The EveryAnimalMachine

The EveryAnimalMachine:

Technology and Humanity in Douglas Coupland’s microserfs

People who ‘fall’ in love are in no condition to evaluate the qualities of the object of their ‘love’ . . .The computer will introduce a much-needed transformation from the spurious conception of “love” that leads to so many disastrous marriages, to a much more humane and reasonable basis for marriage. -Ashley Montagu and Samuel S. Snyder, Man and the Computer (206)

This quotation, incredibly enough, is not meant ironically. Montagu and Snyder’s description of a better future, one in which the potentially unlimited but perfectly rational intellect of the computer becomes a means for liberating humanity from its rasher impulses and moments of weakness, is a genuine one. For them, the computerization of matchmaking and other social functions is a natural and desirable extension of the more prosaic ways in which the ability of computers to sift through massive quantities of data makes them highly useful in helping people make decisions – or in making decisions for them. Even that large majority of technophiles who shrink from the rather extreme view presented in Man and the Computer still maintain that by extending the range and increasing the ease of communication computers serve a highly beneficial function in fostering human interaction.

While those skeptical of technological progress generally agree that computers are a rationalizing force in human existence and that their use tends to bring about a reduction in subjectivity and impulsiveness, they disagree violently with the contention that this alteration in the human condition is a good one. For them, the emotional side of human existence is the vital one, and the introduction of computers into human decision-making and interaction serves only to eliminate the particular and ineffable qualities that define humanity. In this view, any good to be found in the increased reach of new communications technologies is far outweighed by the corresponding decrease in intimacy that attaches to their use. Electronic mail may seem to connect us with friends across the world, but in truth it isolates us from people just down the hall. As Clifford Stoll, one of the first technologically literate critics of these emerging technologies, writes, “Computer networks isolate us from one another, rather than bring us together. We need only deal with one side of an individual over the net. And if we don’t like what we see, we pull the plug” (58).

For novelist Douglas Coupland, however, neither side is right: the entire debate between these two camps depends upon a shared but erroneous assumption: that computers represent an objectifying force. His third novel, microserfs, argues, instead, that the ultimate effect of these technologies upon people will be humanizing. On a superficial level, microserfs would seem to confirm the technophobes’ worst fears: the lives of its central group of characters, computer programmers at computer software giant Microsoft, take a profound turn for the better after they leave its soulless and completely computerized atmosphere. This reading, however, self-destructs with the simple observation that it is only Microsoft they have left, not computers. If anything, technology becomes even more of a presence in their lives as the novel progresses; Coupland makes it clear that their growing happiness is not tied to an escape from technology’s influence.

Coupland wastes no time in asserting that life at Microsoft, one of the most technologically-oriented places on earth, is dehumanizing and hellish. In the very first paragraph, we learn that Michael, the best programmer among the central group, has just received “this totally wicked flame-mail from hell” (1), a blistering criticism of his work, from Bill Gates, Microsoft’s founder and president. Michael, traumatized, locks himself in his office and refuses to communicate with the world beyond his door – “Doors are important to nerds” (2), Daniel, the narrator, notes. At Microsoft, totally focused upon shipping products and establishing dominance over the software industry, one’s life and sense of purpose are completely centered around work – and Michael has been dealt the ultimate blow, a personal insult from the feared but quasi-deified Gates. Holed up in his office, he sleeps and refuses to eat any foods not flat enough to fit under his door, withdrawing into a shell, both literally and emotionally. A day later, however, Michael emerges, and promptly returns to “shipping hell” as he and his co-workers struggle to meet an impossible product deadline.

Fueled by junk food and caffeine, forced on by “the Pol Pots from Marketing” (25), the overstressed and underpaid Microserfs who give the book its title have only the most minimal of lives apart from their work. “My universe consists of home, Microsoft, and Costco[1]” (3), writes Daniel, who has not “seen a movie in six months” (27) and concedes that “I am single. I think partly this is because Microsoft is not conducive to relationships. . . . Sometimes I’ll sort of get something going, but then work takes over my life” (4). Daniel’s clipped diary entries (the entire novel is written in the in the form of a journal he keeps in his laptop computer) tell all: “In at 9:30 a.m.; out at 11:30 p.m. Domino’s for dinner. And three diet Cokes” (6). When he returns home one night from work at 1:30 in the morning, he finds his roommates each locked in some private activity – sleeping in front of the television or “obsessively folding shirts.” His response is do “some unfinished work” (29).

In this electronic-age sweatshop, the stresses of creating technology lead to isolation, not connection. Neither Daniel nor Karla, the woman who works in the office opposite his, has ever visited the other’s office. Their first genuine conversation takes place while both are outside and wandering the grounds, taking brief breaks from their never-ending work. Even e-mail cannot bridge the interpersonal gaps. “The cool thing about e-mail is that when you send it, there’s no possibility of connecting with the person on the other end. . . . The less of a life you have, the more mail you read” (22), muses Daniel.

Coupland ties this emptiness to the particular conditions of Microsoft, however, instead of to the effects of technology itself. As his characters rediscover and reinvent their humanity, their transformations appear as a series of rebellions against – and ultimately an escape from – the dehumanizing Microsoft milieu. After noticing how thin Karla seems when they accidentally meet on the lawns outside their building – both of them taking breaks from their hectic programming duties – Daniel starts bringing her food. This unexpected act of kindness and consideration has consequences that double and redouble: they fall in love, and Karla moves in with him at the apartment that he shares with his group of friends. And then the real transformation begins; Michael quits his job at Microsoft and founds a software company to produce a flexible and bizarrely creative program called “Oop!” loosely based on the modularity of Lego blocks. Daniel and most of the others pull up their roots and follow Michael to Palo Alto, to become the entire workforce of this start-up firm.

Once they have escaped from Microsoft’s paralyzing corporate culture, technology itself ceases to be a barrier to relating to others. Obviously, that “we’re killing ourselves for ourselves, instead of for some huge company to whom we might as well be interchangeable bloodless PlaySkool figurine units” (135) has something to do with this transformation, but the alteration in their relationship to technology has to do with more than mere self-employment. The software they created at Microsoft, “something like the Norwegian Macintosh version of Word 5.8” (9), was numbing and dehumanizing simply because it reflected the corporate culture that produced it. “Oop!” on the other hand, becomes an exercise in creativity and imagination that matches the anarchic and literally garage-based environment from which it springs. In this environment, the use of computers becomes, paradoxically, an affirmation of humanity. In Daniel’s words, “What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?” (15)

One of the more striking ways in which the supposedly impersonal and technological acquires a human face lies in the currents of humor that flow through microserfs. One style of humor, in particular, is pervasive in this novel: a constantly ironic and skewed perspective on the technology and its incarnations. “Don’t you ever feel like a cog, Dan? . . . wait – the term ‘cog’ is outdated – a cross-platform highly transportable binary object?” Karla muses at one point immediately before they jump ship from Microsoft (60; ellipsis original). The moment is typical, a subversion of the language and ideas of the computer-literate into biting parody. These jokes can be seen as an affirmation of humanity in the face of the abstract concepts and buzzwords of encroaching technology, but there is also something in them that is respectful of the ideas they mock, whether Coupland’s characters participate in “this big discussion about what sort of software dogs would design if they could” (14) or Dan describes Karla’s diary entries, which are briefer than his, as “Reduced Instruction Set Computation diaries” (113)[2]. As microserfs progresses, these deliberately misapplied metaphors become cooperative exercises, in-jokes that the group uses to assert its creativity, its intimate familiarity with computers, and even its coherence as a group. They define themselves and their micro-community through their increasingly comic variations on technology’s themes.

In fact, once they start work at Interiority, their new company, the technological setting there gradually but undeniably removes many elements of isolation from their lives. When one of them sets up a program on their office computers which allows them to exchange brief and anonymous pieces of gossip, it “[gets] way out of control immediately” (201), as they exchange deliberately silly rumors about each other:

18) DAN HAS A YANNI CD IN HIS CAR

19) ETHAN’S VISA LIMIT IS $3000

20) SUZAN’Z BOYCRAZY SUZAN’S BOYCRAZY SUZAN’S BOYCRAZY SUSAN’Z BOYCRAZY SUSAN’Z BOYCRAZY

21) DAN: LISTERINE KILLS GERMS THAT CAN CAUSE BAD BREATH (202)

That these rumors are transparently false is exactly the point; this perpetually ironic form of discourse is a bonding ritual, facilitated here by the presence of computers. Technology, even when it is central to what is undeniably still a high-stress workplace, becomes a form of social glue. In Daniel’s words, “Oop! isn’t about work. It’s about all of us staying together” (199). Eventually, technology even helps their group reach out beyond itself. Ethan, Interiority’s initially distrusted manager, becomes welcome after he fights Michael to a draw in a contest to name the digits of pi. They engage in this stereotypically “geeky” activity, as always, with respectful irony.

A more remarkable moment of computer-achieved interconnection, however, occurs when Michael falls in love with someone nicknamed BarCode whom he knows only through exchange of e-mail. Daniel flies to Waterloo, Ontario on Michael’s behalf to meet this “BarCode entity” (323). BarCode turns out to be a computer engineering student named Amy who has fallen just as hard for Michael as he has for her, leading Daniel to think “I had just transacted the most bizarre matchmaking transaction in the history of love” (332). Daniel’s part, in truth, is extremely limited; it is through their pseudonymous correspondence on the Internet that Michael and BarCode have found each other. The recognition signal Daniel gives to BarCode is “Cheese slices” (330), a reference to Michael’s flat foods phase. BarCode is also a flat-food fan, and in this context, the use of such a reference is yet another assertion of the continuation and even enhancement of shared human identity in the computer age, albeit a profoundly personal one.

The role of technology in making this match, however, transcends being merely the common interest that unites them, a set of private codes, or even the medium they use to contact each other. It is the seeming distance and impersonality of their communication which, paradoxically, bring them together. Amy tells Dan that “interfacing with Michael over the Net was the only way she could ever really know that he was talking to her, not with his concept of her” (334), an idea with which Daniel agrees when he states “if you create a convincing on-line meta-personality on the Net, then that personality really IS you” (327). Although their theories differ in one important respect – Amy/BarCode believes that one’s electronic identity is innate and revealed only when the physical is removed from consideration while Daniel sees it as synthetic and only capable of being brought into existence with the aid of the disguising features of electronic media – they agree in that it is a fully valid identity, perhaps one’s most genuine.

Michael’s overcoming his fear that BarCode will reject him based upon his appearance demonstrates an important refinement of this theory. Coupland is not suggesting, as prior technological theorists have, that the flesh is a weakness to be overcome – to be escaped – with the aid of computers. For him, mistaking the substance for the essence is purely a social problem of misperceptions, not one of personal identity. Michael and Amy, once they meet in person, have “a John-and-Yoko lovefest at the Residence Inn Suites down in Mountain View” (334). They have met through purely intellectualized means, but in the end their match is fully physical as well, a match of body and soul. This emotional arc is identical to the one Daniel and Karla’s relationship follows. As he describes it:

Karla and I fell in love somewhere out there . . .

Karla and I would talk about computers and coding. Our minds met out in the crystal lattice galaxy of ideas and coding and when we came out of our reverie, we realized we were in a special place – out there.

And when you meet someone and fall in love, and they fall in love with you, you ask them, ‘Will you take my heart – stains and all?’ and they say ‘I will,’ and they ask you the same question, and you say, ‘I will,’ too. (57)

Again, their relationship begins on an intellectual plane – here one whose very subject is technology – but expands to an all-inclusive embrace. Computers do not bring about a fundamental shift in humanity’s nature from physical to mental; instead they bring into being new ways of understanding that nature and relating to others, ways that are fundamentally different from those that existed before.

This induced sense of unity between mind and body, in which the former incorporates the latter instead of transcending it, is a theme which Coupland explicitly develops elsewhere in microserfs. Karla believes that the body – not just the brain but the elbows and calves, as well – is used as storage for a person’s memories; Daniel calls this theory “the concept of body as hard drive” (67), an explicitly technological metaphor which Coupland employs repeatedly. Indeed, this conceptualization of the body – not the seat of one’s identity but an integral part of it – becomes an important factor in the lives of Coupland’s characters, who start working out, lifting weights, and placing a premium on good physical condition. A technological interpretation of the mind-body relationship leads to a rejection of a Cartesian conception of the self. As Daniel observes disparagingly of porn stars, “Their bodies must be like machines to them, or products to ship” (343). Coupland refuses to see the body either as an error-prone impediment to the mind or as a tool entirely at the mind’s disposal. The electronic metaphor emphasizes the essentially organic unity of body and spirit.

This complex reevaluation of humanity in light of technology is nowhere more strongly conveyed in microserfs than in its ending. Daniel’s mother has a stroke, and the Interiority community pulls together around her, talking to her, holding her, sitting by her bedside, hoping desperately to help her break through the veil over her consciousness. After two weeks of trying, they hit upon the idea of providing her a computer keyboard on which she can type messages to them. With Michael’s help in moving her fingertips, she is able to communicate again:

Oh, to speak with the lost! Karla broke in and said, “Mrs. U., our massage . . . is it okay? Is it helping you?”

The fingers tapped:

GR8

I LK MY BDY

Karla looked at the words and, hesitating a second, declared, “I like my body now, too, Mrs. U.”

Mom’s assisted hands tapped out:

MY DOTTR

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. (369)

The scene is a remarkable one. In it, Coupland brings many of the themes he has developed throughout the novel. The computer is not just the medium of communication at the most emotionally important moment in microserfs; it is the medium that makes such communication possible in the first place. Even when her only link to the world is the tenuous one through her fingertips at the keyboard, Daniel’s mother cannot resist making a joke with a typical Internet abbreviation for the syllable “ate.” She is insisting, through this technological in-joke, on her continued membership in her community of loved ones at the moment when she is most isolated, most in danger of being cut off from it.. Even unable to consciously control the vast majority of her muscles, she can say “I like my body,” when the Macintosh is there, almost a part of her, to help her along. The light in the room comes from the computer screen, but it is Mom who glows with that light.

This is an ending which neither Montagu and Snyder nor their critics would have anticipated. The traditional arguments about the accelerating wave of technological change have been underwritten by the assumption that computers would make people more like them: more serious, more objective, less constrained by their bodies. Coupland steps beyond the terms of this debate by portraying computers, instead, as a force that intensifies uniquely human characteristics. At the end of microserfs, Coupland has his characters weeping with joy because of a computer. The mysterious virtue of technology is that it allows humanity to be more human.

Works Cited

Coupland, Douglas. microserfs. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

Montagu, Ashley and Samuel S. Snyder. Man and the Computer. Philadelphia: Auerbach Publishers, 1972.

Stoll, Clifford. Silicon Snake Oil. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

[1] A store which sells groceries, supplies, and a wide variety of other items at great discounts and in gargantuan quantities.

[2] Reduced Instruction Set Computation (RISC) computers have fewer allowable instructions than others, but can execute them faster. In a sense, they do not use as many “words” as normal computers.