Review by Michael Salvo

Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

Ellen Ullman
New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017. 306. Biography.

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I have a small library of books—written for scholarly, technical, popular, left, right, center audiences—claiming to tell the history of the internet. I have been hoping, since first assigning Negroponte’s Being Digital (a title I have always believed was missing a comma) that someone would offer a concise, engaging, inclusive history. Finally, Ellen Ullman’s new Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology, has appeared. Thank you. There will be a highly discounted book sale on the other titles I have acquired over the years.

“Real techies don’t worry about forced eugenics. I learned this from a real techie in in the cafeteria of a software company.” (9) Right from the opening anecdotes, Ullman pulls no punches and announces the theme she doggedly pursues through 303 pages and 3 decades. I have been answering the question, “How is the book?” by addressing another question: “What is this book?” The book is the anti-Gamer-Gate, the antimatter necessary to un-bro histories of the internet, to re-insert Grace Hopper and COBOL, Ada Lovelace alongside Babbage, and stop pretending that there isn’t appeal for women to join technoculture, now commonly referred to as STEM, and to admit that toxic masculinity combined with fragility that convinces women they should run, not walk, away from programming, engineering, and the scientific method.

Women are supposed to prefer talking. I’ve been told that women have trouble as engineers because we’d rather relate to people than to machines. This is a thorough misconception. The fact that I can talk to people in no way obviates my desire (yes, desire) to handle a fine machine. I drive a fast car with a big engine. An old Leica camera—miracle of grace and glass and velvety metal—sits in my palm as if part of me. I tried piloting a plane just to touch it: taking the yoke in to my hands and banking into a turn gave me indescribable pleasure of holding a powerful machine while it held me. I’m an engineer for the same reason anyone is an engineer: a certain love for the intricate lives of things, a belief in functional definition of reality. I do believe in the operational definition of a thing—how it works—is its most eloquent self-expression. (28)

Forgive the long quotation, so unbecoming in a review meant to be critical and to find flaws. Perhaps a review should not be undertaken while still in the throes of infatuation. Infatuation, love, romantic and filial become important themes throughout the book as Ullman meditates on the question of what is missing among the doggedly technophilic. This paragraph, the simplest expression in response to the query, “Why be an engineer?,” sums up so powerfully how voices like Ullman’s have been missing from the conversation. They aren’t missing because of a lack of desire, but because they have been chased out, actively discouraged, and woefully misunderstood. Saddest of all are the revelations that there is plenty of motivation to participate in both creation and application of technology. Missing girls–and the women they soon become—lost to STEM not only have been chased away by men inadequately socialized by the erasure of the contributions of women. If not expunged systematically, women’s role in technological production and invention is suppressed through neglect and failure to include, remunerate, and record women’s participation. All of technoculture, all of culture, is poorer for the violence inflicted on women devoted to the operational definitions of things—because the boys around them were uneasy because there were breasts and vaginas in the vicinity.

In the 1996 essay “Come in CQ,” Ullman opens and closes with stories of Eugene, the ham radio operator next door. This is probably where I first encountered Ullman’s writing, as it was included in Wired Women, an early attempt at gender inclusivity in the first wave of web work. The sketch of the nerd next door, erecting complicated antennas that bridged the two families’ roofs, is painted lovingly, gently, and also starkly. The frame narrative sandwiches a long-cooled virtual romance that develops similar themes, the author recounting all the Eugenes, pale and shy, hiding from scary women in dank basements, twiddling their nobs to get clear reception.

When Ullman describes the participants in a MOOC she attended in order to learn how to code:

Women, men, U.S. citizens or not, students just out of college, laid off fifty-year-old hoping to retrain themselves for twenty-first century jobs. Curious laborers. Students aspiring to escape the bounds of their social class. How appealing do they find this introduction to the world of programming? (254)

I physically wince when she recounts one MOOC’s reliance on Monty Python references to drive home pedagogical lessons. Legitimate connections can be made between the British comedy troupe so important to (male) geek identity and by extension (male) programming identity.^[1]Monty Python is a mostly British plus American Terry Gilliam comedy troup central to geek culture and influenced the naming of the Python programming language. See: wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python. The Python programming language sits at the center of Ullman’s chosen introductory class in programming.^[2]“Python. (Programming Language).” (2018, July 31). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language). I am guilty of thinking universal the brand of British-American humor embedded in the Flying Circus and Douglas Adams references&mdashthis geeky world peppers my metaphors and playful sense to the absurd.^[3]“Douglas Adams.” (2018, July 27). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams. Ullman’s assertion is staggering, and I am guilty. Guilty of erecting walls and barriers before the very people I most want to invite in, when the hug of welcome is an intrusion and a violation of personal space: taboo breaking of unknown cultural norms. Humiliating, embarrassing, and probably cause of a good deal of the façade of anger white fragility hurls outward.^[4]“White Privilege.” (2018, July 25). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from wikipedia.org/wiki/White_privilege. I did not mean to hurt; yet I have hurt and am implicated. But wait, don’t I get to “be myself?” Well, no, not when it costs another their dignity, their bodily comfort, their right to be offered the substance of the course—programming, engineering, STEM—without first having to endure a completely unnecessary, beside the point, and rather ridiculous hazing ritual: Don’t Panic.^[5]The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (2018, July 30). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy. Well, yes, the message is there, but how many footnotes, explanations, and contextualizations are offered before everyone gets to share in the joke? And I am supremely embarrassed by my own conduct over years, thinking I have been inclusive when my attempt at being approachable has constructed the very barriers I wanted to push aside. [Sigh.] All I can tell myself is that I intended to present an open door. Instead, I demanded to know the air-speed velocity of an unladden European swallow.^[6]Explaining a joke kills it. I think the reader, whether aware or blissfully unaware of Monty Python, Douglas Adams, or American (male) geek culture understands by this point what I am trying to make … Continue reading “What … is your favorite color?” Even the characters portrayed in the programming examples are off-putting: Sir Loin the protagonist.^[7]See: aqua-teen-hunger-force.wikia.com/wiki/Super_Sir_Loin. Another door slams.

Like Ullman, many of us are seeing the signs of disruption. There are fewer filled retail spaces even in a booming economy: while Amazon is forcing K-Mart and Sears into historical oblivion, Bezos’s behemoth has opened two pickup points on campus and ThinkGeek has a store in the local shopping mall. Best Buy is no longer trying to sell its way to profitability. Instead, it has contracted with some of the higher-end hardware manufacturers (Sony, Asus, Apple, Lenovo) to showcase their products in-store. So even the most successful retail ventures are successful not because they are better at discounting. Instead, they are changing what it means to be a retail establishment in the 21^st century. Brick and mortar retail is being remediated by successful online businesses. A recent NPR story asserts that Walmart is the digital upstart to the stalwart Amazon: if that’s not remediation then the neologism is truly empty.^[8]See: marketplace.org/2017/08/17/business/walmart-amazon-rivalry. Agility, defined here as a shift from selling discounted electronics to being the showroom for high-end electronics design, may not be an obvious or advertised commodity, but it changes the rules of play.

The book closes with a simultaneous reminder/critique that what is dislocated by all this technological disruption is access. Writing about urban renewal in her beloved SOMA neighborhood in San Francisco, Ullman bemoans the loss not just of trees in her favorite urban oasis along with the weathered picnic tables where locals gathered to socialize and talk, and other less savory things, in the shade of trees whose replacements will not cast sufficient shade for decades to come. Most powerfully, she writes about the loss of the smallest retail stalls from the buildings at the base of SOMA’s rebuilt high-rises. These arcades housed the entry point to American economic life, harkening back to an earlier definition of startup. Gone are the small, inexpensive kiosks:

Where were the spaces for the dry cleaners, shoe makers, convenience stores, all that goes into making something that is not just a building but a part of a neighborhood? … Where was the drive to address affordable capitalism? (277)

Access as economic access, independence, and the ability to be self-supporting, to make a living, a life: these are the affordances missing from the sleek silhouetted buildings rising into the sky. Interestingly, the discussion of technology and access … not to wealth but the right to make a modest living if not a killing … somehow and inevitably returns to discussion of architecture, and through architecture and awareness of the lived in and moved-through spaces, public and private, to the underlying infrastructures and the discourses that enable infrastructural thinking to emerge: awareness of how life in this city will be lived, as it is the future of life and work, and through those key components, that emergent human identities and opportunity for developing ethics and character.

It occurs to me that most of the new inhabitants of the new SOMA don’t need a neighborhood as we once knew it. Maybe the city planners were right in their careless and unfeeling way. The new residents have a different idea of what a city is…They won’t miss the local dry cleaner or drugstore or convenience market. (282)

Ullman has captured the sunset of a way of living, of an urban social compact where immigrants come to the inner city, gather, and cater to needs of the last generations of immigrants on their way out of the urban center, moving out into suburban sprawl. Venture capital and urban pioneers have, again, disrupted this mid-20^th century pattern, further remediating the city center with disruption: disruptive ideas, technologies, patterns, needs. Ullman’s approach appeals to the sense of loss and nostalgia for a lost age of urban community, of urbanity itself if not cosmopolitanism. Yet the sense of what is being lost dissipates as I reflect on the cities I have known most intimately: New York City and London are world cities, like Ullman’s beloved San Francisco (she is partial to New York as well, glimpses of which I am grateful for throughout the book), and their groaning incapacities to accommodate the world’s wealthiest in ever-more glamorous, lofty, airy, open apartments and penthouses as recent immigrants are forced out of city center towards less visible, more diffusely populated suburban secondary centers with little if any glamor—the aging Levittowns and cul-de-sacs of mid-century white flight becoming increasingly brown, progressively taking on the less-glamorous responsibilities once left to the lower-east side and far northern reaches of Manhattan and neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Mission and SOMA. Lafayette, Indiana, USA and Dundee, Scotland, UK rebuild themselves precisely to articulate the next generations of emergent entrepreneurs, the go-getters and all-nighters and hungry strivers that once filtered through Ellis Island, then JFK, and now through every international airport across the nation, bringing new blood, new ideas, new energy. Is Ullman right in asserting that the bottom rungs of American capitalism have been removed, or have the bottom rungs, the entry points, been moved to other, less expensive—less glamorous—locales, creating less visible entrée to American civic and economic life?

Ullman uses a wonderfully layered moniker for her inquiry: desktop archeology. She does not mean armchair archeology, the kind of passive consumer experience made possible by mobile, miniaturized digital video equipment (although “The Party Line”, a late chapter set in Ithaca, New York in 1970 and 2015, effectively explores the politics of video as precursor to internetworked politics). No, she means an archeology of her previous computing machines: an archeology of the self she (spoiler alert) likens to the process of keeping and then reading and re-reading personal journals: old hard drives as repositories of previous selves. Less than social science, this is an exploration akin to Gregory Ulmer’s Me-Stories and the Emer/a/gency. While poking at an aching sense of what is lost at the city centers, the increasingly heartless Manhattan and San Francisco neighborhoods with which she has fallen out of love, Ullman nevertheless returns to earlier versions of her- selves as encased in those hard drives, interfaces, and operating systems, and through that exercise, reminding herself what she had been, and where she had been, “programming as a collective exercise in incremental forgetting.” (52) While an archeological study of the self and of a succession of previous past selves, she also articulates the information architect’s approach. Like Gary Hustwit obsessively making movies, first, about a typeface in Helvetica, then about design in Objectified, and finally, about cityscapes in Urbanized, Ullman sifts through the artifacts of her previous selves to ponder urban spaces:

… we build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins. (47)

Readers who have encountered Ullman previously will recognize her mellifluous yet strong voice. They will likely recognize themes such as “Close to the machine, ” the title of her highly acclaimed 1997 book in which she first articulates, then deconstructs, the geek-boy-genius mythology of the Gates-Woz-Jobs-Bezos ontology and origin myth of the interwebs, as well as the reversed hierarchy where being a low-level programmer means he is a better, more important programmer than another he or, more commonly, a she, who is a high-level programmer, or further away from the machine.^[9]Ullman, Ellen. 1997 (2012 reprint). Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents. 1st Picador ed. New York: Picador/ Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Closer, lower programmers get to be not only idiosyncratic, but bratty and misogynistic because their genius leaves them unfit for mortal human interaction, while those far from the machine and higher amid interface-wielding programming systems wonder where their careers took wrong turns, leaving them outside, too far to have any impact or influence on the underlying source code—the actual ones and zeros of which the virtual is woven.

To be close, to be low, to be permitted to be eccentric and peculiar: privilege leaves so many (male) programmers blind. It leaves them unable to fathom how relatively inconsequential endless references to in-jokes like “Sir Loin” as characters in mandatory programming assignments and constant references to the number 42 being the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything that, while meant to be playful and familiar, are actually off-putting, exclusionary, and precious. More importantly:

The project team is having lunch and discussing how long it would take to wipe out a disease inherited recessively on the X chromosome. First come calculations of inheritance probabilities. Given a population of a given size, one of the engineers arrives at a wipe-out date. Immediately another suggests that the date could be moved forward by various manipulations … They start with rewards to discourage carriers from breeding. Immediately they move to fines for those who reproduce with the disease. Then they go for what they call “more effective” measures: Jail for breeding. Induced abortion. Forced sterilization. (9)

It would be funny if it weren’t so serious. It wouldn’t be funny if these geek-man-boys did not have so much cultural power. If their real, sovereign power were not so broadly and deeply felt. It would not be so scary, perhaps, if we had not known of the Nazi’s final solution, or if Trump weren’t in the White House, coddling white supremacists and neo-Nazis. If reductio-ad-Nazium weren’t already a joke among these very same man-boys, who do not know or care to understand when their argument is being reduced to absurdities, reductio ad absurdum. And this is why I treasure Ullman’s text, itself a collection of thirty years’ worth of greatest hits writing about technology. It reminds every reader that, first, the tradition that erases women’s contributions to technoculture is all too alive and well, and that it continues to systematically remove women from history and devalue women’s perspectives and that, second, if technoculture is to move beyond the most fragile man-boy obsessions and obscenities, it needs to get beyond the portrait of the ham radio operator in the basement, Ullman’s neighbor Eugene, and all our under-socialized geek-boy friends, colleagues, and selves, unable or unwilling to communicate with other human beings—especially those with other genital configurations.

Ullman’s Life in Code is a replacement for the small library of books that I have used to get diverse classes interested in the newest, shiniest artifacts of digital culture, mostly written in the coded nerd-language of man-boy geekdom: What the Dormouse Saw, The Information, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, Weaving the Web, Microserfs, How the Web was Born, Revolution in the Valley, Casting the Net, The Internet Galaxy, Architects of the Web, The Information Architects, and Wired, a Romance: all titles I have inflicted on students throughout two decades of teaching at the undergraduate and graduate level. At the very least, Ullman has spared future students from tortured prose and mediocre historical narrative. At best, our attention will linger where further, inclusive development of technoculture most needs us.

 

Biography

Michael J. Salvo is Director of Professional Writing and Associate Professor at Purdue University. Routledge recently published his book Writing Postindustrial Places: Technoculture amid the Cornfields, exploring globally competitive firms in the American Midwest (2017). He also edited the collection Rhetoric and Experience Architecture with Liza Potts (Parlor Press, 2017). Michael is a founding member and on the editorial board of Kairos, the longest continuously publishing online journal in new media, rhetoric and writing; he won the Hugh Burns Award in computers and writing; received the Ellen Nold Award for research published in Computers and Composition; and the Kairos Best Webtext Award.

© 2018 Michael Salvo, used by permission

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Technoculture Volume 8 (2018)