by
Ellen Ullman
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10:30 AM: programmer commute hour on the freeway. South toward Silicon Valley, the remnants of the fog are just lifting off the bay, and the sky breaks through, a washed-blue-jean blue. Four sparsely filled lanes, stock-option sports cars like mine pushing 80, delivery vans riding at the limit-a freeway the way God meant it to be. The car in front of me tailgates everyone out of the way, then zooms off. The carpool lane, defunct at this hour, has turned back into the fast lane, and its painted diamonds stretch out ahead for miles.
[...]
[...] Now I drive north back to the city, and again I've missed the traffic. My little car hums along at an effortless 75. I play a Vivaldi chorus-loud-on the CD. Just as I round the edge of the bay, the last lines of fog are catching the edge of the sunset, writing a furious red calligraphy across the sky. The city glows in the last light, the sky darkens and-Magnificat!-the red strokes blaze above the skyline.
not a bad description
I didn't want my experience to be useless. I wanted it to be of value that someone could remember the lovely compactness of Release 3.0. [...] He would see it all as landfill, fit companions to my long disposed-of Kaypro II personal computer, first letter-quality daisy-wheel printer, and 300baud modem with acoustic coupler. * But all this history had to be worth something, I felt. There had to be some threads, some concepts, some themes that transcended the details, something in computing that made it worth being alive for more than thirty-five years.
:(
But I can't take this in. I want the conversation to move on. "And the women next to us," I say, "how old are they?" I had been looking at them, wondering if I were there yet.
He looks. "They're in their fifties," he says. For a moment I feel relief: I look younger, Oh good, I'm not there yet. But I can't erase the sound of the word "fifties"-the tone, the mild disdain, the dismissal, as if those women had crossed over into another reality, so that I can't for long glow in the knowledge that I look younger than they do. In their fifties : it speaks volumes of resignation, another country, a depressed, uninteresting region where older women are supposed to go.
I had to explain that companies would make everyone a contractor if there weren't laws against it; that they would jump at the chance to unload the cost of medical coverage, overtime, holidays, sick leave.
"You think so?"
"Jesus, Joel. Companies don't give benefits because they like to. People had to die in the streets-literallyto get these benefits."
"Did they?" Suddenly he seemed suspicious of me. Maybe I was indeed a decently successful software developer. Maybe I did read The Economist. Maybe we did get along quite well in nice restaurants. But there I was talking dead people in the street,just like some sort of commie.
We sat in the beautiful restaurant. Before us was a bottle of old, red wine. The vases of fresh cut flowers surrounded us. I lifted my glass. I talked labor history of the '20s. For the five-day work week, people did indeed get shot by company thugs and die in the streets; and there we sat, two independent contractors who brag about working all the time. Virtual employer and virtual employee, sipping their wine.
"It can't just be the money," I pressed.
"Well, it might be that they have what they think is a good idea ... " He trailed off then sat looking at his hands , which were fine-boned and pale.
But there are many ways to express a good idea, I thought. One could talk to people, give a speech, write an article, perhaps a book. But it was clear these were not the sort of good ideas he had in mind. No, his were the sorts of ideas whose goodness could be expressed only through the amount of revenue they generated, the size of the company that was grown, the grandeur of the CEO's house, the price of the stock.
"So it is the money," I said finally.
The whitest man I ever met looked into his lap then gazed out the window. On the other side of the French doors edged in bronze from Paris, the sky was the bright, deep blue of early autumn in San Francisco. The two bridges stood against a sparkling bay. The searchlight of Alcatraz blinked rhythmically against the water. Toward the northwest, a tanker was slowly sliding out the Gate, about to pass under the bridge on its long ride west to Japan.
We went to a movie. He held my hand all through the show. Afterwards he waited for me outside the ladies' room. When I walked back out into the lobby, there was Brian leaning against a wall, with all the other boyfriends. I felt strangely pleased at the sight of him, at his highschoolish, date-night good manners. It wasn't nostalgia- I had been a sullen, rebellious girl who drove off any boy who tried to get within a foot of me. No, it wasn't memory but the brief idea of some other life entirely. As he put his arm around me to make our way out, I had time to regret the morose young woman I'd been; to wish I had let a few more boys into my life to hold my hand at the movies and wait for me outside the ladies' .
unexpectedly sweet
Before I finally fell asleep, I remembered a conversation I'd had with an old friend , the one who recruited me into the communist party. We had both been pretty wild in our youth. I used to kid her that she'd slept with everybody-and she practically had. "How did we do it?" I asked her. "How did have so many lovers? And how did we go so blithely from one to the next?"
"You have it wrong," she said. "We weren't blithe. We suffered. We fell in love with all of them."
"Oh, right," I said. "I remember now."
I'll start to worry about the payroll clerks using the software I design . I'll wonder what I'm doing helping the IRS collect taxes. It will bother me that so many entities-employer, software company, bank, IRS-know so much about the simple act of someone getting paid for labor delivered. I'll think about the strange path of a paycheck direct-deposit, how it goes from employer to bank, company to company, while the person being paid is just a blip, the recipient's account a temporary way station, as the money flows through the bank's hands into the hands of a borrower, then out again through the great engine of commerce.
And I'll have to muddle through without certainties. Without my father's belief that the machinery of capital, if you worked hard and long, was benign in the long run, so benign you could even own a piece of it. Without my generation's macho leftism, which made us think we could smash the machine and build a better one. Without Brian's cocksureness that he was smart enough to know all the machine's little secrets, and so control it.
the blessing and curse of the postmodern age
It is in the twenty-second session of that gathering that a chasm opens between the delegates, a split remarkable not only for its depth, but also for the seeming triviality of its catalyst. The question is whether a party member should be one who ‘recognises the party’s programme and supports it by material means and by regular personal association under the direction of one of the party organisations’, or ‘by personal participation in one of the party organisations’. Martov demands the former. Lenin stakes all on the latter
Relations between the two have been cooling for some time. Now after an intense, vigorous debate, Martov wins, twenty-eight to twenty-three. But various fits of huff and dudgeon ensue on other issues, and by the time the party leadership is to be decided, walkouts by the Jewish socialist group the Bund and by the Economist Marxists mean Martov has lost eight of his original supporters. Lenin manages to push through his choices for the Central Committee. Minority in Russian is menshinstvo, majority bolshinstvo. From these words the two great wings of Russian Marxism take their names: Martov’s Mensheviks and Lenin’s Bolsheviks.
In 1903, at the Second Congress of the RSDWP
Prominent in the Zhitomir attack were the Black Hundreds, an umbrella name for various cells of proto-fascist ultra-reactionaries, which sprang up out of authoritarian outrage at the 1905 revolution. They are apt to sprinkle a few populist calls, such as for land redistribution, atop fervour for an autocratic tsar – Nicholas II is an honorary member – and murderous spite against non-Russians, most particularly Jews [...]
sounds terrifyingly familira