Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents

She arrived with an entourage of eight, a group she had described on the telephone as “Internet heavy-hitters from Palo Alto.” They were all in their early thirties. The men had excellent briefcases, wore beautiful suits, and each breast pocket bulged ever so slightly with what was later revealed to be a tiny, exquisite cellular phone. One young man was so blonde, so pale-eyed, so perfectly white, he seemed to have stepped out of a propaganda film for National Socialism. Next to him was a woman with blond frosted hair, chunky real-gold bracelets, red nails, and a short skirt, whom I took for a marketing type; she turned out to be in charge of “physical network configuration.” This group strutted in with all the fresh-faced drive of technocapitalism, took their seats beneath the AIDS prevention posters (“Warriors wear shields with men and women!” “I take this condom everywhere I bring my penis!”), and began their sales presentation.

My work hours have leaked into all parts of the day and week. Eight in the morning, ten at night, Saturday at noon, Sundays: I am never not working. Even when I'm not actually doing something that could be called work, I might get started any minute. So everything is an interruption -- a call from a friend, an invitation to lunch -- everything must be refused because it is possible that from one moment to the next I will get back to something.

Delivery guys love us: We're the new housewives. We're always home.

In the afternoons, I see us virtuals emerge blinking into the sunlight. In the dead hours after 3 P.M., we haunt cafés and local restaurants. We run into each other at the FedEx drop-box or the copy shop. They, like me, have a freshly laundered look, just come out of pajamas or sweat pants, just showered and dressed.

I recognize my virtual colleagues by their overattention to little interactions with waiters and cashiers, a supersensitivity that has come from too much time spent alone. We've been in a machine-mediated world -- computers and e-mail, phones and faxes -- and suddenly we're in a world where people lumber up and down the steps of buses, walk in and out of stores, have actual in-person conversations. All this has been going on while I was in another universe: that's what comes to us with a force like the too-bright sun or a stiff wind off the bay. We do our business, drop off the overnight packet, clip together the xeroxes, and hurry home.