Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

by Ellen Ullman

Overview

The never-more-necessary return of one of our most vital and eloquent voices on technology and culture, from the author of the seminal Close to the Machine

When Ellen Ullman moved to San Francisco and became a computer programmer in the late 1970s, she was joining an idealistic, exclusive, and almost exclusively male cadre that had dreams and aspirations to change the world. In 1997 she wrote the now classic and still definitive account of life as a coder at the birth of what would be a sweeping technological, cultural, and financial revolution.

The intervening twenty years has seen, among other things, the rise of the Internet, the ubiquity of once unimaginably powerful computers, and the thorough transformation of our economy and society—as Ullman’s clique of socially awkward West Coast geeks became our new elite, elevated for and insulated by a technical mastery that few could achieve.

In Life in Code, her first book of nonfiction since Close to the Machine, Ullman unlocks and explains—and does not always celebrate—how we got to now, as only she can, with a fluency and expertise that’s unusual in someone with her humanistic worldview, and with the sharp insight and personal storytelling that are uniquely her own. Life in Code is an essential text toward our understanding of the last twenty years—and the next twenty.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374534516
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	08/08/2017
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Ellen Ullman is the author of a novel, The Bug, a New York Times Notable Book and runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the cult classic memoir Close to the Machine, based on her years as a rare female computer programmer in the early years of the personal computer era. She lives in San Francisco.

Table of Contents

A Note About the Dates ix

Part 1 The Programming Life

Outside of Time: Reflections on the Programming Life 3

Come in, CQ 18

The Dumbing Down of Programming: Some Thoughts on Programming, Knowing, and the Nature of "Easy" 39

What We Were Afraid of As We Feared Y2K 56

Part 2 The Rise and First Fall of the Internet

The Museum of Me 81

Fiber Optic Nights 94

Off the High 104

To Catch a Falling Knife 115

Part 3 Life, Artificial

Programming the Post-Human: Computer Science Redefines "Life" 129

Is Sadie the Cat a Trick? 160

Memory and Megabytes 171

Dining with Robots 181

Part 4 Three Stories About What We Owe the Past

While I Was Away 197

Close to the Mainframe 208

The Party Line 223

Part 5 The Hand that Writes the Code

Programming for the Millions 237

Boom Two: A Farewell 272

Editorial Reviews

Ellen Ullman has long cast a skeptical eye over the tech world from the inside, spurning the Kool-Aid of start-up culture and questioning the industry's obsession with disruption. Author of the cult classic Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents, she tumbled into the programming world accidentally. In 1979, fresh out of studying literature at Cornell University, Ullman was strolling through her San Francisco neighborhood when she saw a TRS-80 in the window of Radio Shack. Nicknamed the "Trash-80," it was one of the first mass- marketed PCs. Reader, she bought it.

"I didn't know it was the next cool thing. I just found great satisfaction in getting something to work," Ullman tells me by phone from New York, where she has returned to live part-time after decades in San Francisco. Ullman parlayed her passion for tinkering with machines into a career as a programmer, but the written word's allure never left her. She eventually turned to chronicling the transformation of the tech world and, in turn, the world's transformation by tech.

Ullman began writing the linked essays in a riveting book, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology, in 1994. It was the year Amazon and Yahoo were born, and the moment web browsers first came to mainstream attention. One of the few women toiling in the coding coalmines, she documented the puerility of programming culture, where obnoxious behavior was not just accepted but admired in the young white men who dominated the industry.

In Life in Code, Ullman describes a software vendor developers' conference where self-proclaimed "barbarian" engineers project slides of themselves dressed in animal skins, holding spears. When a man at the event asks Ullman why she has decided to leave engineering for consulting, she begins to explain her frustrations with the "the cult of the boy engineer" -- only to be interrupted by a massive, organized water balloon fight.

There's blatant sexism, too: at one company, her boss rubs her back while she codes. At another, she's excluded from meetings even after being promoted to manager.

"I didn't manage my anger well, and I felt I had to leave the company because of that," Ullman admits with sigh. "I've learned over the years that angry dignity is the key: you have to learn to just stare it in the face, find a place inside you where you believe: I belong here." She points out that she was just an ordinary programmer doing "the nitty-gritty to make things work," not some revolutionary innovator. Yet, she says, "What kept me going was the fascination and wonder -- with coding and understanding systems in a deeper and deeper way. It was not to prove that I could be the woman who broke the ceiling."

Ullman vividly evokes a milieu of young men sealed inside their own mental bubbles, alienated from their bodies and disdainful of real-world interactions and responsibilities. They prefer communicating by email rather than by telephone or in the flesh. Those observations may seem commonplace now -- but Ullman's prescience was seeing how they created a system that facilitates these preferences. In doing so, they've remade the world in their image. As Ullman accurately predicted in the 1994 essay that kicks off this book, "Soon we may all be living the programming life," each of us staring deep into our own machines.

In Life in Code, she follows human threads that sometimes get lost in discussions of technology's grand tapestry. Ullman charmingly chronicles an email romance with a colleague that doesn't survive their attempts to translate it into the flesh, and she wrangles with her doubts about Artificial Intelligence via a lovely ode to her elderly cat, Sadie. Pondering the idea that even organisms as complex as mammals can be understood purely in terms of genetically encoded logic and reflexes, she asks, "Was Sadie a trick? Was all that life -- from acrobat to purring companion to arthritic old lady . . . just part of her hardwiring?"

This new book serves as a kind of sequel to 1997's Close to the Machine. Like her chance collision with the TRS-80, Ullman's first book was a result of serendipity. She says City Lights editor Nancy Peters mentioned at a dinner party that she was considering publishing Resisting the Virtual Life, an essay collection about the "information superhighway"; a mutual friend suggested that Ullman could supply an insider's perspective. She followed her contribution to that book with Close to the Machine, an elegant swan dive into the tech boom that hit the zeitgeist perfectly.

"It was just at that time where people were intuiting that this wave was about to come over them and they didn't know precisely what it was," Ullman says. She continued gathering material for another nonfiction book but along the way veered into writing novels: The Bug, a thriller set at a Silicon Valley start-up, and By Blood, a psychological labyrinth of Hitchcockian twists that enfold both the legacy of the Holocaust and the social chaos of 1970s San Francisco.

For Life in Code, she gathered two decades' worth of writing and added 100 pages of new material that confronts our tech-saturated present. Ullman describes the fever dream of the Internet -- from utopian fantasia to financial hysteria to commercial dystopia -- as it unfolds in real time. Some of the contemporaneous narratives, like the reported story about the Y2K panic from 1999, vibrate with the uncertainty of the moment. Interviewing tech people, she detects a kind of "animal insecurity, as if they're sniffing something scary upwind." Ullman herself is horrified by the potential for disaster built into our new, invisible infrastructure; as a programmer, she understands how haphazardly it is all constructed, layers on top of layers that were never built to last and that have been stretched and twisted far beyond their original purposes.

"It wasn't this abstract dream, it was made of wires and networks and software, and the people who wrote these programs, they never thought they would still be running!" Ullman says with amazement. "They thought new technology would come along and it would all be rewritten."

Asked if there are things she didn't foresee, Ullman takes a long pause. "I thought we'd all be staring into computer screens, but I didn't know we would all be walking around with the screens in front of us all the time," she finally replies. "I also didn't expect the discrimination against women to last. Not only that it would last this long but that it would even get more grueling for women."

She did anticipate some of the contemporary problems the Internet has wrought. In a chapter of Life in Code written in 1998, she writes of disintermediation -- the way technology is eliminating middlemen (salespeople, travel agents) in the name of efficiency. She mourns the human toll it took on her San Francisco neighborhood. "I watched the way that all of these little people were being put out of a job," she says. "When I hear the word disruption, in my mind, I think of all these people in the middle who were earning a living. We will sweep away all that money they were earning and we will move that to the people at the top."

Writing fiction has allowed Ullman to consider how our forerunners lived, in very specific ways. What did the streets smell like when cars were first invented? Did women's shoes hurt back then? Although she remains excited by the wonders of new technology, Ullmann feels more than ever the need to remain grounded in the past. She says crisply, "All things change, but we always have to think: what are we leaving behind?"

Reviewer: Joy Press

The Barnes & Noble Review

Don't panic, non-nerds. In addition to writing code in multiple computer languages, Ullman has an Ivy League degree in English and knows how to decode her tech-world adventures into accessible narratives for word people…

The New York Times Book Review - J. D. Biersdorfer

05/15/2017
Novelist and former computer programmer Ullman returns to the domain of her seminal memoir, Close to the Machine (1997), an unflinching insider’s account of the digital revolution, with this equally eloquent collection of new and previously published essays from the past 20 years. Providing much-needed nuance to the binary world of code, the essays gracefully move between intimate anecdotes, frustrated rants about the unconscious bias and hypercompetitiveness that dominate much of venture-capitalist startup culture, philosophical meanderings about artificial intelligence and the nature of human thought, and big-picture analysis about the relationship between technical design and human desire. Not only is Ullman an astute observer of the changing culture but she proves prescient on a diverse range of issues including the siloing effect of the internet, the growing digital divide, and corporate-assisted government surveillance. Neither technophilic nor technophobic, this collection creates a time-lapse view of the rapid development of technology in recent years and provides general readers with much-needed grounding for the sweeping changes of the revolution underway. It’s also simply a pleasure to read. (Aug.)This review has been corrected to note that the essays included are new and previously published.

Publishers Weekly

★ 2017-06-05
A sharply written, politically charged memoir of life in the data trenches by computer pioneer Ullman (By Blood, 2012, etc.)."I once had a job where I didn't talk to anyone for two years," writes the author, who is known in computing circles for many things, not least her work on the graphical forerunner to Windows. As Ullman notes, programmers live in "mind-time" and not the ordinary time-space continuum the rest of us inhabit, and in any event they're poorly socialized; one early boss had intended to hire her simply to inflict a woman on an underling ("evidently, Peterson was some manager he wished ill, and I was the ill"), then was demoted to the underling's position and grudgingly had to supervise her himself. Early on, by her account, Ullman brought ethical considerations to bear on her work, reminding teammates on a project that veered into epidemiology that the best solution was not the Nazi one of killing off carriers of a particular disease, which earned her the sneer of a male colleague: "This is how I know you're not a real techie." More than a personal account, Ullman's narrative is a you-are-here chronicle of the evolution of things we take for granted, from the early AI research of the 1970s and the first flickerings of the personal computer to the founding of Google—and now, to a decidedly dystopian present that is the real thrust of a sometimes-rueful confession. As Ullman writes without hyperbole, all the liberatory promise of the personal computer has been swallowed up by corporations. Corporate leaders may promise that they're changing the world, but that proclamation is "but an advertisement, a branding that obscures the little devil, disruption, that hides within the mantra" and threatens to destroy what little civilization we have left. What Anthony Bourdain did for chefs, Ullman does for computer geeks. A fine rejoinder and update to Doug Coupland's Microserfs and of great interest to any computer user.

Kirkus Reviews

“This book is an original. It reads like a memoir, personal and compelling. But it’s also a set of savvy reflections about the unfolding of digital culture as it became mainstream culture and we all learned to live with its aesthetic, values, and politics. Here, nothing about the inevitability or the virtue of these three are taken for granted. The question of our ‘post-humanity’ is tackled as just that, a question for human beings to discuss rather than a technical problem for programmers to dispense with. Life in Code will launch the most interesting conversations!” —Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation

"[Life in Code] manages to feel like both a prequel and a sequel to [Close to the Machine] . . . In addition to writing code in multiple computer languages, Ullman has an Ivy League degree in English and knows how to decode her tech-world adventures into accessible narratives for word people . . . The philosophical questions posed--like those on robotics and artificial intelligence-- . . . resonate." —J. D. Biersdorfer, The New York Times Book Review

"The fierce intelligence of Ellen Ullman's writing has reached cult-like status . . . What elevates [Ullman] and this new book, Life in Code, is its sense of timing . . . The book is remarkable in the way it illustrates how much has changed, but maybe more stunningly, how little has changed at all." —Kevin Nguyen, GQ.com

"Life in Code is a consummate insider's take, rich with local color and anecdotes . . . Ullman has a pure passion for computing that doesn't stop her from recognizing all the ways it can isolate and intimidate . . . Like all great writers, she finds the universal in the specific, mixing memoir with industry gossip . . ." —Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

"What is most engaging about this collection is that Ullman, an expert in the field, allows readers access to sometimes highly technical material, never pandering to the most obvious topics. For example, she does talk about the struggles of women in tech, but doesn't generalize. It would be too simple, too expected to rehash that story line . . ." —Rebekah Miel, Bust

"Ullman is a rare breed . . . She offers a vivid, gripping window into what it is to be shaped by keyboard characters and machine . . . Ullman relishes tech's beauty while also fearing what it has created." —Jessica Bennett, Elle

"Ullman's takes on tech's gaines (iPhones, endless information) and drawbacks (decision paralysis, loneliness) are often witty and always accessible." —Real Simple

"Sharply written, politically charged . . . What Anthony Bourdain did for chefs, Ullman does for computer geeks." —Kirkus (starred review)

"Ullman maintains a healthy skepticism regarding the notion that technology will cure all that ails us . . . she brilliantly questions the computer’s capacity for sentience." —Ben Segedin, Booklist

Praise for Ellen Ullman

“Ullman is that rare member of the coding tribe: a translator who deeply understands the world we live in and the worlds we build with software . . . Her insights are finely wrought, philosophical, and lasting.” —Anna Wiener, The New Republic

“No one writes more eloquently than Ullman . . . about the peculiar mind-set of the people who create the digital tools we use every day.” —Laura Miller, Salon

“Ellen Ullman writes unsparingly of the vivid, compelling, emotionally driven souls who gave us our new machines.” —Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March

“[Ullman is] a strong woman standing up to, and facing down, ‘obsolescence’ in two different, particularly unforgiving worlds: modern technology and modern society.” —J. D. Biersdorfer, The New York Times Book Review

“Ullman comes with her tech bona fides intact (she is, after all, a seasoned software engineer). But she also comes with novel material . . . We see the seduction at the heart of programming: embedded in the hijinks and hieroglyphics are the esoteric mysteries of the human mind.” —Constance Hale, Wired

From the Publisher

Ellen Ullman juxtaposes her professional life as a computer programmer with the development of the tech industry over the last 20 years. While her prose has a distinct style and wit that make it worth reading, her narration of the audiobook falls flat. She speaks in a largely monotone voice, and, though it sounds in some ways artistically appropriate for a book about the life of a programmer, the absence of emotion and the constant drive of words leave the listener empty and uninterested. It’s likely that few people will enjoy the audio version of this powerful memoir of a woman in a male-dominated field that has come into cultural prominence. L.E. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2017 - AudioFile

Ellen Ullman juxtaposes her professional life as a computer programmer with the development of the tech industry over the last 20 years. While her prose has a distinct style and wit that make it worth reading, her narration of the audiobook falls flat. She speaks in a largely monotone voice, and, though it sounds in some ways artistically appropriate for a book about the life of a programmer, the absence of emotion and the constant drive of words leave the listener empty and uninterested. It’s likely that few people will enjoy the audio version of this powerful memoir of a woman in a male-dominated field that has come into cultural prominence. L.E. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2017 - AudioFile