Microserfs (25 page)

Discovering that Dusty was well informed about some calcified aspect of European history was like discovering - I don't know - like discovering that the happy face on the Kool-Aid pitcher is a cross-dresser. It's so random.

I mention this because tonight Todd and Dusty had dinner with a crew of moping ex-Marxist buddies of her parents over in Berkeley - all of them feeling left behind by the tide of history, singing freedom songs with a 5-stringed guitar; facial hair. That kind of stuff. There were probably lots of candles.

I think the religious feeling made Todd homesick for his religion-frenzied parents in Port Angeles. He returned to the office, brooded, and then he started to cry, then he went out on the lawn and didn't return for an hour.

Oh, and this afternoon I caught Ethan scrounging under the couch cushions, in pursuit of lost coins. The embarrassment!

Big gossip - Todd has announced he's

becoming a . . . Marxist! Of all things.

"Oh, Christ, Todd," said Ethan, "that's like announcing you're becoming Bugs Bunny."

Karla asked, "A Marxist? But Todd - the Wall came down in 1989."

"That doesn't matter."

"No, of course it doesn't," said Ethan.

"Arrogant bourgeois cochon" Todd slung back.

So anyway, Todd's found something external to believe in. I don't think it's a matter of dumbness or smartness, just his need to need, as ever.

Ethan was on the warpath: "If Todd expects us to treat him with some sort of respect just because he believes in some sort of outdated, cartoon-like ideology, he has another thing coming."

Ethan is being "reactionary" (Todd told me the word). But, as with any recent conversions to any new belief, Todd does exude a righteousness that is a touch off-putting, if not boring.

Michael said of the matter, "Everything else aside, his preaching interferes with his coding - as if bodybuilding didn't already use up enough of his brain's CPU. I think his parents being so religious and all, he has been trained with a deep need to follow."

Karla said, "Let's call them Boris and Natasha from now on."

Karla and I were both perplexed as we discussed the change in bed. "Where on earth did politics come from?" I asked. "Todd's gone from being historically empty to becoming a young post-Marxist, post-human code cruncher. Converted on the posing dais, I suppose."

"Red in his bed."

So who says people don't change?

Abe e-mailed from his mini-holiday in Vancouver:

I'm at the Westin in Vancouver. Room service asked me, inocently enough, "How many people will be eating?" and I replied, "2" , because I didn't want to seem like I was alone. Which I wwas.

How bad is this on a scale of one to ten?

My reply:

Abe . . . it's an "ELEVEN*

Dad got a callback from Delta Airlines for a job in their billing systems department. "It's tangential to high-tech - not really part of it - but . . ." Dad's interview is in two days. Bug and Dad went into town to get their hair cut together at one of those barber shops with a stuffed bass on the wall. Bug said it was like going to a Toppy's in Moscow.

Political nuttiness:

Todd: "Marxism presupposed that technology would never pass beyond a certain point . . . Marxism's 19th-century creation lends it an attractive distance in the postindustrial, late capitalist era."

Ethan: "There is more to prosperity than envy and redistribution."

Susan: "I'm sure the Hollywood unions are just waiting with bated breath for coding and multimedia production to unionize. What's it going to be - I write the code and then somebody from I.A.T.S.E. comes in and has to press the return key?"

Me: "TIME OUT!"

Politics only makes people cranky. There must be some alternative form of discourse. How is political will generated? Susan is embarrassed to be agreeing with Ethan over something. Normally they squabble over everything.

Michael caught us playing Doom on the office operating system and flipped out . . . or rather, he deleted it from the system and gave me a lecture about lost people-hours when I later asked him to please reinstall it. In the end he did, because it would be catastrophic to worker morale to not be able to hunt and kill your co-workers.

"And Daniel, they have a new version called Doom II coming out in October, and rumor has it that pirated versions have a hard-drive-trashing virus, so all I ask is that you don't even consider installing it."

Good luck.

Bug was so mad that he wanted to write a Marburg virus and stick it in Michael's machine, but this is just typical Bug ranting. The Marburg virus is so dangerous, it can't

even be studied. Thirty-seven German laboratory workers died in conjunction with it.

    Todd called me a cryptofascist         today. In honor of this,

    I'm formatting this particular              paragraph

                     flush right.

Michael said something cool today. He said something remarkable and unprecedented has occurred to us as a species now - "We've reached a critical mass point where the amount of memory we have externalized in books and databases (to name but a few sources) now exceeds the amount of memory contained within our collective biological bodies. In other words, there's more memory 'out there' than exists inside 'all of us.' We've peripheralized our essence."

He went on:

"Given this new situation, the presumption of the existence of the notion of 'history' becomes not necessarily dead but somewhat beside the point. Access to memory replaces historical knowledge as a way for our species to process its past. Memory has replaced history - and this is not bad news. On the contrary, it's excellent news because it means we're no longer doomed to repeat our mistakes; we can edit ourselves as we go along, like an on-screen document. The transition from history at the center to memory on the periphery may prove to be initially bumpy as people shed their intellectual inertia on the issue, but the transition is an inevitability, and thank heavens we have changed the nature of change itself - the prospect of cyclical wars and dark ages and golden ages has never particularly appealed to me."

Finally:

"And the continuing democratization of memory can only accelerate the obsolescence of history as we once understood it. History has been revealed as a fluid intellectual construct, susceptible to revisionism, in which a set of individuals with access to a large database dominates another set with less access. The age-old notion of 'knowledge is power' is overturned when all memory is copy-and-paste-able - knowledge becomes wisdom, and creativity and intelligence, previously thwarted by lack of access to new ideas, can flourish."

I changed the subject to that of tickets to the upcoming Sharks game in San Jose.

        Todd apologized for calling me

         a cryptofascist and called me

          "benignly centrist," instead.

The formatting for this paragraph is

                                obvious.

Dad had his interview with Delta. "An interview's an interview's an interview," he said. I think he just doesn't want to overly raise his hopes.

I later told Dusty Michael's theory of history being dead and she went goggle-eyed. Dusty said conspiratorially, "Michael may be a crypto-Marxist." (Oh God . . .) She kept blabbing, and it's so weird to see Dusty's mouth moving and genuine political words emerge. It just doesn't mesh with her computer image. I get the impression she should be discussing exfoliation or tanning factors instead, but then, bodies are political, too. Or so Dusty has informed the office.

I surprised Dusty. I said, that "since Marxism is explicitly based on property, ownership, and control of means of production, it may well end up being the final true politik

of this Benetton world we now live in." She said, "Hey, Danster - I underestimated you."

It was interesting to briefly enter the political realm - as such.

Dusty made a "Bulimia Top Ten List." Dusty is so incredibly willing to discuss her body. She even confessed she had to become a big-time shoplifter to support her habit. "Hey babe - bulimia ain't cheap." Karla was, needless to say, silent on the subject.

Bulimia Top Ten List:

• several buckets of Haagen-Dazs strawberry

• two large spaghetti dinners

• large box of Godiva chocolates

• stack of eight grilled cheese sandwiches with ketchup

• entire cheesecake

• two dozen chocolate pudding cups

• four hundred grapes

• bucket of McDonald's french fries

• even larger box of Godiva chocolates

• largest box of chocolates in the universe

Dusty is designing a cosmetic surgery program for Oop! as her creative project. Basic body and facial structures are loaded into the system, and by sucking and implanting bricks in and out, Oop! users can reengineer whatever body shape they want.

Dusty's being stringent in using 100 percent genuine medical parameters, so even if you wanted to, you couldn't transform Arnold Schwarzenegger into Christy Turlington. "You can only max out the potential of what's already there. Users must know the body's limits."

She and Susan are sharing bone parameters from Susan's dancing skeletons product.

Speaking of Christy Turlington, I have noticed that a fair number of women seem to want to be her. In fact, I have noticed that if modern conversations don't switch to the disappearance of time, they shift to discussions of super-models. I guess supermodels are like geeks, but instead of winning the Punnet Square of brains, they won the Punnet Square of looks. It must be bizarre being fabulously good-looking. I mean, at least you can disguise brains.

Supermodel; Superhighway. Coincidence?

The Boris and Natasha nickname is really catching on. We actually use the names to their faces. I think they love it.

I keep forgetting Susan's rich, but she is. She came back from grocery shopping at Draeger's with edible flowers ($1.99 a tub) and Bear Head mushrooms ($19.99/lb. - they look like white coral). Karla and I buy noodle-helper-style boxed products at Price-Costco. We're going to have to start eating better. Food is too good here, and eating crap makes you feel like such an outsider in the Bay Area.

Rants are the official communication mode of the '90s.

Karla asked Dusty what she thought of Lego, and this triggered a mega-rant:

"What do I think of Lego! Lego is, like, Satan's playtoy. These seemingly 'educational' little blocks of connectable fun and happiness have irrevocably brainwashed entire generations of youth from the information-dense industrialized nations into developing mindsets that view the world as unitized, sterile, inorganic, and interchangeably modular - populated by bland limbless creatures with cultishly sweet smiles."

("Minifigs" are what the tiny Lego people are called - Dusty must learn the correct terminology.)

"Lego is directly or indirectly responsible for everything from postmodern architecture (a crime) to middle class anal behavior over the perfect lawn. You worked at Microsoft, Dan, you know them - their lawns . . . you know what I mean.

"Lego promotes an overly mechanical worldview which once engendered, is rilly, rilly impossible to surrender."

"Anything else, Dusty?"

"Yes. Lego is, like, the perfect device to enculturate a citizenry intolerant of smell, intestinal by-products, nonadherence to unified standards, decay, blurred edges, germination, and death. Try imagining a forest made of Lego. Good luck. Do you ever see Legos made from ice? dung? wood? iron? and sphagnum moss? No - grotacious, or what?"

"Sure, Dusty, but what do you think of Michael's product idea - his coding?"

"It's rilly, rilly brilliant."

We've decided that we must have entertainment to break the monotony of coding and work.

We tried going to movies at the Shoreline Cineplex, but movies at a theater take FOREVER to watch - no fast forward. And VCR rental movies take forever to watch, even using the FFWD button.

Then Karla accidentally discovered this incredible time-saving secret - foreign movies with subtitles! It's like the crack cocaine equivalent of movies. We watched a Japanese movie - an artistic one, at that (Kurosawa's No Regrets for Our Youth) - in less than an hour. All you have to do is blast directly through to the subtitles, speed-read them, and then blip out the rest. It's so efficient it's scary.

"Why can't they subtitle English movies?" asked Karla. I mean, they do books-on-tape for commuters. Subtitled English movies would fill a potentially big niche. No one has time anymore."

Mr. Ideology himself (Boris) walked in, and Ethan couldn't resist telling him that he'd run a search on Lenin on an on-line encyclopedia, and it turns out Lenin's name means nothing. "It's a made up name - like Sting - he just showed up at the dacha one morning and said, 'Call me Lenin.' "

Todd responded by saying, "Just goes to show you how he was postmodern a century ahead of his time."

Dusty was trying to tell us all about "Mehrwert" - surplus value per unit of time/labor: "A worker creates more value than that for which he is compensated. You know?"

Michael went purple, like a Burger King manager who hears one of his employees discuss unionization.

And then Karla screwed Michael's notions of production up even further by passing along a meme somebody spammed her on the Net that day, that any multiple of 6, minus one, is a prime number. All work STOPPED immediately as everybody set out to prove its validity.