Microserfs

So charming! I was immersed in academia in the 90’s and came to “Silicon Valley” culture in 2003, yet still felt connected to the characters in this reflective fictional diary and I indulged in the same experience I had reading "Still Life with Woodpecker" in high school: lots of "YEAH!" reactions to snippets of text. I’m glad I waited to read this; I think in 2022 it’s far more poignant than it would have been if I’d read it in 1997. (And for totally unexpected reasons I cried at the end!) Spookily, most (though not all) of the predictions have indeed come true. For funsies, I've written up a list of quotes that inspired me to mark up the pages, and have recorded them here before I pass the book along.

* I'm trying to feel more well adjusted than I really am, which is, I guess, the human condition. My life is lived day to day, one line of bug-free code at a time.
* My relationship with my body has gone all weird. I feel like my body is a station wagon in which I drive my brain around, like a suburban mother taking the kids to hockey practice.
* What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?
* There's this eerie, science-fiction lack of anyone who doesn't look exactly 31.2 on the Campus. And, of course, major death denial. I'm 26 and I'm just not ready to turn 31.2 yet.
* It must have been so weird - living the way my Dad did - thinking your company was going to take care of you forever.
* What's the engine that pulls us through the repetition?
* Where does morality enter our lives, Dan? How do we justify what we do to the rest of humanity?
* We can no longer create the feeling of an era...of time being particular to one spot in time.
* Why are we so hopeless with our bodies?
* Karla says we're all trying to figure out what we really need in life, as opposed to what we simply want.
* You can put anything on a label and people will believe it. We are one sick species, I tell you.
* I want to forget the way my body was ignored, year in, year out, in the pursuit of code, in the pursuit of somebody else's abstraction.
* There's something about a monolithic tech culture like Microsoft that makes humans seriously rethink fundamental aspects of the relationship between their brains and bodies - their souls and their ambitions; things and thoughts.
* Having nothing feels liberating.
* I'm no sci-fi buff, but doesn't this seem like a dangerous way to be messing with the structure of time - allowing the corporate realm to invade the private?
* Simply grinding away at something makes life feel stable, even though the external particulars of life (like our paychecks, our office, and so forth) are, at best, random.
* There's an endemic inability in the software industry to estimate the amount of time required for a software project.
* In Los Angeles everyone's writing a screenplay. In New York everyone's writing a novel. In San Francisco, everyone's developing a multimedia product.
* How will games progress as 30somethings turn into 50somethings? [Fantastically, as it turns out!]
* You never heard about people 'not having lives' until about five years ago, just when all of the '80s technologies really penetrated our lives.
* He is lost. He does not connect privilege with responsibility; wealth with morality.
* Beware of the corporate invasion of private memory.
* Do you think humanoids - people - will ever design a machine that can pray? Do we pray to machines or through them? How do we use machines to achieve our deepest needs?
* I think that's why it's so hard for me to understand my body. Because our family was so zero-touch.
* And I wondered then, how do we ever know what beauty lies inside of people, and the strange ways this world works to lure that beauty outward?
* Many geeks don't really have a sexuality - they just have work.
* Machines really are our subconscious...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.
* I think your problem is that you think everyone else is a freak except you, but everybody's a freak - you included.
* Where does your individuality end and your species-hood begin?
* Humans are the only animals to have generations.
* When technology accelerates to a critical point, as it has now, generations become irrelevant.
* Subjectivity is so much faster to scale.
* Politics only makes people cranky. There must be some alternative form of discourse. How is the political will generated?
* We've peripheralized our essence.
* Eating crap makes you feel like such an outsider in the Bay Area.
* Rants are the official communication mode of the '90s.
* When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of these gyms and all of this scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.
* The industry is made up of either gifted techies or smart generalists. Look for those people - the talented generalists. They're good as project and product managers.
* There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's the there's no point to remembering everything. Being able to find things is what's important. [Library science teaches us this, too!]
* 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 toys and free beverages and the way tech firms won't even call work "the office" but instead "the campus."
* Todd's almost cybernetic relationship with his answering machine seems a precursor of some not-too-distant future where human beings are appended by nozzles, diodes, buzzers, thwumpers, and dingles that inform us of the time and temperature in the Kerguelen Archipelago and whether Fergie is, or is not, sipping tea at that exact moment. [That future is now.]
Randomness is a useful shorthand for describing a pattern that's bigger than anything we can hold in our minds.
* What does all this stuff tell us about ourselves as humans? What have we gained by externalizing our essence through these consumable electronic units of luxury, comfort, and freedom?
* The one thing that differentiates human beings from all other creatures on Earth is the externalization of subjective memory - first through notches in trees, then through cave paintings, then through the written word and now, through databases of almost otherworldly storage and retrieval power.

Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs reads like a time capsule crossed with a nerds-only Breakfast Club. Focused on the California geek population who powered the late eighties/early nineties technology boom, the novel focuses so much on time and place that it could arguably be classified as historical. The CD-ROM and early internet references seem, like an AOL disc or heavy monitor, both quaint and annoying. Coupland transcends the period piece nature of Microserfs about 60% of the time, especially when he focuses less on era-only details and more on the way people interact with technology in concert with the way they interact with other human beings.

Dan, the narrator, works at Microsoft with a stock ragtag set of programmers that, if the book were filmed, would consist of actors you had seen before but you weren’t sure where. When the smartest of the group hits on the idea of creating a CD-ROM with on-screen Lego-like capabilities the group collectively leave the womb of Gates’ company and leap into the venture capital funded 1.0 world of internet, um, I’m sorry, CD-ROM start-ups. Coupland’s staccato delivery, propelled by short, blogesque paragraphs, works well within the frenetic nature and outsider quality Dan and his colleagues embody. The characters are significantly meta; they know they’re geeks, they’re unsure of what they want, and they talk a lot about the pros and cons of nerd-dom. They bond over Star Trek references and analyze the fact they all buy their clothes at The Gap. The creative and financial risks and rewards of the classic “one big idea that could make us all rich” leads the friends, especially Dan to address their strengths, shortcomings, and whatever it was that carried them, for better or for worse, to programming.

Coupland has mined this territory before. He’s comfortable (as in The Gum Thief) framing anonymous corporate settings as canvases that, in their bland structure, both impede identity development and provide the opportunity for one to step back and respond to the lack of stimuli. Dan’s hobbledehoy disposition is laced with strength and insecurity. He stitches his love of computers with the acquisition of his first real girlfriend and come to terms with the childhood death of an older brother. Does that make for an exciting book? No. But Microserfs contains some compassionate passages, especially when the nerds speak honestly, Breakfast Club style, both through email (which was probably still novel then) and face to face, or when Dan’s mother uses technology (don’t want to spoil it) to communicate from a far away place.

I don’t love Coupland but I count on him for breezy, thoughtful novels when I’m in the mood for something between light and heavy. Microserfs lives up to that expectation but doesn’t attempt to rise beyond the characters’ pursuit of quiet self-acceptance in the anonymous Silicon Valley. As I was reading I thought of getting lost, near Seattle, in what seemed like an endless landscape of strip malls and Olive Gardens. The sterile, clinical environment does not preclude a desire for identity. Dan and his colleagues would understand that desire as they ventured from their innominate apartments into the suburban night, probably stopping at a 7-11, grabbing something to eat, and talking about where to go next.

I've never been part of a social group like the one described in this book--a bunch of geeks who work together doing similar work and also live together dealing with each other's quirks. But I do have a lot of tech geek friends who probably know what it's like to work at a place like this, and I thought it was entertaining. There were a LOT of characters and they were hard to keep track of at first, but I appreciated that the author did not just assign a specific characteristic to each and then stereotype them by it. Sure by the end you're thinking okay Todd's a musclehead and Michael's autistic and Bug is the gay one, but they have all had other dimensions all along. I must say also that as a woman with a lot of stereotypically masculine interests, I appreciated that the women characters weren't treated disrespectfully by the narrative. I was honestly shocked that the bullet-point lists of character traits generally did not include physical description for the men OR the women. (And it was kinda cool that by the end a few of the female characters had banded together to make a women-in-coding organization and the protagonist didn't have to respond to it by getting offended, mocking it, or applying a bunch of stereotypes to it.)

I think the only thing I didn't like much was that a straight male character fell in love with someone whose gender, sexuality, and age were unknown due to him interacting with them only over the Internet, and he asked the protagonist to go visit this person and offer them a job, admitting that he was in love with them no matter who they were. The person of course turned out to be not only a woman, but a single woman in his age range who was also interested in HIM romantically. It would have been more interesting to me if Michael had to deal with having fallen in love with the soul of a person whose physical shell did not match his preferences.

I liked how it gave such an authentic picture of these characters' workplace. It felt very real and I could imagine how it looked and how the characters interacted. I liked their camaraderie and the way they all learned to know each other so well.

I wrote down some quotes and examples of stuff I liked from the book. I'll just share those here for the rest of my review.

Of course I like that they came up with the idea to slide flat food under the door for Michael.

I laughed at them referring to helping old ladies with their Christmas list on Works.

Rolling their chairs over bubble wrap is described as a stress reliever.

There was a really interesting anecdote about energy going into choosing the right car and how no one at Microsoft has bumper stickers.

The question is raised whether a vegetarian who dreams of burgers is a cryptocarnivore.

The group of geeks migrating to their new home honked when they passed roadkill but got tired of it.

I really liked that the protagonist's girlfriend Karla was mad that he casually called her stupid for burying the music they had planned to enjoy on the ride, and then we find out why--that her parents treated her like she was dumb and elevated her brother Karl to a status of more respect than her even though he wasn't as intelligent and didn't apply himself. Gross that she's named the femme version of her brother.

It was really striking that Karla didn't think she'd get to be interactive, and her family taught her that she should just do women's things, and she starved herself.

I LOVED the reference to banana stickers on computers.

I laughed really hard when they said they named the gerbils Look and Feel. They also named all their computers and servers.

There were a lot of funny lists and comparison charts. On a Microsoft vs. Apple comparison chart. Microsoft has better cafeterias; Apple has better nerd toys. Both have wacky titles on business cards.

The term [deletia] is introduced. It stands for everything that's been deleted in an e-mail, but feels more poignant when described as everything that was lost.

In discussing massage, the narration says everyone has a special place they store their tension, the same way everyone misspells the same words over and over.

In an e-mail conversation with Abe: "I think our e-mail correspondence has given us an intimacy that face-to-face contact never would have. Irony!"

It entertained me a lot that they referred to someone who had pinecones on the table "like an adult."

There was a list of cereals and reasons why they're decadent.

There was this surprisingly emotional description of a character whose key card didn't work and he felt like he stopped existing.

There's a reference to diseases that get transmitted to impatient type A's through the door-close elevator button.

One psycho for every nine stable people in the company is said to be a good ratio.

I liked a reference to the cartoon holes that people jump into. Does anyone ever wonder where they go? The narration said they come out here, this is the other side.

"[T]his feeling passed through me--this feeling of what a gift it is that people are able to speak to each other while they're alive. [...] It was strange to realize that, in one sense, all we are is our voice."

Nerdy, fun and you get to learn about eating flat meals that can be slipped under your door.

It makes you just look around and love your friends.

The story of five colleague-friends working at Microsoft in the l1990s, five struggling and directionless people, who live in the insular world of digital tech. Told in the short snappy digital diary entries of one of the group Daniel. This book feels like it was Douglas Coupland's idea of capturing the lives and times of a group of people that already spent a decade in tech; but note that it is set in the pre Windows 95 climate. A typically well researched and innovative read but it felt quite tech heavy even for someone like me that works in the digital arena. Just 5 out of 12 Two Stars for this fictional look at pop culture.

2024 read

This book has not aged well.

This is always the problem with Douglas Coupland. His books are always in the here and now of the moment in which he wrote them. Can you imagine a book about tech culture that doesn't feature the following:

DVDs, Google, Smart phones, Facebook, Netflix, Thumb drives, Minecraft?

None of these things existed in the public consciousness when Microserfs was published in 1995. In fact, at the time, Yahoo! was still a PhD project at Stanford.

I think in the 90s, people saw Coupland as a visionary, but for the most part he was just able to comment on the world around him. He hits as much as he misses in this book (although one big hit is that the Oop! software the main characters in the book write sounds a hell of a lot like Minecraft.)

I'm sure that in 1990 when this book came out, I lapped this up. But now it seems a lot like a relic.

I loved reading this book, set in the mid 1990s just before the internet highway exploded into mainstream America's workplaces and living rooms.

I loved the voice of the main charactar, Daniel, who seemed like somebody I could have known in college or in grad school. I loved his description of the minutiae of the life of people who work 80 plus hours per week coding software and what their little diversions to keep sane said about them as people.

I loved the philosophical explorations of computers (and tecnology in general) as extensions of our subconscious.

I especially loved the very humanistic ending.

And, for my friends who love Legos, I love the small yet important part that they played in the book.

Well done, Douglas Coupland. Reading this book for the 1st time in 2010 showed me how ahead of your time you were in 1993!