Microserfs

by Douglas Coupland

What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?

“Wh@ iz human B-havior, X-ept tryng 2 proov th@ w’r not animalz?”

I learned a great new word today: “deletia.” When you get an e-mail and reply to the sender, you simply obliterate everything they sent you and then, in small square brackets, write: [deletia] It stands for everything that’s been lost.

I‘m coming to the conclusion about the human subconscious … that, no matter how you look at it, machines really are our subconscious. I mean, people from outer space didn’t come down to earth and make machines for us … we made them ourselves. So machines can only be products of our being, and as such, windows into our souls … by monitoring the machines we build, and the sorts of things we put into them, we have this amazingly direct litmus as to how we are evolving.

Politics is, in the end, about biology, information, diversification, numbers, numbers, and numbers—all candy coated with charisma and guns.”

Ethan said randomness is a useful shorthand for describing a pattern that’s bigger than anything we can hold in our minds.

Karla noted that when photocopy machines first started to come out, people photocopied their bums. “Now, with computers, we photocopy our very being.”

This is maybe the core of the nerd dream: the core of power and money that lies at the center of the storm of technology, that doesn’t have to express emotion or charisma, because emotion can’t be converted into lines of code. Yet.

Karla said that as our memory multiplies itself seemingly logarithmically, history’s pace feels faster, it is “accelerating” at an oddly distorted rate, and will only continue to do so faster and faster.