Microserfs

by Douglas Coupland

An hour later we were all back at work, when apropos of nothing, Bug said, “Ahem, “ called our attention, and announced that he’s gay. How random! “I’ve been inning’ myself for too long,” he said, “and now it’s time to out myself. It’s something you’ll all have to deal with, but believe me, I’ve been dealing with it a lot longer than you.” It never even entered our heads to think Bug was anything except a sexually frustrated, bitter crank, which is not unusual up at Microsoft, or in tech in general. I think we all felt guilty because we don’t think about Bug enough, and he does work hard, and his ideas really are good. But we’re just so used to him being cranky it never occurred to us he had an interior life, too.

At geek parties, you can sort corporate drones from start-up drones by dress and conversation. Karla and I stood next to two guys who work on the Newton project at Apple. They talked with unflagging enthusiasm about frequent flyer miles for about 45 minutes. They had a purchasable Valley hip. One guy had the mandatory LA Eyeworks glasses and a nutty orange vest worn over baggy jeans. The other guy had Armani glasses and a full Calvin Klein ensemble, but not a matching ensemble, mind you—“thrown together” in “that expensive way.” You can’t help but be conscious here of how much everything costs, and where it comes from.

At Microsoft you pretend bodies dont’ exist … BRAINS are what matter. Vou’re right, at Microsoft bodies get down played to near invisibilty with unsensual Tommy Hilfiger geekwear, or are genericized with items form the GRP so that employees morph themelfves into those international symbols for MAN and WOMAN you see at airports.

I almost made Dad a cardboard sign saying,”WILL MANAGE FOR FOOD“ but then I felt like a bad, bad son, and then, like clockwork, I got to feeling depressed for fifty something’s, imagining them standing at the corner of El Camino Real and Rengstorff Avenue holding up such a sign.

Before California high-tech parks, the most a corporation ever did for an employee was maybe supply a house, maybe a car, maybe a doctor, and maybe a place to buy groceries. Beginning in the 1970s, corporations began supplying showers for people who jogged during lunch hour and sculptures to soothe the working soul—proactive humanism—the first full-scale integration of the corporate realm into the private. In the 1980s, corporate integration punctured the next realm of corporate life invasion at “campuses” like Microsoft and Apple—with the next level of intrusion being that the borderline between work and life blurred to the point of unrecognizability. Give us your entire life or we won’t allow you to work on cool projects.

Dad quit his night course in C++ because all of the kids in his class were seventeen and they just stared at him and didn’t think he could be a student because he was too old. The students were saying things to each other like, “If he comes too close to you shout, ‘You’re not my father!’ as loud as you can.” Kids are so cruel.

I can’t stop marveling at how together geeks are in the Valley. At Microsoft, there was no peer pressure to do anything except work and ship on time. If you did, you got a Ship-it Award. Easy. Black and White. Here, it’s so much more complicated—you’re supposed to have an exciting, value-adding job that utilizes your creativity, a wardrobe from Nordstrom’s or at the very least Banana Republic, a $400,000 house, a cool European or Japanese car, the perfect relationship with someone as ambitious, smart, and well-dressed as yourself, and extra money to throw parties so that the whole world can observe what a life you have, indeed.

Many geeks don’t really have a sexuality—they just have work. I think the sequence is that they get jobs at Microsoft or wherever right out of school, and they’re so excited to have this “real” job and money that they just figure that the relationships will naturally happen, but then they wake up and they’re thirty and they haven’t had sex in eight years.

Actually, today was just a big waste of a day, work-wise. I didn’t get anything done because I had too many interruptions. I’d start to do something, then I’d be distracted by something else, forget what I was doing in the first place, and then get so worried that I wasn’t getting anything done, that it wrecked even further my ability to get anything done. Sometimes too much communication is too much communication.

Dad was out today—job hunting. Anywhere else on earth except here in the Valley he wouldn’t have a chance, but here he might find something.

Michael pointed out that humans are the only animals to have generations. “Bears, for example, certainly don’t have generations. Mom and Dad bears don’t expect their offspring to eat different kinds of berries and hibernate to a different beat. The belief that tomorrow is a different place from today is certainly a unique hallmark of our species.” Michael’s theory is that technology creates and molds generations. When technology accelerates to a critical point, as it has now, generations become irrelevant. Each of us as individuals becomes our own individual diskette with our own personal “version.”

I‘m sure the Hollywood unions are just waiting with bated breath for coding and multimedia production to unionize. What’s it going to be—I write the code and then somebody from I.A.T.S.E. comes in and has to press the RETURN key?

Every time I look at Karla, she changes and changes, and now I realize other men are looking at her and this makes me have to look at myself, and what I see is sort of scrawny. Suddenly Karla can date higher on the geek food chain than me if she wants to—she can date all the Phils-from-Apples of this world—she has entered the realms of buffness and cleft chins. I care about being with her too much to lose her to a … Phil unit. To lose her ever, to anyone. I can’t imagine losing her. I must make myself stronger. I must build a better me. I must become the Bionic Man.

And his big personal beef is Japanese animation. He says that SEGA and Nintendo are responsible for the “subtle but massive Hello-Kittification of North American animation. You can kiss our Hanna-Barbera heritage good-bye.” How can anybody take this so seriously? Emmett has 4,000 manga comics from Japan. They’re so violent and dirty! The characters all look as if they’re saying unbelievably important things—talking to God and the Wizard of the Universe—but when you translate them, all they’re really doing is making belching noises.

I learned a new expression today: “protein window.” Todd told it to me. Apparently, after you bodybuild, you have a two-hour time window in which your body can suck up amino acids. This is your protein window. I was talking to him and he said, “Man, I’d like to talk some more, but my protein window is closing,” and he ran off to the kitchen and ate a chicken. What a decade this is.

Susan says the Gap is smart because they cut it both ways: “Kids in Armpit, Nebraska, go into a Gap with pictures in their heads of Manhattan, Claudia Schiffer, and the Concorde, while kids in Manhattan go into the Gap with a picture in their head of Armpit, Nebraska. So it’s as though Gap clothing puts you anywhere except where you actually are.”

“J. Crew is a thinly veiled Gap. So is Eddie Bauer. Banana Republic is owned by the same people as the Gap. Armani A/X is a EuroGap. Brooks Brothers is a Gap for people with more disposable income whose bodies need hiding, upscaling, and standardization. Victoria’s Secret is a Gap of calculated naughtiness for ladies. McDonald’s is the Gap of hamburgers. LensCrafters is the Gap of eyewear. Mrs. Fields is the Gap of cookies. And so on.

Michael pointed out that a few years ago there was a minor furor over the ethics of Dairy Queen, who sent their franchisees hamburger patties that were pseudo-randomly shaped, with little bumpies around the patty’s edges, so that burger’s consumer would feel more as though they were having a “handmade” burger. “In this same spirit, one wonders if the Gap randomly assigns nonstandardized clothing items to its various outlets so as to simulate the illusion of regional variety.”

MICROSOFT! You know how it is here - singles overwork to make themselves shine, but the *Marrieds* become the managers, and move up the ladder more quuickly, Elearnor Rigbies need not apply.

Dusty said, “Gawd … I was rilly, rilly freaked out the first time I had chunks. No one ever tells you about that in, like, school or at home or anything. You see those Playtex commercials and they’ve got this watery blue liquid and that’s what you’re expecting, and then one day you look at your pad and there are … chunks there. Grotacious.” Karla, ever logical, said, “I knew intellectually it had to be uterine lining, but I envisioned the lining as being thin, wispy … not like chunks of liver.” Dusty figured, “We, as women, also need to invent some alternative to that adhesive they use on pads. I wouldn’t even wear them if it weren’t for chunks. It rilly bothers me to think of these chunks that want to migrate south, but they can’t because of this Tampon Roadblock. So I always wear pads on like the second day, but I hate them. It’s like getting a drive-by waxing.” Karla suggested, “If they ever made ‘chunky-style’ tampons, we wouldn’t need to ever wear pads.” Susan said, “I’ll bet you anything Fry’s doesn’t carry tampons because they’re misogynist and afraid of adult, bleeding women … they can’t accept the non-Barbie, fully-functional female!” Karla and Dusty: “Right on, Sister!” Susan said, “Yet again men win: with condom hysteria and semen they monopolize the notion of sacred body fluids. Women lose again. I want pads to be to the 1990s what condoms were to the 1980s. Destigmatize the flow!”

On the way back we drove past Xerox PARC on Coyote Hill Road, and Bug swooned only mildly. He now no longer foams when he imagines how Xerox could be the biggest company on Earth if they’d only understood what they had back in the 1970s.

The industry is made up of either gifted techies or smart generalists—the people who were bored with high school—the sort of people the teacher was always telling, “Now, Abe, you could get As if you really wanted to. Why don’t you just apply yourself?” Look for these people—the talented generalists. They’re good as project and product managers. They’re the same people who would have gone into advertising in 1973.

The upper age limit of people with instincts for this business is about 40. People who were over 30 at the beginning of the late 1970s PC revolution missed the boat; anyone older is like a Delco AM car radio.

“Jeremy wanted me to be just like him, which wouldn’t be so bad, except he’s just like all of his friends. It’s like Coeur d’Alene all over again—except with pasta and better defined pectorals. And it doesn’t annoy me that Jeremy wants me to be just like him. That’s actually kind of nice. But what bothers me is that Jeremy is just essentially not like me, and we’re too disparate to ever be in sync. I thought, you know, dating would be a bit easier. It’s not. And what’s truly freaky is realizing I’m vulnerable to identity changes because I’m so desperate to find a niche. I feel like Crystal Pepsi.”

Michael and Ethan broke down and told everyone the news—we have NO money. They made sure Dad wasn’t around for the news, which was nice. We’d more or less suspected this all along, so in the end it came as no surprise. Suddenly Microsoft doesn’t look so bad. How could we have been so stupid to leave? Microsoft is a business first and only—not a social welfare state for 13,000 people who lucked in at the right moment.

The tech system feeds on bright, asocial kids from diveorced backgrounds who had pro-education parents. We ARE in a new industry; there aren’t really many older poeple in it. We are on the vanguard of adoldescence protraction. As is common with Microsoft people I worked like a mental case throughout my 20s, and then hit this wall at thiry and went *SPLRT*. But just think about the way high tech cultures purposefully protract out the adolescence of their employees well into their late 20s, if not their early 30s,. I mean, all those NERF TOUYS and FREE BEVERAGES! And the way tech firms won’t even call work “The office:, but instead, “the campus”. It’s sick and evil.

Identity. I go by the Tootsie theory: that if you concoct a convincing on-line meta-personality on the Net, then that personality really IS you. With so few things around nowadays to loan a person identity, the palette of identities you create for yourself in the vacuum of the Net—your menu of alternative “you’s”—actually IS you. Or an isotope of you. Or a photocopy of you.

At the bar, I asked Amy what it was—or rather, how it was that two people could not know each other and fall in love and all of that. She told me that all her life people had only ever treated her like a body or a girl—or both. And 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. “Reveal your gender on the Net, and you’re toast.” She considered her situation: “It’s an update of the rich man who poses as a pauper and finds the princess. But fuck that princess shit—we’re both kings.”

Our ancient queen-size bed was as concave as a satellite dish—the same mattress must have been mangling the lumbars of low-budget gamblers since the Ford Administration—so we sat clustered in its recess like kangaroo babies inside Mom’s pouch.

We generate stories for you because you don’t save the ones that are yours.

The booths are all staffed by thousands of those guys in high school who were good-looking but who got C+’s; they’re stereo salesmen now and have to suck up to the nerds they tormented in high school.

I must say, there’s something timeless about the false sincerity and synthetic goodwill of meetings, the calculated jocularity and the simian dominant-male/subordinate-male body language. At least the presence of Karla, Susan, and Amy saved us from the inevitable stripper jokes. Karla pointed out how in marketing meetings at Microsoft, everybody was trying to be fake-perky, and trying to fake having ideas, while at CES, everybody’s trying to be fake-sincere and trying to fake not looking desperate.

The Convention Center has the worst food on earth, served in the most humiliating, chair-free, low-dignity manner possible. People looked like dogs, hobbled over, eating high-sodium, byproduct-enriched, grease-lathered guck. Convention Center food in your stomach is like having fifty chest × rays, it’s so toxic. In fact for the rest of the day, the “chest × ray” became our official standard of measurement for something that is probably very bad for you, which shortens your life, but which won’t take its toll until much later on. If we met someone really horrible, we said they were like “ten chest × rays,” and we’ll probably die three days earlier than if we had never met that person.

I wandered around and picked up a copy of the New York Times lying next to an SGI unit blasting out a flight simulation. There, on the third page of the business section, not even the first, was a story about how Apple shares were going up in value as a result of rumors of an impending three-way buyout by Panasonic (Holland), Oracle (USA), and Matsushita (Japan). My, how things change. That’s all I can think. Apple used to be the King of the Valley, and now they’re getting prospected like a start-up. Time frames are so extreme in the tech industry. Life happens at fifty times the normal pace.

Bug, Sig, and Karla were all a bit annoyed by how “family-oriented” the city had become, and we yearned for traces of its proud history of sleaze and corruption. I mean, if you can’t get lost in Las Vegas, then what’s the point of Las Vegas?

The porn pavilion itself was creepy. This weird porn energy and lots of women with breasts like basketballs. It sounds so great in that bachelor fantasy way, but then you see it, and you freak out. Actually, pornography really just makes sex look unappealing.

Las Vegas was once seedy, but it has now evolved into a Disney version of itself—which is probably less fun, but certainly more lucrative, and certainly necessary for the city to survive as an entity in the 1990s. Disneyland presupposes a universe of noncompetitive species—food chains hypersimplified into sterility by a middle-class fear of entropy: animals who will not eat each other and who irrationally enjoy human company; plant life consisting of lawns sprinkled on the fringes with colorful, sterile flowers.

Karla massaged Mom’s back in Mom’s new room beside the kitchen, a room that we filled with her rocks and photos and potpourri and Misty. Misty, buffered by dumbness, unaware of the traffic jams in the blood flow of her master’s brain: carbon freeways of cracked cement and flattened Camrys and Isuzus and F-100s; neural survivors as well as those neural victims, all as yet unretrieved from within the overpasses of her Self. Mom’s brain is crashed and inert, her limbs as stationary as lemon tree branches on an August afternoon, occasionally twitching limbs appended by a wedding ring and a Chyx wristband from Amy. Images of a crashed Japan on every channel, the newscaster’s voice floating in the background. At least Japan can be rebuilt.

And it was Karla who started us talking to Mom, Mom’s eyes fishy, blank, lost and found, requiring an act of faith to presuppose vivid interior dimensions still intact. Karla who made me stare into these faraway eyes and say, Speak to her, Dan: She can hear you and how can you not look into these eyes that once loved you when you were a baby, and not tell her of your day. Talk to her, Dan: tell her … today was a day like any other day. We worked. We coded. Our product is doing well, and isn’t that just fine? And so I told Mom these things. And so every day, I hold the hand that once held me, so long ago.

We entered the kitchen, where Bug and Amy were discussing an idea of Bug’s, that “humans don’t exist as actual individual ‘selves’—rather, there is only the ‘probability’ of you being you at any given moment. While you’re alive and healthy, the probability remains pretty high, but when you’re sick or when you’re old, the probability of you being yourself shrinks. The chance of your ‘being all there’ becomes less and less. When you die, the probability of being ‘you’ drops to zero.”

IT IS JANUARY 1995, the month of Microserf Daniel’s final dispatches from Silicon Valley. The prospects for Oop!, our geek heroes’ software business, are looking up. “Oop!, I might add, is going to be a hit,” Daniel tells us. Skip forward thirteen years—how would you rate the chances today of a group of low-level dissident Microsoft coders attracting investment for Digital Lego? About as good as finding the Justice Department on Bill Gates’s Christmas card list. With Michael’s Oop! odyssey, Douglas Coupland captured the early nineties wave of geeky prospectors that made its way out to the West Coast for the Silicon Rush. By the late nineties, young, brash Internet start-ups were receiving seemingly limitless funding.

So what went wrong? Well, here’s the condensed version. It’s all to do with investor confidence. Hundreds of dot-com start-ups around the world joined the stock markets. Most weren’t turning a profit and had pitiful sales levels. But what they did have was the distinct whiff of revolutionary technology. Investors were desperate to get in on the ground floor, and banks would offer greenhorn companies huge borrowing levels (debt to you and me) to get them on their way. Share prices skyrocketed as investors ignored profits (there still weren’t any) and instead used measurements such as website hits to measure success. “Not for the first time, Douglas Coupland was ahead of the game.” Then, in 2000, there were some high-profile casualties. In the U.K., online clothing retailer Boo.com was forced to shut down just six months after it was launched. The £80 million of funding with which Boo.com had started was the largest ever in Europe for a retail internet venture, but it quickly ran out. Consumers shunned Boo’s digital shopping experience with its epileptic array of pop-ups and unfathomable purchasing processes. Another sufferer was online travel site Lastminute.com. On the day it floated onto the stock exchange in March 2000 its shares soared from 380p to 550p. Young cofounders Martha Lane Fox and Brent Hoberman became irresistible City pinups. However, although Lastminute.com has survived, by October 2001 its shares were worth less than 20p. It is 1993 in Microserfs when a ve...

venture capitalist tells a deflated Ethan: “There’s nothing the world wants as little as a new technology company. If you give a company $2 million, they’ll spend it all and never ship a profitable product.” Not for the first time, Douglas Coupland was ahead of the game, and it took another seven years for real-world investors to come to the same conclusion. By the end of 2000 the dream was over. Investors who had started getting impatient about their lack of financial return from the Internet now began stampeding toward the exit signs. Technology share prices collapsed, and so did the prospects of thousands of dot-com employees who had accepted equity packages in the companies they worked for. The geek’s beloved desktop WinQuote window, for so many years a kaleidoscope of escalating share prices, now looked out onto a vista of tumbling numbers and corporate bloodshed. Venture capital firms, who two years before couldn’t get enough of projects like Oop!, now couldn’t run away fast enough from hexed technology start-ups.