. Without my father’s belief that the machinery of capital, if you worked hard and long, was benign in the long run, so benign you could even own a piece of it. Without my generation’s macho leftism, which made us think we could smash the machine and build a better one. Without Brian’s cocksureness that he was smart enough to know all the machine’s little secrets, and so control it.
But all that can wait. For now, I’m just going to enjoy where I am: at the beginning of a new contract, the rocket-takeoff learning curve, the exquisite terror of it, the straight-up ride against gravity into a trajectory not yet calculated. The next time I drive down to the company, a fog hangs lead-gray over the bay. Then, where the freeway turns inland, the fog lifts and thins and reveals the sheer glare of the sky. I race past the trucks, toward hills shining green in the clear light. And for now, just this now, I feel I’m where
I’m supposed to be: hurrying to a place I’ve never seen before. If only I could stay here, inside this moment, before it slips away, as it surely will: this delusion, this sweet delusion.
Also by Ellen Ullman
The Bug
By Blood
ELLEN ULLMAN is the author of the new novel By Blood, and The Bug, selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of 2003, and runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award. She lives in San Francisco.
Notes
1 Computers can be programmed to operate as if they were functioning under conditions of uncertainty. In particular, a branch of logic, called “fuzzy logic,” can be used to create programs that try to predict the probability of various outcomes when one or more pertinent conditions are not well known. However, at the level of the code itself, the logic is not fuzzy. Each programming statement must resolve into a set of executable machine instructions, each of which is logically determinant. If something unexpected happens at the level of the machine instruction, the chip has a bug or the computer is “broken.”
2 I quit the party after one year—I was expelled when I tried to leave. I then reviewed what I knew about computer programming and got my first job in the industry. My employer was amazed at my ability to work hundred-hour weeks without complaint, and I was promoted rapidly. He did not know that my endurance came from my year in the party. Being a cadre in an underground political party, as it turned out, was excellent training for the life of a computer programmer.
3 “Gimme Shelter,” by the Rolling Stones.
4 Advertisement for “The Gate,” an on-line service of the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner.
5 Today’s techno-libertarians have a similar idea about the mechanistic basis of human existence, but for very different reasons. They see human thought and consciousness merely as the result of many small, local processes in the body and brain, rather than as evidence of some observing self. While we communists wanted to make good fighting machines of ourselves ostensibly to further social equality, techno-libertarians prefer to see human life as a collection of small, local mechanisms because such mechanisms “prove” that controlling superstructures, like governments, are not necessary.
6 On August 7, 1996, America Online became completely inopera-tional for nineteen hours, and its many subscribers had to face what life would be like without e-mail and access to the Internet. This one-day system failure was widely viewed as a harbinger of life in the electronic information age, the sort of occurrence that would become commonplace, given our reliance on computer-mediated communications. AOL’s managers, however, described it as “a coincidental series of sequential events that will most likely never occur again.” The problem was eventually traced to a software upgrade on a network router (“a bug in the operating system of the routers that was exercised by this particular routing”), the functional equivalent of installing ten new lines of assembler code. AOL’s managers were right in a way. That particular problem did not happen again. The next failure came from too many subscribers trying to connect to the service, a monumental system jam described by the Wall Street Journal as “the busy signal heard around the world.”
7 Computer cryptology is the study and practice of encoding information for the purposes of data privacy. This encoding is called encryption. Current encryption schemes involve the use of keys to scramble and unscramble the information. The longer the key—the more bits it has—the more difficult it is for an unauthorized person to decrypt the information. Encryption with longer keys is called “strong”; shorter keys result in “weaker” encryption. As of this writing, keys with 256 bits are considered uncrackable at the current state of the computing art. At the time of the conference discussed later in this section, the United States government, in an attempt to limit the dissemination of “uncrackable” information (and to make sure the FBI would be able to perform wiretaps), had made illegal the export of encryption software with keys longer than 40 bits. Currently the legal export limit is 56-bit keys and an encryption method called DES, but export of this relatively “weak” encryption is subject to obtaining a license from the Department of Commerce. In general, the U.S. government, through export controls, has hoped to control even the domestic use of encryption products, since such controls draw expertise and development energies toward weaker products.
8 Evidently they, or people just like them, can indeed crack encryption with keys of 40 bits. At a data security conference held in January 1997, the conference sponsor, RSA Data Security, a maker of encryption products, offered prizes of up to $10,000 for breaking code encrypted with keys of various lengths. A Berkeley graduate student using 259 computers broke 40-bit encryption; it took him about three and a half hours.
9 Two months after I had my banking fantasy, I went to a conference at which a financial services company, Liberty Financial, demonstrated an Internet-based program for its customers. The program was “customizable,” said the company representative, to give customers what he called a “personalized, interactive experience.” Banking as electronic fantasy game is undoubtedly coming, but the company’s product needs work; my fantasy is better.
10 Smartphone apps have given us the most private experience of our money, even as we each walk separately through the space that was once understood to be “in public.”
11 On May 9, 1995, auditors from the federal Inspector General’s office entered the offices of a Boston AIDS-services provider and compiled a list of names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and HIV status of 98 patients. The provider protested that the taking of the information constituted “an egregious breach of confidentiality.” The federal government maintained, however, that the service provider received federal funding and therefore the government had a right to audit patient data. According to a report in the New York Times (April 3, 1996, A13), the auditors said “there was evidence of fraudulent use of Social Security numbers and that they reported that [fact] to other federal officials responsible for investigating such fraud.” The federal government’s right to confiscate files was later upheld in court.
12 The same could be said of a library, except that libraries have something the Internet considers nearly anathema: librarians. The current reigning ideology of the Internet is strictly opposed to the idea of a librarian’s overriding sensibility, opting instead for the notion that anything, in and of itself, is worthy content. So it is entirely up to the end user to distinguish junk from literature. Hence the rapid proliferation of search engines. It is interesting to note that, over time, the search engines themselves are beginning to incorporate biases and strategies that could be characterized as ordering sensibilities. However, these strategies are not in the public domain, in a sense making each search engine a private card catalog, a personal collection.
13 For all too brief a moment, the ability to create Web pages and write blogs enormously enriched the user’s vocabulary on the Net. But a new wave of infantilization and loss of control seems to be taking hold. Web pages are being left behind in favor of the predetermined format of Facebook. Blogs are yielding to tweets. The purpose of most search engines and “apps”—of many Facebook pages and Web sites—is to deliver advertising. The user is bombarded, like it or not. Programs are migrating away from desktops and laptops, where users can keep whatever version they like, into some unknowable, software-vendor-controlled place “in the cloud.”
14 Given the political nature of the project, a certain degree of ambiguity in the identification of clients was considered an acceptable price and was designed into the system. However, the most technically capable consultants uniformly suggested ID cards and fingerprinting as “solutions” to this ambiguity of identity. It became a sad joke: if they suggest fingerprinting, we said, they probably can do the job.
15 The acronyms refer to evolving models for what are called software “objects” as promoted by Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. Software objects are designed to let one program, such as a charting tool, be embedded in another, such
as a spreadsheet. They also permit small application programs, called “applets,” and even finer-grain collections of code, to be shared over a network, including the Internet. At the time of this writing, Sun and Microsoft were offering competing, incompatible object models.
16 The tools, languages, and hardware listed above date from the mid-1960s to approximately 1983. COBOL was the standard business-programming language during that period; it is still in use, though slowly dwindling. The Z-80 and 8080 were the standard chips on personal computers of the early 1980s. System 370 Job Control Language was used on mainframe computers that were state-of-the-art in the late 1970s. FORTRAN was one of the earliest programming languages, though it is still in use for some specialized technical applications. Pick was an operating system for minicomputers of the mid-1970s and early-1980s; it still runs on some mid-range computers but mainly as a way to keep old programs from having to be rewritten. The Kaypro computer, daisy-wheel printer, and 300-baud acoustic-coupler modem are all completely obsolete, though some survivors may still be operating somewhere.
17 Companies are shedding employees then regaining the use of their labor as “contingent workers”: as on-call workers, temporaries, workers provided by contract firms, and independent contractors. According to a labor department study cited in the New York Times (December 8, 1996), 17 percent of all contingent workers had a previous relationship with the company at which they were working. Over 22 percent of independent contractors had such a previous relationship. A temporary-help agency that supplies contract workers to Pacific Bell said that, on an average day, former employees represent 80 percent of the people they place at the phone company.