Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents
https://www.amazon.com/Close-Machine-Technophilia-Its-Discon...
Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents
11–20 of 165 posts
Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents
#12FWIW - I found "The Bug", by Ellen Ullman, to be a really engrossing piece of fiction to read. I wasn't aware she'd authored other works. I'll have to check them out!
Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents
#13This looks like a review or comment on something, that Ellen wrote, but I've no idea what, it does not link to anything ?
The title of the book is the title of the article. If you read the article, the author clearly states this is a review of the book.
I read the article, and I see nowhere that the author states that the title of their review is the title of the book. However, whatever was being reviewed seemed interesting enough to ask here. So, except for your arrogant way of telling me so, I am thankful that I now know, so that I can look up the book.
Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents
#14I recently read Ellen Ullman's memoir about her life as a software developer in the dot-com bubble era: "Close to the machine: Technophilia and its discontents". The book was written before I was born, but I can still closely relate to most of the cultural points made. She does a great job defining the anxieties and frictions you experience working in the duality of the very formal computer systems and the subjective…
>The book was written before I was born Oh my god I'm so fucking old.
My friend, it happens to everyone.
I typed in my first BASIC program in ‘89. I dropped out of high school in the late 90’s to program uh… high quality adult entertainment websites. I had a small e-commerce site for a while selling weird stuff. I eventually finished school and tried to move on but I got back into programming for a living to this day.
Twenty some odd years of doing it professionally. For fun. For curiosity. And looking at trying to keep at it for twenty more. Life’s a trip.
Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents
#15From 'Life in Code': "We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins."
Maybe that's the only possible way. More than a few systems have failed from over-planning and under-iterating.
And they do say cities are the greatest invention of humankind
Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents
#16Back when syntax was a challenge for me and documentation more scarce generally, and, perhaps even more than I’d like to admit to this day, I find myself mentally thinking of programming as ‘begging a computer to do things.’
Thanks for that, I’m going to use it anytime someone asks me what prompt engineering is!
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Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents
#17This looks like a review or comment on something, that Ellen wrote, but I've no idea what, it does not link to anything ?
You and the person responding to you are both right. If you don't know Ellen Ullman or Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents, it's kind of sideways.
He does mention Ellen and says
> The book is a memoir about her life
but never explicitly connects the title of the article to the title of the book or explains this is a review of that specific book (though that section is titled "Review.")
So I understand your confusion. I put "Ellen Ullman" in google and that quickly got me to Goodreads.com and seeing a list of her books, including this title. A little mystery left for us to solve. But the author could've also chosen to do a better job of explaining what they were doing here!
Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents
#18I think I'm one onanistic "article about engineers (from an engineer)" away from completely losing it
Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents
#19From 'Life in Code': "We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins."
Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
Jorge Luis Borges
Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents
#20This is a great book and I quote this 1998 article she wrote for Salon all the time: https://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/
"The dumbing-down of programming"
> The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of the computing machine. Under Windows was DOS; under DOS, BASIC; and under them both the date of its origins recorded like a birth memory. Here was the very opposite of the authoritative, all-knowing system with its pretty screenful of icons. Here was the antidote to Microsoft's many protections. The mere impulse toward Linux had led me into an act of desktop archaeology. And down under all those piles of stuff, the secret was written: We build our computers the way we build our cities -- over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.
I repeat the last sentence to my students all the time ("We build our computers the way we build our cities -- over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.")
There's no way to understand why our computers work the way they do without understanding the human, social, and economic factors involved in their production. And foregrounding the human element often makes it easier to explain what's going on and why.