#dotcom

[daggerstarlight]

OH GOD OH FUCK ITS HAPPENING??? ITS TOO SOON IM NOT READY—

WDYM WDYM WDYM WDYM WDYM

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ellen Ullman's "Close to the Machine."

Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.

Close To the Machine is Ellen Ullman's classic memoir of writing software in Silicon Valley at the start of the dotcom bubble; it was originally published in 1997 and reprinted in 2022 for the 25 anniversary by Farrar, Straus and Giroux's MCD books:

https://www.mcdbooks.com/books/close-to-the-machine-25th-anniversary-edition

I somehow never read Ullman's book; having read it now, it's easy to understand how this beautifully rendered snapshot of life at the end of the 20th century became a touchpoint for multiple generations of coders and technologists, and why it's still in print, 27 years later.

Ullman's subtitle for the book is "Technophilia and its discontents," and therein lies the secret to its magic. Ullman loves programming computers, loves the way they engage her attention, her consciousness, and her intelligence. Her descriptions of the process of writing code – of tackling a big coding project – are nothing less than revelatory. She captures something that a million technothriller movies consistently fail to even approach: the dramatic interior experience of a programmer who breaks down a complex problem into many interlocking systems, the momentary and elusive sense of having all those systems simultaneously operating in a high-fidelity mental model, the sense of being full, your brain totally engaged in every way. It's a poetics of language that meets and exceeds the high bar set by the few fiction writers who've ever approached a decent rendering of this feeling, like William Gibson.

These glittering moments are fleeting, though. No code project survives contact with the computer, a brutal and unforgiving cognitive partner that ferrets out every error in your thinking, every trap you've unknowningly fallen into. Here again, Ullman shines in her renderings of the ferocious mental combat that programmers must do with their computers, grueling matches that are made all the worse by the certain knowledge that the only way to win the bout is to discover and fix your own flaws.

These set-pieces make for great branching points into the three other components of Ullman's classic: first, there are the stories of high-tech institutions. We follow Ullman – a contract programmer who is hired to assemble teams to run specific projects – as she works on a gnarly all-in-one tool for matching people with AIDS with a spectrum of public services; and when she is brought into a failing startup as part of an abortive turnaround attempt.

All of this is happening just as the web and the internet are devouring all high-tech projects, and Ullman – a techie who is an old hand at networked communications, but it professionally part of a breed of coder who specializes in standalone and modem-based services – finds herself sitting opposite glittering new-breed hackers who have arrived to eat her lunch. Here, too, Ullman absolutely nails the experience of a technologist who has transitioned from surfing the cutting edge to being decapitated by it. This sequence is made all the more poignant by a series of scenes in which Ullman confronts the impossible knot of writing code that benefits marginalized, at-risk users (people dying of AIDS) while satisfying the political and bureaucratic imperatives of multiple charities, government agencies, and advocates. Ullman has finally wrestled all of these stakeholders into a stable configuration, only to have these shiny young people show up and tell her that she – and everything she's done and everything she stands for – is obsolete. It's a gut-punch of a scene.

That's the third component of Ullman's memoir – the workplace culture of a programmer who must answer to (and assuage) a variety of nontechnical people who flip from awe to seething resentment of you and your work. Ullman, who lives the simultaneously precarious and lucrative life of a high-paid, much sought-after freelancer, is at the mercy of so many people who have terrible power over her, little empathy for her, and an almost total lack of understanding of what she does (imagine Dilbert, but written by a smart and aware person, not a humorless asshole).

The final quadrant of Ullman's book is the memoir itself – the story of her life growing up in the shadow of a driven, striving Jewish immigrant in New York City whose manic entrepreneurship and minimal self-awareness transforms him into both a source of inspiration and an object of pity for Ullman. Ullman's personal life in San Francisco is painted with equal fidelity, from her bisexual, polyamorous romantic life to her camaraderie with other hackers (some of whom end up in her bed). Ullman introduces us to characters that are instantly recognizable today, from the cypherpunk who dreams of setting up an anonymous digital cash system that is financed by an offshore porn empire to a semi-libertarian young man who can't imagine why the law would set limits on when a worker can be treated as an independent contractor.

These are timeless avatars for the kinds of people whose live "close to the machine," whose brains are easily and productively ensnared by digital computers and their pitiless logic. Despite that, this volume is also a perfect, high-fidelity capture of Silicon Valley at the start of one of its many (many, many) bubbles. I was there, then, working as a contractor (what else?) for a Unix shop and learning on the job as we tried to figure out whether our customers would expect to access our tools through a browser rather than at the console of a quarter-million dollar SGI machine. Though I'm a generation younger than Ullman, I was in the same place, time and milieu as she was when this book was written, and all of it rings utterly true.

What's more, Ullman's work here preserves and reveals the extent to which the best and worst aspects of tech culture have been present since the earliest days, and gestures at the causal relationship between those aspects and the intrinsic nature of the work of programming computers. While Ullman doesn't advance an explicit theory relating the attitudes and conundra of her field to the nature of computer programming, this work is implicitly webbed over with gossamer threads joining all these phenomena.

That's something I've tried to do in my own fiction, particularly with my Martin Hench novels, which visit different moments in Silicon Valley history (the 1980s, the 2000s, the 2020s) through the eyes of a forensic accountant who unravels tech scams and, in so doing, traces those same threads:

https://us.macmillan.com/series/themartinhenchnovels

This 25th anniversary edition features a beautiful introduction by Anna Wiener, author of the extraordinary 2020 Silicon Valley memoir Uncanny Valley. Wiener is the perfect choice to introduce this volume, connecting the present moment with the first days of the commercial internet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley_(memoir)

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/16/beautiful-code/#hackers-disease

[ogrishtoonz]

i wanted to make a dotcom bubble era spamton that i would find fucking around in the clipart folder of Word 98 on my school's computer lab when i was a little girl, it was the style at the time

[dizzyhslightlyvoided]

There's something really funny about how the first CODEC conversation in Metal Gear Solid 2 has Otacon mentioning that "every state, group, and dotcom has its own version of Metal Gear" (emphasis mine).

Like let's set aside how dotcoms are being treated as being on the same level as a country, but 1. he said it's every dotcom, and 2. can you imagine. Ebay as it was envisioned during 2001 with its own knockoff version of Metal Gear REX. Amazon firing your packages directly to your house via a railgun that was originally designed for stealth-ICBMs. Pets Dot Com doing an ad with its "Because Pets Can't Drive" tagline showing a cute doggy in a mecha cockpit. A Metal Gear model called "Metal Gear DOTCOM."

[yourselfcola]

attacking and maiming car

[your-fave-as-owl]

Dotcom and Zoogina from Zoog Disney (they had two sets of designs so 2.0 designs if possible)

Zoogina from Zoog Disney is an Eastern Screech Owl (Megascops asio).

Dotcom (right) from Zoog Disney is a Spotted Eagle-Owl (Bubo africanus).

[azurefaire]

doodle of dotcom Zoog (she's mad at redditors)

This is part of a spread, so I'm going to add more characters soon :)