Ellen Ullman's "Close to the Machine."
Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.
Close To the Machine is Ellen Ullman's classic memoir of writing software in Silicon Valley at the start of the dotcom bubble; it was originally published in 1997 and reprinted in 2022 for the 25 anniversary by Farrar, Straus and Giroux's MCD books:
https://www.mcdbooks.com/books/close-to-the-machine-25th-anniversary-edition
I somehow never read Ullman's book; having read it now, it's easy to understand how this beautifully rendered snapshot of life at the end of the 20th century became a touchpoint for multiple generations of coders and technologists, and why it's still in print, 27 years later.
Ullman's subtitle for the book is "Technophilia and its discontents," and therein lies the secret to its magic. Ullman loves programming computers, loves the way they engage her attention, her consciousness, and her intelligence. Her descriptions of the process of writing code β of tackling a big coding project β are nothing less than revelatory. She captures something that a million technothriller movies consistently fail to even approach: the dramatic interior experience of a programmer who breaks down a complex problem into many interlocking systems, the momentary and elusive sense of having all those systems simultaneously operating in a high-fidelity mental model, the sense of being full, your brain totally engaged in every way. It's a poetics of language that meets and exceeds the high bar set by the few fiction writers who've ever approached a decent rendering of this feeling, like William Gibson.
These glittering moments are fleeting, though. No code project survives contact with the computer, a brutal and unforgiving cognitive partner that ferrets out every error in your thinking, every trap you've unknowningly fallen into. Here again, Ullman shines in her renderings of the ferocious mental combat that programmers must do with their computers, grueling matches that are made all the worse by the certain knowledge that the only way to win the bout is to discover and fix your own flaws.
These set-pieces make for great branching points into the three other components of Ullman's classic: first, there are the stories of high-tech institutions. We follow Ullman β a contract programmer who is hired to assemble teams to run specific projects β as she works on a gnarly all-in-one tool for matching people with AIDS with a spectrum of public services; and when she is brought into a failing startup as part of an abortive turnaround attempt.
All of this is happening just as the web and the internet are devouring all high-tech projects, and Ullman β a techie who is an old hand at networked communications, but it professionally part of a breed of coder who specializes in standalone and modem-based services β finds herself sitting opposite glittering new-breed hackers who have arrived to eat her lunch. Here, too, Ullman absolutely nails the experience of a technologist who has transitioned from surfing the cutting edge to being decapitated by it. This sequence is made all the more poignant by a series of scenes in which Ullman confronts the impossible knot of writing code that benefits marginalized, at-risk users (people dying of AIDS) while satisfying the political and bureaucratic imperatives of multiple charities, government agencies, and advocates. Ullman has finally wrestled all of these stakeholders into a stable configuration, only to have these shiny young people show up and tell her that she β and everything she's done and everything she stands for β is obsolete. It's a gut-punch of a scene.
That's the third component of Ullman's memoir β the workplace culture of a programmer who must answer to (and assuage) a variety of nontechnical people who flip from awe to seething resentment of you and your work. Ullman, who lives the simultaneously precarious and lucrative life of a high-paid, much sought-after freelancer, is at the mercy of so many people who have terrible power over her, little empathy for her, and an almost total lack of understanding of what she does (imagine Dilbert, but written by a smart and aware person, not a humorless asshole).
