(4) Introduction [Jaron Lanier]

"This piercing book records what it felt like when humans were first engulfed by artificial computation."(4)

"For all the global roar of the Internet’s regard of the Internet, a plain account of living with computation is hard to come by. There are precious few."(6)

(14) [0] Space is numeric

"in another part of my being—later, perhaps when we emerge from this room full of computers—I will care very much why and for whom and for what purpose I am writing software. But just now: no. I have passed through a membrane where the real world and its uses no longer matter."(16)

(32) [1] Transactions

Ze wordt ingehuurd door een bank. Daarbij krijgt ze met Brian te maken.

"“Corporate users,” I thought. They live where software edges into business. Corporate end users: wildebeests of the programming food chain, consumers, roaming perilously far from the machine."(32)

"In that place she ran over so quickly was a dimly understood process: programmers turning the many pages of specifications into a foreign language called code."(35)

"“A project leader I know once said that managing programmers is like trying to herd cats.”
“Uhmm,” she demurred again. “Clever.”
“I mean, you don’t want them to stop being cats,” I kept on bravely. “You don’t want obedient dogs. You want all that weird strangeness that makes a good programmer. On the other hand, you do have to get them somehow moving in the same direction.”"(35)

"The “system” comes to them done on paper, in English. “All” they have to do is write the code. But somewhere in that translation between the paper and the code, the clarity breaks down. The world as humans understand it and the world as it must be explained to computers come together in the programmer in a strange state of disjunction."(36)

"Then something happens. As the months of coding go on, the irregularities of human thinking start to emerge. You write some code, and suddenly there are dark, unspecified areas. All the pages of careful documents, and still, between the sentences, something is missing. Human thinking can skip over a great deal, leap over small misunderstandings, can contain ifs and buts in untroubled corners of the mind. But the machine has no corners. Despite all the attempts to see the computer as a brain, the machine has no foreground or background. It cannot simultaneously do something and withhold for later something that remains unknown. In the painstaking working out of the specification, line by code line, the programmer confronts all the hidden workings of human thinking.
Now begins a process of frustration. The programmer goes back to the analysts with questions, the analysts to the users, the users to their managers, the managers back to the analysts, the analysts to the programmers. It turns out that some things are just not understood. No one knows the answers to some questions. Or worse, there are too many answers. A long list of exceptional situations is revealed, things that occur very rarely but that occur all the same. Should these be programmed? Yes, of course. How else will the system do the work human beings need to accomplish? Details and exceptions accumulate. Soon the beautiful crystal must be recut. This lovely edge and that one are gone. The whole graceful structure loses coherence. What began in a state of grace soon reveals itself to be a jumble. The human mind, as it turns out, is messy." [mijn nadruk] (37-38)

"It has become a struggle against disorder. A battle of wills. A testing of endurance. Requirements muddle up; changes are needed immediately. Meanwhile, no one has changed the system deadline."(39)

"Something in the whole cypherpunk presentation invited skepticism. The name they’d given themselves: punks. Their self-promotion. Their manifestos posted on the Web. The whole hip-boy-rebel thing. The idea that they could outsmart anyone: global superpowers, international law enforcement, giant transnational corporations—they hated any and all authority and no one was safe from their brilliant cypherpunkdom. And they were having way too much fun making everyone deeply nervous. Something about all this was just too familiar.() Boys being bad: what else is new."(54)

[Ja, het is het gedrag van arrogante mannetjes... Maar dat bekritiseert ze blijkbaar niet.]

(55) [2] Sushi

Ze maakt een afspraak met Brian en gaat met hem naar bed.

"But now, in bringing up morals, I’d gone and ruined it: I’d brought up something dull."(70)

[Hoe ze over die Brian praat... Schokkend onkritisch tegenover al dat technische geklets. Natuurlijk wil hij het niet over de moraal hebben.]

(70) [3] Real estate

"When my father died, he left the family two small commercial buildings in the Wall Street area.() Me: communist turned software engineer slash landlord."(71 en 74)

[Ze is dus ook nog bemiddeld ook. ]

Briasn heeft plannen voor pornoservers, in Mexico.

"The whole complicated business of international pornography had devolved, in Brian’s thinking, to the level of a mathematical problem, some famously difficult proof, a challenge of the mind. He seemed neither attracted to nor repulsed by the content of the stuff he would be sending around. To him, it was just bits, stuff on the wire—my building turned into a bond or a picture of a woman tied up and raped—none of his business either."(82)

"Meanwhile, tapas getting cold in from of me, Brian spinning dreams of techno-deception, I replayed my reaction to myself. Shrug. I cast off twenty years of feminist debate. Shrug. The battles of my mid-twenties, the groups of women dividing and subdividing over this issue. The slogans, the shouting matches: Sexual freedom! Take back the night! Anti-sex! Pornography hurts women! A decade when I was in collectives large and small, in parties and formations and factions, all of them intending to change the world. Shrug. I let it all go. How could he understand anyway? Why go into all that now? Shrug. All the old politics fell away so easily, like scales off a dead fish. And what did it matter? I had no particular liking for what Brian was doing, but I couldn’t imagine a world I’d want to live in where it should be illegal. The argument could only be moral, some private decision a person must come to alone, and, right then, just come from a round of landlording, I was fresh out of moral superiority."(83)

[Maar ze neemt dus geen standpunt in. Slappe hap, die auteur. ]

(84) [4] Software and suburbia

"Like any of the boy engineers, I enjoy cursing at the machine. It makes me feel superior: smarter than the hardware, smarter than the software, smarter than everyone who built it."(85)

"I was not ready to think about Brian. I especially didn’t want to think about the fact that, after the dinner where I learned about his porn server, I went home with him, and we had hours of sex, night and morning. The truly difficult thing to accept was how good it was. I don’t mean only the physical pleasure of bodies and positions, but a certain presence to one another, a certain close attention, which does not happen as often as people imagine it does. So it was all the more confusing to find it there, with this too-young man, who had no real emotional ties to me, nor I to him, and whose values I found disturbing."(85)

[Weinig reflectie in dit boek. Het heeft een prachtige titel, maar tot nu toe merk ik weinig van de 'discontents' en krijg ik een subjectief verhaal van allerlei ervaringen zonder kritische opmerkingen. Hierna komt ze weer terug op het AIDS-project uit het begin.]

"It worries me that no one has refused to sign the consent-to-share forms. Everyone confronted with a sheath of legal papers, all requiring signatures, has duly executed them: I hereby agree to share my records with all other participating agencies."(95)

[Ik denk niet dat mensen dat zo belangrijk vinden als ze totaal afhankelijk zijn geworden van zorg en snel dood zullen gaan.]

"When I watch the users try the Internet, it slowly becomes clear to me that the Net represents the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer. The users seem to believe that they are connected to some vast treasure trove—all the knowledge of our times, an endless digitized compendium, some electronic library of Alexandria—if only they could figure out how to search it properly. They sit and click, and look disconcertedly at the junk that comes back at them." [mijn nadruk] (97)

"In the end, the Jerry home page all but gives up on the idea of being a resource link to information on the Net. Instead, we supply information about the AIDS service providers participating in the project. Never mind that the clients Jerry is supposed to serve are not likely to have a computer, let alone a connection to the Web. Forget about that nasty reality: having a Web page has become the way we must prove our existence. We have a “presence” on the Web: we are therefore real."(101)

"Something similar happened with the AIDS project. Despite the idealism of the programmers, the good intentions of my client’s staff, the hard work of the users, what we created in the end was not the “system of care” we set out to build. In the end, what we created was only a system."(103)

[Waaraan je ziet hoe naïef ontwikkelaars van dat soort omgevingen zijn. Technologie zal alles oplossen. Nee, dus. Technologie heeft ook negatieve gevolgen: je maakt een systeem met e-mail en meteen houdt iedereen op te telefoneren wat veel beter contact oplevert.]

"In this way, the system became the justification for the system. We collected data, therefore it had to be “good” data. And since we could link one database to another, since it was possible to cross-check data here with data there, well, we should link them. And what was designed to store patients’ information as a service for them, had somehow become the property of the “people paying for this system”—an agency of the federal government."(107)

[Goed geformuleerd. Eindelijk kritiek op technologie. ]

"We place this small projection of ourselves all around us, and we make ourselves reliant on it. To keep information, buy gas, save money, write a letter—we can’t live without it any longer. The only problem is this: the more we surround ourselves with a narrowed notion of existence, the more narrow existence becomes. We conform to the range of motion the system allows. We must be more orderly, more logical. Answer the question, Yes or No, OK or Cancel." [mijn nadruk] (113)

[De vraag is in hoeverre dat werkelijk waar is. Ja en nee. Hangt er van af.]

"Finally, we arrive at tautology: the data prove the need for more data! We think we are creating the system, but the system is also creating us. We build the system, we live in its midst, and we are changed." [mijn nadruk] (114)

[Ik weet niet... Klinkt te deterministisch, alsof we geen keuze hebben. De morele kwesties bijvoorbeeld. Je schuift dat dan te gemakkelijk op de technische middelen af.]

"This time, on this contract, I will be working only with programmers and networking people. As to what flows over the networks—it’s no longer any of my concern. Let them send information about sick people or nudie shots. Shrug. None of my business." [mijn nadruk] (115)

[Een voorbeeld van het wegpraten van je verantwoordelijkheid. Wat als het om kinderporno gaat? ]

(117) [5] New, old, and middle age

"There they were on the cutting edge of our profession, and their arrogance was as natural as breathing. And in those slow moments while their vision of future Jerry was sketched across the whiteboards—intranet, Internet, cool, hip, and happening—I knew I had utterly and completely lost that arrogance in myself.
I missed it. Suddenly and inexplicably, I wanted my arrogance back. I wanted to go back to the time when I thought that, if I tinkered a bit, I could make anything work. That I could learn anything, in no time, and be good at it. The arrogance is a job requirement. It is the confidence-builder that lets you keep walking toward the thin cutting edge" [mijn nadruk] (120)

[Wat een onzin.]

"“What do you think?” asked my client after the presentation.
We sat, exhausted, beneath the AIDS posters. What did I think? What did it matter if I was staring down the road of my own obsolescence. I was leaving anyway. “Hire them,” I said. “If you can afford them, hire them.”"(123)

[Eerst terechte kritiekpunten geven en dan zeggen 'contracteer ze'? Ze neemt weer geen verantwoordelijkheid en doet weer eens wat anders dan ze zegt of vindt.]

Ze geeft een overzicht van de informatieovervloed waarin je als techneut terechtkam op p.123-128.

[Herkenbaar, zelfs voor iemand als ik.] ]

"There was no satisfying this desire to know, and yet to know more. The fact that there seemed to be no end to the things one had to know was all the better. It was like riding in a powerful car in the days of cheap gas: more, faster, now.
What has happened to me that I just feel tired? The weeklies come, and I barely flip the pages before throwing them on the recycle pile. The new catalogs come and I just put them on the shelf. My machines are three years old—ancient by my own standards."(128)

"And maybe there is something unseemly in an old programmer. Maybe the isolated compulsion of coding, its bottomless details, its narrow-well horizon—the sheer electric nervousness required for a relationship with the machine—is simply unnatural for someone over thirty-eight."(129)

[Dan val je voor je eigen onzinnige idee dat programmeren iets is van onverantwoordelijke jonge hackers. Die tijd is allang voorbij. ]

"The corollary of constant change is ignorance. This is not often talked about: we computer experts barely know what we’re doing. We’re good at fussing and figuring out. We function well in a sea of unknowns. Our experience has only prepared us to deal with confusion. A programmer who denies this is probably lying, or else is densely unaware of himself."(134)

"The people I had to direct were programmers, and nontechnical managers don’t get away with directing programmers for very long. When they meet you, there is really only one thing programmers want to know: are you technical or not?"(137)

"Old: we don’t know what to do with the word. We throw away old hardware. Old programmers are supposed to give way to twenty-year-olds. The new is what we desire, and the newer yet.
Only software gets to age. Too much time is invested in it, too much time will be needed to replace it. So, unlike the tossed-out hardware, software is tinkered with. It is mended and fixed, patched and reused. Software is almost homey, our approach to it almost housewifely. We say it has a “life cycle”: from birth, to productive maturity, to bug-filled old age." [mijn nadruk] (142)

"The preciousness of an old system is axiomatic. The longer the system has been running, the greater the number of programmers who have worked on it, the less any one person understands it. As years pass and untold numbers of programmers and analysts come and go, the system takes on a life of its own. It runs. That is its claim to existence: it does useful work. However badly, however buggy, however obsolete—it runs. And no one individual completely understands how." [mijn nadruk] (143)

(147) [6] Virtuality

"To say, then, “I have a virtual company” should mean I have a not-quite-real company, something close to the reality of a company but with some essential element missing. Other people, for instance."(152)

"I recognize my virtual colleagues by their overatten-tion 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."(167)

[Een droevig leven eigenlijk. ]

"We spend our time alone in front of monitors; now look up at any office building, look into living-room windows at night: so many people sitting alone in front of monitors. We lead machine-centered lives; now everyone’s life is full of automated tellers, portable phones, pagers, keyboards, mice. We live in a contest of the fittest, where the most knowledgeable and skillful win and the rest are discarded; and this is the working life that waits for everybody. Everyone agrees: be a knowledge worker or be left behind. Technical people, consultants, contract programmers: we are going first. We fly down and down, closer and closer to the virtualized life, and where we go the world is following."(176)

(178) [7] Money

[Veelal herinneringen.]

(206) [8] The passionate engineer

Over het afscheid van Brian.

(217) [9] Driving

Afsluiting.