Ellen Ullman: We Have to Demystify Code
Ellen Ullman is a former software engineer and a writer. She started programming in the late 1970s and was a first-hand witness to the rise of the internet and the various tech booms and busts of the last forty years. She wrote a memoir in 1997 titled Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents. The book is often described as a “cult classic.” Ullman has also written two novels, The Bug and By Blood. She writes about technology with the lyrical gifts of a poet and the penetrating mind of a philosopher. She recently published a new book of non-fiction called Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology (MCD: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). It chronicles her experiences in the tech world from 1994 to the present.
Morgan Meis: Let me quote the first few sentences of the book, which I love, and which go like this: “People imagine that programming is logical, a process like fixing a clock. Nothing could be further from the truth. Programming is more like an illness, a fever, an obsession. It’s like riding a train and never being able to get off.”
I take this opening to be something of a shot across the bow, a challenge to any of the standard ways of writing about technology, which tend to be either “techie” on the one side or outside critiques that don’t really get it on the other. Am I basically on the right track here?
