Jim McClellan
There has been no shortage of books about computers over the past few years. Politicians, academics and journalists have all spun out utopian or dystopian techno- visions.
But programmers – the people responsible for making this technology work – haven’t produced any grand globe-spanning theories about the heaven or hell on Earth they will supposedly create. Perhaps they’ve been too busy writing code to bother with prose – there’s more money to be made cranking out
the programming language C++.
That said, things have begun to change. Last year, Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents was published in the United States. An autobiography of sorts, with snapshots of programmer culture, it has become a bestseller at the online bookshop amazon.com.
Her book has been followed by Daniel Kohanski’s The Philosophical Programmer: Reflections on the Moth in the Machine, published in the USlast month. A less personal work, this attempts to explain the basics of programming with some clear- headed thoughts on the ethical challenges posed by programming and the increasing ubiquity of computers.
Ullman’s book fuels the suspicion that the excesses of certain books about technoculture were caused by their authors’ distance from working technology. The view from the code face, as it were, is more pragmatic. This may have something to do with the fact that when you’re grappling with code day in, day out, you have a grasp on the material reality of computing that eludes those who just boot up their word processor in the morning. It may also have something to do with the fact that Ullman is in her mid-40s and taking stock.
She describes how programmers have to suppress human vagueness and ambiguity to deal with the dumbly, unforgivingly precise world of code. They get so caught up in the machine world, she suggests, they lose all tolerance for the real world.
Ullman points out that, as machines encourage a certain sort of behaviour in programmers, so that influences the kind of programs they create. Her example is groupware – software created so that people no longer have to meet in person.
However, Ullman gives a lot of space to the intellectual pleasures of programming. There’s an offbeat wit to her observations: she draws a link, for example, between her programming life and her membership of a post-Sixties revolutionary communist cell: “We behaved just like programmers. We moved closer to the machine, confronting the messiness of human life, and tried to simplify it.”
Unlike most books on technology, Close to the Machine is funny. There’s a peculiarly modern social comedy in the story of Ullman’s affair with the socially challenged cypherpunk, something that culminates in the bedroom, where Brian pursues the “algorithm method”. “This sex was formulaic,” Ullman writes, “had steps and positions and durations, all tried and perfected, like a well-debugged program.”
Programmers’ reaction to the book has been good: “The response has mainly been, `Now when people ask me what I do, I hand them this book.'”
Of course, some programmers may also not like the book because it tackles a belief many of them hold dear – that technology is neutral and that it’s people who do good/bad things with it. “What I’m saying is that there is a dialectical relationship here. We make these machines with a certain idea and they make us back.”
In the book she talks about the system “infecting” the user. Her example is an office network she created for a small firm. The employees at the firm were trusted by the boss, but once his new office network was up and running, he asked Ullman if it could be tweaked so he could spy on them. Without the system, such surveillance would have been unavailable.
Like Ullman, Kohanski is suspicious of computers’ supposed “neutrality. There is a sense in which technology can be called ethically neutral, in that it has no will of its own. But to the degree that technology allows us to affect other people’s lives, it definitely has an ethical component that we ignore at our peril.”
For a longer version of this article read the eM&G at http://www.mg.co.za/g/pc/9809/02sep-
codeface.htm
ENDS