When quaint becomes cult

April 5, 2024 9:03 AM

Jared Shurin on Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, a "heart-warming/breaking portrayal of lost-and-found geeks captured the zeitgeist of a new [tech] subculture," from casual coding to its Silicon Valley extremes:

Looking back. . . we can see the first seeds of a spin-off culture, one that is not only aware of its incompatibility with the rest of society, but also revels in it. . . thirty years on, it now feels a lot less quaint, and a lot more frightening.

posted by criticalyeast (22 comments total)

I still have a co-worker's copy that I accidentally stole (loaned it to me, then the FBI arrested the founder of our company while I was out of the office, the company collapsed, and I never saw her again) and it definitely encapsulated a certain era of the tech world in the Bay Area.
posted by tavella at 9:15 AM on April 5 [36 favorites]

This says it all: "Also, again, a) nobody wants this. "
posted by tommasz at 9:50 AM on April 5 [3 favorites]

It's been a while since I read Microserfs, but I feel like this review is stretching it a little bit? If I squint really hard at the passages they cite I can see their point, but if those are the best pull-quotes they can find in the book to support their thesis, it seems kind weak.

I read Microserfs a little over ten years ago while crashing out of academia and trying to find a job that wasn't in slinging advertisements or doing awful things in social media. By then the anti-social traits of edgelords and techbros that the reviewer talks about were already pervasive throughout the tech industry and for me the characters in the book just seemed quaintly wholesome. Maybe the characters flush with their own success grew up to become Mac Andressen's and Peter Thiels', but I'd like to think they all lead quiet, fulfilling careers pouring their creativity into the product that they created.

But in the gently self-aggrandising philosophing of Microserf’s characters, we can also see the dawn of a more extreme worldview. What if I’m an outsider because I’m better than everyone else?

The same is true about Harry Potter and literally every other chosen-one trope.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 10:01 AM on April 5 [8 favorites]

> the FBI arrested the founder of our company while I was out of the office, the company collapsed, and I never saw her again) and it definitely encapsulated a certain era of the tech world in the Bay Area

As does your comment!
posted by The corpse in the library at 10:13 AM on April 5 [33 favorites]

I'm reminded of a quote that I saw in an anime series (though I'm pretty sure it predates it) - "The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power." I find that really sums up the problem with the Silicon Valley technoutopian ethos - that it created a culture where power - in the form of technological development - is disjoined from remorse and accountability. This was crystallized in the phrase "move fast and break things" - a saying that justified harm as "the price of progress", and was used to dismiss arguments that perhaps we need to consider the larger ramifications of technology.

Which is why I find the pushing of Doctorow's "enshittification" narrative at the end to be a bit disheartening, as more and more it feels like a comforting half-truth, pointing the finger at tech for using a lack of regulation to grow at the expense of the public, while quietly eliding over how many of the technoutopian set - Doctorow included - championed arguments that holding tech accountable to society would hamstring its potential. I think that's why it's become a popular narrative, because it lets people say that all of what's happened is the fault of bad actors - while not needing to consider that said actors were enabled by a culture that was happy to buy into arguments that accountability was only holding us back.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:16 AM on April 5 [23 favorites]

This was crystallized in the phrase "move fast and break things" - a saying that justified harm as "the price of progress", and was used to dismiss arguments that perhaps we need to consider the larger ramifications of technology.

See also: “Innovation”
posted by Thorzdad at 10:24 AM on April 5 [5 favorites]

I find that really sums up the problem with the Silicon Valley technoutopian ethos - that it created a culture where power - in the form of technological development - is disjoined from remorse and accountability.

I got teased a lot in grade school. Nobody could do anything about the teasing, but to make it up to me, the adults in my life would try to tell me how "special" I was. "They're only teasing you because you're smart and you're good with computers and they're not". When I started responding to the harassment physically--by pushing, shoving, or even punching other kids--I'd often get a pass on any punishment, or worse: an implicit acknowledgement that what I did was OK because I was this special little nerd with so much potential who was being oppressed by all these other kids who couldn't appreciate how great I was.

Silicon Valley Technoutopian Ethos is just the product of combining incomprehensibly large amounts of money with people who grew up believing that "fans are slans" and who never had to spend a day in detention for using a lunchtray as a riot shield.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:26 AM on April 5 [8 favorites]

people who grew up believing that "fans are slans"

Depressing part is that a significant number of those people were nerds only on the sliding scale, and never got over the glory of being #2 in their class in some random New Jersey public middle school.

It would be a lot easier to take the group as a whole if they were much clearly smarter. Certainly the most recent batch troubling our lives show little other than low cunning combined with sociopathic disregard for others.
posted by praemunire at 11:28 AM on April 5 [11 favorites]

I’ve been wondering if

absolute wealth, absolute power, and absolutely no contact with actual humans

was a slip, a slur, an accidental acceptance of framing that’s damaging on either side, or what. (There’s no amount of wealth or technical skill, either high or low, that makes a human not a human.)
posted by clew at 11:40 AM on April 5 [2 favorites]

It's a figure of speech.
posted by Sebmojo at 2:43 PM on April 5

Yeah, I'm wondering about that slip too. I very much have the feeling that the insiders have won by co-opting the language and messaging of those of us who were outsiders in the '80s.

I've been doing a lot of soul searching of late, because, yeah detention for using a lunch tray as a riot shield. I'm a Waldorf survivor who's definitely got some childhood traumas, and who found my people in the '80s via online and tech hacker communities, because I did not fit in in meatspace.

In the '90s I totally identified with Microserfs, and that sense of "we in tech are outsiders who can see further" was definitely real. I remember when I was part of a small team starting an ISP in the 1993-1994 era, we had so many conversations about this phenomenon that we could see coming, but very few people in the area I was living in, none who seemed like they could help us grow, "got it". Had some fantastic discussions with local business leaders (that one newspaper editor...) that we look back on now and laugh and laugh and laugh.

I solved that problem by moving to the SF Bay Area.

I've changed immensely, but it feels like the tech community that I found in the Bay Area has changed too. The rise of the .com boom meant that the money people came in in ways that, sure, they were there before, but now moreso. Where we the outcasts used to turn to our online communities to escape the bullying and abuse of normal communities, it felt like tech became norrmal people. Around the time when "social media" replaced blogs, tech interest get-togethers went from halting "here's some stuff I'm working on that I think is cool" to bros practicing their standup routines while talking about microservices and containerization.

(And, yes, MeFi is "social media", several people have remarked that they're surprised how high my number is here, and that has more than two digits, part of that was that I hoped the future was gonna be independent blogs. Still do, actually.)

And then I see Kagi blowing a funding round on T-shirts, and compare that to decorating a foyer with Lego™, and I'm not sure of anything...

I read "The fact that tech culture is torn between the two towers of accelerationism vs effective altruism is, in hindsight, a completely foreseeable scenario", and... was I that naive? Or does cynicism read well these days? Probably the former, I thought that we could bring the wonders of our fantastic little online spaces to the larger world, and, of course, we did nothing but destroy those spaces.

So, yeah: what everyone lays at tech, well, it feels more like we in the tech world had some cool spaces, invited the larger world in, and this is what we got.
posted by straw at 2:45 PM on April 5 [12 favorites]

I remember reading Microserfs and feeling kind of jealous that they had a life I thought I couldn't even aspire to. And crying in some parts. It hit me like a a ton of bricks.

The tech aspects of the book are a bit dated, but I like to think that, even after all this time, their lives turned out at least OK, because I need that thought.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 3:04 PM on April 5 [4 favorites]

But in the gently self-aggrandising philosophing of Microserf’s characters, we can also see the dawn of a more extreme worldview. What if I’m an outsider because I’m better than everyone else?

The same is true about Harry Potter and literally every other chosen-one trope.

Before you had HP, there were the X-Men--also pupils under training for their special powers at an isolated, expansive mansion, and also with other people with powers whose vision for their relationship with ordinary humans was considerably more sinister--and before them there was A.E. van Vogt's novel Slan; that book led SF fans to declare that "fans are Slans".
posted by Halloween Jack at 3:17 PM on April 5 [3 favorites]

I remember reading the Wired article while in my office at Microsoft. I was in a post-graduate "apprenticeship" program and I think I'd been there for about six months. I'd thought that Coupland had captured the vibe of the Microsoft campus very well.

It was a different world then. The idea that a technology companies (and those of us that worked at them) could have cachet within broader culture was still relatively novel. Tech hadn't had any crashes yet. Capitalism felt less rapacious. Technology companies had a much smaller footprint - Boeing was still much more of an economic force within the Pacific Northwest than Microsoft, by orders of magnitude.

Sometimes I wish that I didn't know now what I didn't know then.
posted by microscone at 3:41 PM on April 5 [6 favorites]

For me, working throughout the late 90s and early 2000s in a small dev company, I noticed a fairly consistent attitude throughout the young, fresh-outta-school devs wherein they insisted on enforcing the old narrative that, as computer nerds, they were eternally picked-on in school, while at the same time insisting that they must be looked upon as the high priesthood of technology and paid appropriate deference.

And none of them knew how to email me a screenshot of the web-based app we were developing without first inserting into a Word doc.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:45 PM on April 5 [2 favorites]

i was a Microserf when Microserfs came out... my Portland friends got a good kick out of that when I'd go visit them
posted by kokaku at 4:39 PM on April 5 [1 favorite]

Is JPod like a sequel? I'm more familiar with that book (and a fun miniseries version).
posted by ovvl at 7:51 PM on April 5

cmd-f Balaji Srinivasan
posted by german_bight at 7:55 PM on April 5

I'm reminded of a quote that I saw in an anime series (though I'm pretty sure it predates it) - "The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power."

This is Brutus from Act II, scene 1 of Julius Caesar, and I am not sure you could have brought up a more appropriate bit of Shakespeare. Brutus , alone in his back garden, wrestles with himself over how to tell if a beloved leader has crossed - or even has the potential to cross - the line into being a despot, and, if so, what action is demanded of an honorable citizen in response.

It must be by his death: and for my part,
I know no personal cause to spurn at him,
But for the general. He would be crown'd:
How that might change his nature, there's the question.
It is the bright day that brings forth the adder;
And that craves wary walking. Crown him?—that;—
And then, I grant, we put a sting in him,
That at his will he may do danger with.
The abuse of greatness is, when it disjoins
Remorse from power: and, to speak truth of Caesar,
I have not known when his affections sway'd
More than his reason. But 'tis a common proof,
That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round.
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend. So Caesar may.
Then, lest he may, prevent. And, since the quarrel
Will bear no colour for the thing he is,
Fashion it thus; that what he is, augmented,
Would run to these and these extremities:
And therefore think him as a serpent's egg
Which, hatch'd, would, as his kind, grow mischievous,
And kill him in the shell.
posted by minervous at 9:47 PM on April 5 [9 favorites]

I liked the book but even at the time I thought that if it had been realistic it would have ended with them discovering that Bill Gates had stolen their idea, produced a rather inferior, bloated version of it, and was bundling it free with Windows in order to kill their business at birth.
posted by Phanx at 4:10 AM on April 6 [3 favorites]

The Brutus line is a truism that's a half-step away from Jenny Holzer's, which I love enough to keep on display in my house. Thanks, minervous, for the context.
posted by criticalyeast at 6:47 AM on April 6 [2 favorites]

This is almost 180-degrees opposite from how I have read Microserfs. The arc of the novel is about finding meaning, humanity, and community. The characters move away from big, impersonal business instutions (quitting Microsoft, Dad getting fired) and towards a small and very personal startup. They build a product and a business, but most of the important beats are about whether it will be successful enough to keep them together and independent, not about whether it will be successful enough to make them rich and important. They fall in love, they learn to be themselves, and they struggle with how to live despite a lot of past trauma (hellojed). Computers aren't a force to change the world at large, or a replacement for dumb humans, they're a way for people to become more open, more vulnerable, more at home with themselves and each other.

I literally wrote a college paper about this. While a lot of my writing now makes me cringe, I think my argument about what Coupland is doing, and the details he uses to do it, holds up pretty well. This is a book in which a bunch of sad, isolated, and emotionally stunted dorks learn how to have feelings and let other people in. It's a book about family and healing. No (big) spoilers, but there's a reason that the two key passages in the ending are:

Karla lost it and started to cry, and then, well, I started to cry. And then Dad, and then, well, everybody, and at the center of it all was Mom, part woman/part machine, emanating blue Macintosh light.

and

I'm worried about Mom . . . and I'm thinking about Jed, and suddenly I look around at Bug and Susan and Michael and everybody and I realize, that what's been missing for so long isn't missing anymore.

posted by grimmelm at 11:49 AM on April 6 [10 favorites]