Book

Microserfs

Douglas Coupland

I first read this when I was about 11 (1999/2000) and loved it. It’s interesting revisiting a book from 20 years distance and seeing it in a different way. It’s prescient about how central the internet and the technology companies that built its applications would become.

Some quotes

“What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?”
“Microsoft’s millionaire’s are the first generation of North American nerd wealth.”
There’s this idea that machines are us - a reflection of our dreams, a repository of our memories, that they are alive, an echo of our consciousness developing their own. “The constellation of red, yellow, and green LEDs from Michael’s sleeping, dreaming machines.”
“I started to think about those old Life-Time books with such all-embracing names like, ‘The elements,’ and ‘The ocean,’ and of how all the information in them never really goes out of date, whereas the computer series books date within minutes.”
On doing something useful with your life (an engineer’s refrain). “The real morality here… is whether these good hands are squandered on uncreative lives, or whether these hands are applied to continuing humanity’s dream.”
A brain drain to startups was happening in the 90s (and has happened in many cycles since depending how bullish the VCs are feeling): “People our age are abandoning the tech megacultures in droves, starting their own companies, or joining small, content-based startups… The big companies that aren’t minting money are hemorrhaging brains. It’s intellectual darwinism.” There’s another idea throughout the book about how “Multimedia” was the big thing at the time, reminds me of the blockchain frenzy a few years ago, Web 2.0 before that and AI now. These trends are very ephemeral. Beware when they go media mainstream, there are a lot of hangers on and opportunists selling nonsense.
“Susan’s mother told Susan she had an enormous IQ so she could never pretend she was dumb.”
“Ethan and I drove around Silicon Valley today looking at various company parking lots to see who was working on a Sunday. He says that’s the surest way to tell which company to invest in.”
“Start-ups appeal either to the jaded-cynics because they know the way things really work - or to the totally naive - because they don’t. Which are you?”
On Silicon Valley pace and optimism: “There’s a saying down in these parts twenty-four hours heals all wounds.”
“I say ‘ummm’ a lot. Karla says it’s a CPU word. ‘It means you’re assembling data in your head.‘”
The gang go to a fancy apartment in SanFran “we went off to marvel at the amount of stuff owned by your hosts. We felt like East Germans visiting West Germany for the first time.”
The gang reflect on Gap and how the future of clothing will see shortened ‘purchase - spot trend - manufacture to meet trend’ cycles. That art has been almost perfected by Shein.
“The lower your employee number down here, the higher your status - and the more likely you are to hold equity.”
Some valley rules:

a) “Always ask a person ‘what have you shipped in the last two years?’.”

b) “The industry is made up of either gifted techies or smart generalists.”

c) “One psycho for every 9 stable people is a good ratio.”

d) “People are most ripe for pilfering from tech monocultures in their mid-to late 20s.”
“Just think about the way high tech cultures purposefully protract out the adolescence of their employees well into their late 20s, if not their early 30s… the way tech firms won’t even call work ‘the office, but instead, the campus’.”
On tying self worth to messages YEARS before insta dms, whatsapp, likes etc. “Todd like many 1990s people, equates his self worth with the number of messages on his phone answering machine. If the red light’s not blinking … YOU ARE A LOSER.”
The protagonist’s mum has a stroke and he looks after her: “And so every day, I hold the hand that once held me, so long ago.”s