Podcasts about microserfs

In today's flashback, an outtake from Episode 268, my conversation with Douglas Coupland. This episode first aired on April 13, 2014. Since 1991 Coupland has written thirteen novels. Including Generation X, Microserfs, Player One, and Worst. Person. Ever. He has written and performed for England's Royal Shakespeare Company and is a columnist for The Financial Times of London. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, e-flux, and Vice.  *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc. Subscribe to Brad Listi's email newsletter. Support the show on Patreon Merch @otherppl Instagram  TikTok Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Please take a moment and give this podcast a review on your favorite podcast platform.David Sucher's 1995 classic, City Comforts is a book I have long recommended to anyone with an interest in cities, design and planning. In a way, the book really hit the cultural mark in that era. It was set in Seattle, which was the locus for 1990s culture, especially musical culture. You could almost pair up the book with the 1990s movie, “Singles,” for a sense of what was happening broadly with the American zeitgeist, and perhaps Douglas Coupland's novel Microserfs. David's book was eminently practical, with not a smidge of utopian thinking. It's written and told by someone who sees problems to be solved at the micro scale, and solutions that can be had. It's written in a series of very short vignettes. It's written with an obvious love and care for humans, and for the cities they inhabit. And while it clearly derives from the era, it could be re-published today with very few changes and having similar relevance. In fact, that's something David and I discuss.Here's a few links we discuss:David's “3 Rules for a Walkable Neighborhood”Allowing One Triplex per BlockOn the proposed gondola for Little Cottonwood CanyonFind more content on The Messy City on Kevin's Substack page.Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you'd like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.Intro: “Why Be Friends”Outro: “Fairweather Friend” Get full access to The Messy City at kevinklinkenberg.substack.com/subscribe

Hola y bienvenidos a Tripeando. En este episodio, David E. Roemer y el resto del equipo te traemos un nuevo episodio súper interesante e importante con Diego García, co-fundador de Clara.Clara es una empresa que se dedica a ayudar a empresas a tener una tarjeta de crédito de forma fácil, y gestionar sus pagos de la forma intuitiva. Esto los ha convertido en una empresa unicornio, es decir valuada en más de mil millones de dólares.Diego es una persona grande y sencilla. En este episodio me cuenta sobre su frase favorita actual: “el presente no es para siempre.” También platicamos sobre cómo construye su camino a través de la programación en Veracruz, creando comunidad con otras personas que no encajaban con el sistema educativo tradicional y sobre su trayectoria por distintos trabajos que hizo desde joven.Diego comparte cómo nace la idea de Clara en un barbecue en el que platica con Gerry su socio sobre la dificultad de conseguir una tarjeta corporativa en América Latina. Y cómo se enamoraron del problema y lograron transmitirlo a todo el equipo a través de la cultura de Clara.Los libros sobre los que nos platicó Diego fueron: On the Road de Jack Kerouac, Microserfs de Douglas Coupland y Daytripper de Fábio Moon y Gabriel Bó.Visita Clara Empresarial para conocer más sobre Clara.

Part One. Dan is a Microsoft employee in desperate need of ‘a life'. His world can be summed up as eat, sleep, code, repeat, and he's not quite feeling himself. So when the chance comes along for him and his friends to leave Microsoft to form a Silicon Valley start-up, will they take the risk and leap into the unknown? A brand new take on Douglas Coupland's funny, classic 1995 novel which takes a microscope to working culture in the early days of the Silicon Valley tech boom. Part of Radio 4's Working Titles season looking at the changing world of work. You can find Part Two of Microserfs on BBC Sounds from the 4th December. CAST Dan ….. Will Merrick Karla ….. Samantha Dakin Bug ….. Matthew Needham Michael ….. Freddie Meredith Todd ….. Chris Lew Kum Hoi Susan ….. Chloë Sommer Abe ….. Hughie O'Donnell Ethan ….. Tom Kiteley Dan's Mum ….. Joanna Monro Dan's Dad ….. Roger Ringrose Written By Douglas Coupland Dramatised By Theo Toksvig-Stewart Directed By Anne Isger Sound by Cal Knightley, Pete Ringrose, David Gregory, Billy Godfrey Production Co-ordination by Luke MacGregor Writer and artist Douglas Coupland has written thirteen novels (including Generation X: Tales For An Accelerated Culture, JPod, Generation A). Microserfs was published in 1995. Theo Toksvig-Stewart is a writer for Stage, Radio, Television and Film. The radio version of Theo's acclaimed theatre play Endless Second was shortlisted for the best radio drama at the Prix Italia 2022 and received a ‘Special Mention'.

Hello Interactors,More Microsoft history and it’s role in the growth of itself, other companies around the world, and our pervasive connections to each other and the internet. I was lucky to play a small part in this transformation. I did my best to understand the behavior of people using the software that fueled these expansions. It taught me lessons I’m now applying to understanding behavior of people interacting with place.As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community. I welcome your participation.Interplace is a place for people to interact so please leave your comments below or feel free to email me directly. Now let’s go…MICROSERFSIn my early days at Microsoft, the place felt more like a startup. I had come from a company of 120 people, so 11,000 people should have felt huge. But compared to the 168,000 of today, it was small. The culture was different too. People were there to make something – not to be somebody. This attitude is best ensconced in Douglas Coupland’s 1995 novel, Microserfs. Set on Microsoft’s forested campus, it gives a peek into ‘geek culture’ of the early 90s. It also exposes the heartfelt belief that we really were doing something meaningful.“What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?” “Maybe thinking you're supposed to 'have a life' is a stupid way of buying into an untenable 1950s narrative of what life *supposed* to be. How do we know that all of these people with 'no lives' aren't really on the new frontier of human sentience and preceptions?” – Douglas Coupland, MicroserfsWhen this book came out, Windows 95 was just starting up. PC sales were revving. Selling at the rate of 40 Million per year it’s success pushed Intel’s revenue growth to 41% in a single year. And the promise of the World Wide Web was taking hold. Bill’s book, The Road Ahead, had come out and he had a vision. That vision was expressed in a keynote at COMDEX, a popular technology conference. The concept was called, ‘Information at your Fingertips’ and he needed a murder mystery movie to tell the story. My team designed the PC desktop interactions in this video. We imagined what interactions would be like in 2005. At one point in the video, Bill jokingly refers to our work as a ‘rather cluttered desktop’. Soon after you’ll see Bill introducing long file names and video conferencing. But in 1995, that meant video conferencing with somebody in a public phone booth! People around the world were buying in to Bill’s vision — including major corporations and governments. Businesses multiplied PC growth. And so did connectivity. Bill’s vision of a PC on every desk was coming true. Connecting computers to the internet really did put information at your fingertips. Buying a PC in 1995 was the entry price to a new world of communication. Windows 95 made connecting to the internet easy, Office 95 simplified sending email, and the Internet Explorer let you, well, explore the internet. Information was not just gingerly touching the tips of fingers. Hands were cupped and people were scooping up tiny bits of addictive bytes and gorging themselves. We still are. In 1996 36 million people were on the internet. By 2000 it grew tenfold to 360 million. A decade later it jumped to two billion. Estimates now put that number at around four billion – over half of the world’s population. A reminder of the advantage and privilege half the world holds over the other half. GROW BABY GROWSatisfying this growing appetite for information required more than software. Cables needed to be run, server farms needed built, and somebody had to manage all this information and technology. Enter the IT Manager. IT had been around for some time already, but installing, managing, and controlling access to Windows, Office, and all these PCs and peripherals put real strains on IT departments. So did the need to control access to the exponential growth of documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Other comparable modes of communication, like snail mail and telephones, only grew at a rate of around 10% over a much longer period of time. The expansion of IT departments mirrored this curve. Digital connection and communication between people inside companies fuels the same ingenuity that physical connections do in dense cities. The bigger the city, the more innovation occurs. Successful cities attract talented and conscientious people generating superlinear population growth and creativity. It’s why bigger cities and bigger companies have bigger stockpiles of patents. “Just as bounded growth in biology follows from the sublinear scaling of metabolic rate, the superlinear scaling of wealth creation and innovation (as measured by patent production, for example) leads to unbounded, often faster-than-exponential growth consistent with open-ended economies.”– Geoffrey West. Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies.To accommodate this growth, the infrastructure must scale accordingly. But whether it’s an ethernet cable plugged in to a PC, a copper pipe connected to a toilet, or the capillaries feeding those information seeking fingertips the endpoints all start small. Universally small. Be it Boston, Bamako, or Bangladesh, the clear plastic fitting at the end of that network cable is the same. The diameter of piping connected to the toilet is also roughly the same. So are the smallest blood vessels in every human’s freakishly flexible fingers all they way down to their tiny typing tips. All of which connect to progressively larger conduits that accommodate increasing amounts of data, water, or blood. All the way to massive data gateways, waterworks plants, and plasma pumping hearts. “The pipe that connects your house to the water line in the street and the electrical line that connects it to the main cable are analogs of capillaries, while your house can be thought of as an analog to cells. Similarly, all employees of a company, viewed as terminal units, have to be supplied by resources (wages, for example) and information through multiple networks connecting them with the CEO and the management.”– Geoffrey West. Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies.It’s the work of fractals and the power of sublinear scaling. It’s what makes an elephant live longer than mouse, and companies like Microsoft to live longer than most startups. But an elephant is also big and slow, and so are big companies. As the year 2000 approached, other growing companies suffered the same fate of growth. The burden of managing these layers of modern administration increased the total cost of ownership of assets. The cost of managing equipment, software, and data, exceeded the cost of the software used to create it. Office 97 was deemed ‘good enough’ by the industry. This meant every new feature we added only diminished the return on their investment. Microsoft Office faced the same fate natural organisms do – a growth plateau. POWER TO THE PEOPLEThis marked a notable shift in our approach to user research. Instead of focusing entirely on the tasks and activities of individual end users, we had new problems to consider: reducing the total cost of ownership and increasing the return on existing investments. Our infamous attempt at expanding menus in Office was one such example. Instead of a bottoms-up ‘geek culture’ approach to software development that was tied to individual needs and desires, we were looking through the lens of IT managers and business decision makers.Meanwhile, the kind of things people were doing in Office was expanding and diversifying. We discovered people used Excel for everything from poetry to programming. Word users made love letters and legal documents. We were constantly surprised by how people used Office. I recall a site visit where we observed an office manager at a car dealership using Word. She was making a flyer to post in the break room. We watched as she created a new document, typed and formatted some text, spent a few minutes laying it out, and then hit ‘Print’. What happened next surprised us. She closed Word, and was dutifully prompted to save her document. To our amazement, she declined. We politely interjected, “You just lost all your work!” She responded, “No I didn’t, it’s sitting right there on the printer.” As we observed more and more behavior we found ourselves looking across individual use cases in search of commonalities. We would cluster and clump collections of behaviors into buckets with names like, “Create”, “Communicate”, “Synthesize“, and “Collaborate”. Before long we distanced ourselves from those individual behaviors. The language became obtuse and abstract. The knowledge of how people were using the product on the ground became mediated through layers of corporate administration. There were decisions being made among the ‘corporate elite’ in corporation that had measurable impacts on how people were using Office. Decisions that impacted their satisfaction of our product and of their livelihood. But much of that became insulated from us. IT didn’t much like Microsoft researching their employees. Knowledge of how real people did real things in real ways was information just beyond our fingertips.STRIKING THE BALANCEThe same effects of scaling occur in cities as well.  Small towns are like startups. They have their own version of ‘geek culture’; transcendental motivators that rally a group around something bigger than themselves. As the city grows, it too attracts the best and brightest. And as the population grows, so does the infrastructure needed to sustain it. The close interactions of smart talented people yields new innovations that generate revenue and attract more talent. City growth seems to be impervious to scaling laws. Luis Bettencourt, a physicist and complexity scientist who studies cities, calls them ‘social reactors’. By his estimation, there’s only one thing in nature that behaves like cities. The sun. In a Santa Fe Institute interview by host Michael Garfield , Bettencourt says, “…the only system that has sort of these properties that I know of exist in nature that concentrates things, increases interaction rates and admits products at a rate that's higher, per unit of mass is the sun, is a star and that's a reactor, right?”Researchers have been observing and understanding the behavior of people and place for centuries. And they too have struggled with the same things I did trying to understand the behavior of people using complex systems like Office. Studying people on the ground indeed yields insights at a micro-level. But after collecting and amassing mounds of data patterns emerge, generalizations are made, and soon they’re looking at humans in the aggregate. Researching at the macro level-begins with agglomerated aggregate. But patterns also emerge. Moreover, it allows for the study of behavior of decision makers, policy writers, and power brokers. These decision makers work together to convive, concoct and sometimes conspire ways of influencing the outcomes of organizations. It’s important we study how planning and long term execution of coordinated strategies impact the world. Only then will hidden influences of our economic and political systems emerge. In synthesizing decades of human geography research by social scientists, researchers Reginald Golledge and Robert Stimson came to this conclusion:“It was found that the long-term plans and objectives of Western capitalist societies often benefited small, elite groups of capitalists more than they benefited people with low incomes and that planning for personal welfare diverged widely among capitalist and socialist and social-welfare economies. Decision making at the macro level was thus defined as a constrained process, undertaken and implemented by a powerful elite, often encompassing goals that differentially considered segments of society or economy.” – Reginald G. Golledge and Robert J. Stimson. Spatial Behavior: A Geographic PerspectiveUnderstanding human behavior is a challenging and dynamical undertaking. After all, in the words of Douglas Coupland, “What is human behavior, except trying to prove that we're not animals?”I’m not convinced we’re smart enough to fully understand or describe human behavior. It’s like looking through a telescope with one eye and a microscope with the other and then coherently explaining what you see. But it does involve a little bit of both of these techniques. It requires us to sit with people in their context to fully grasp the how their physical environment impacts their work, lives, attitudes, and beliefs. When you see someone, as I did, straight out of college sitting in a broom closet with a desk and a laptop using Excel for 10 hours a day, it’s hard to un-see. Somebody in ‘corporate’ decided it was a good idea to put a human in a closet to work. Like an animal. It’s essential we understand why people do these, and much, much worse things to other people. Every organization has a group, or two, of just a few people with a privileged view. They reckon and wrangle, poke and prod, and wager which message to tangle and skew. I’ve been there, I know, they impact me and they impact you.The same is true in the cities we live. And the regions and counties and countries, too. By trying to know all we can know and showing the world what we’re we willing to show, a bigger vessel of understanding can flow. In the words of Reg Golledge and Robert Stimson, “A paradigm for examining human-environment settings needs to encompass a complex set of relevant variables and their functional relationships. It includes the physical and the built aspects of environment; it allows for roles of culture and its related social and political systems and institutions; it identifies the evolution of culture over time through technology; and it recognizes intervening psychological processes as filtering mechanisms in how humanity perceives the environment and acts within it.”Our collective behavior has fueled a rate and pace of growth that we cannot survive. Microsoft, as a company, has survived longer than most. Looking at over 22,000 U.S. companies, from 1950 to 2009, only half made it past 10 years. I’m half way to 60 and many scientists would agree that I’m as old as the Anthropocene – a geological epoch marked by the negative impact our behavior is having on the planet. The majority of my life has been spent molding and understanding the behavior of people behind a computer screen – billions of finger tips making, taking, and shaping information through software. My one wish is that they, we, look at our reflection in that screen and ask, “Will my current behavior allow the next two generations to survive?” Subscribe at interplace.io

We're halfway through the 90s, and this week we're reading a book that feels very much like a time capsule of the era: Douglas Coupland's Microserfs, his follow-up to Generation X, the novel that introduced that term into the world. In Microserfs we follow a group of twenty-something coders as they quit their jobs at Microsoft to work for a start-up company in Silicon Valley. The book explores the world of early start-up culture just a couple years before dot-com culture fully takes over the San Francisco Bay Area. In lieu of publishing news this week, Mike tells a personal story from 1995 about email, the internet, and one young man's search for love. Tom, meanwhile, charts the quick rise and fall of JFK Jr.'s George magazine. And 90s Movie Club is revisiting the classic film Hackers, starring Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, and Jesse Bradford. If you like the show, please consider subscribing to our Patreon, which helps us make a bit of money each month and keep the show going. For just $5 a month, you'll get access to a monthly bonus episode, Book Fight After Dark, in which we visit some of the weirder, funnier corners of the literary world. Recently, that's involved reading a paranormal romance novel, the debut novel of Jersey Shore's Snookie, and the novelization of the movie Battleship (yes, based on the popular board game).

Douglas Coupland has done so much more than name a generation (“Generation X”—post-Boomer, pre-Millennial, from his novel of that name). He is a prolific writer (22 books, including nonfiction such as his biography of Marshall McLuhan) and a brilliant visual artist with installations at a variety of museums and public sites. His 1995 novel Microserfs nailed the contrast between corporate and startup cultures in software and Web design. Coupland is fascinated by time. For Long Now he plans to deploy ideas and graphics “all dealing on some level with time and how we perceive it, how we used to perceive it, and where our perception of it may be going.” A time series about time.

Classic books about computers and technology - Our interests in reading and technology collide in this survey of books about computers and the tech industry, using the 20th anniversary of Douglas Coupland’s “Microserfs” as the jumping off point. Soldering irons and circuit boards! Berkeley hippies fighting German hackers! Early signs of the tech industry’s ongoing mistreatment of workers! Glenning! Join us in a trip through technology’s past, all the while keeping an eye on where we are today. Host Jason Snell with Lisa Schmeiser, Monty Ashley, Glenn Fleishman and David J. Loehr.

On this very special 4th of July epsiode of IWWROI, Aussie filmmaker Julia Ngeow joins us to talk about Tony Abbott, her first trip to New York City, and the slang for Australian rednecks. We also talk about the impending Donald Trump presidency.Finally, we talk about reddit's big meltdown and the shocking truth behind our sympathy for their misogynistic, white supremacist userbase.

Recorded 6 December 2013. You can download the m4a file. This is the last episode of Identical Cousins. Thank you so much for listening! We had a great time, and we loved hearing from people who enjoyed the show. This episode is sponsored by Oxygene from the super-awesome RemObjects Software. See remobjects.com/oxygene and use the discount code ID13 for 20% off. This episode is also sponsored by HostGator. Use the coupon code COUSINS for 25% off. Get your very own .net domain name! (And web hosting. And 24/7 support. And plenty more.) Some things we mention (or just felt like linking to): Gold is Best 24 Atari Xcode Legos Microserfs RIM’s $10K Developer Committment Pull to refresh iOS 7 360 iDev System 7 Romantic Era Modernism Richard Wagner Claude Debussy Paul Cezanne Pablo Picasso The girls would turn the color of an avocado when he would drive down their street in his El Dorado Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole Ernest Hemingway Bauhaus The bats have left the bell tower Fantastical Flipboard iPad Jean Michel Jarre AltWWDC Skype Scott Forstall iCloud Core Data Syncing Letterpress Pinbook Albina Development Collin Donnell Black Pixel Black Pixel Acquires NetNewsWire Rogue Amoeba Vesper Chatology Glassboard Ulan Bator Yak Shaving The Cannonball Run Cannonball Run Bloopers History of the World, Part 1 Dom DeLuise We talk alot about previous episodes. Instead of linking to them in the show notes, we figured you could just visit the Archive.

Nathan and Conlan regale you with News!, Evil Dead 2, Hardcore Tourism, The Avengers, Microserfs, Beyond Outrage, If Chins Could Kill Confessions of a B Movie Actor.

Nathan and Conlan regale you with News!, Beastie Boys, Lockout, Microserfs, new work, Mission Impossible 4, Veep, Fringe.

Microserfs by Douglas Coupland is a satirical look at the Microsoft culture during the early 90s. It's absolutely brilliant. The comparison between MS and Apple's employee culture is fantasatic.

Microserfs by Douglas Coupland is a satirical look at the Microsoft culture during the early 90s. It's absolutely brilliant. The comparison between MS and Apple's employee culture is fantasatic.

In the summer of 1996 I presented a series on CBC Radio’s Island Morning program, produced by Ann Thurlow, called Consumed by Technology. I’ve managed to recover the audio of the episodes, along with the “show notes” and transcripts, from The Internet Archive and I’m posting each episode here for posterity. This third episode of Consumed by Technology focused on the rhythms of digital working; it aired on July 23, 1996. Karen Mair was the host. Farmers live from season to season. Car makers live by the model year. Monks live a lifetime of coming to understand God. Politicians live by their terms. Every sort of work has its own rhythm, and these rhythms can profoundly affect people’s everyday lives. Show Notes These are the original links that I released with the episode; each is a link to the Internet Archive’s cache of the site at the time. Jazzed up Hotwired Microserfs Working at McDonald’s Mad as Hell The Unabomber Manifesto Network Center for Repetitive Motion Disorders Transcript INTRO: Farmers live from season to season. Car makers live by the model year. Monks live a lifetime of coming to understand God. Politicians live by their terms. Every sort of work has its own rhythm, and these rhythms can profoundly affect people’s everyday lives. In another in the series “Consumed by Technology,” Peter Rukavina joins me now to talk about the rhythms of the “digital worker” and what he calls “the death of time.” QUESTION: What exactly is a “digital worker?” ANSWER: Well, the easiest answer to that question is that I’m pretty sure that I’m a “digital worker.” Being a digital worker means that the “stuff” of my job is digital information; what I do all day is move it around. I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life — I’ve sold car parts at Canadian Tire; I’ve sorted turtle bones in a museum; I’ve taught 7 year olds how to canoe; I’ve pasted up the sports section a daily newspaper every day. All of these jobs, in one way or another, have dealt with “real stuff” — car parts, turtles, kids and canoes, newspapers — and they’ve all been the sort of work that gets “finished” at some point — the part gets sold, the bones get sorted, the kids know how to canoe, the newspaper gets printed. But now that I have a job as a “digital worker,” the days of having “real stuff” to deal with and jobs that have a beginning, a middle and an end seem to be gone. What I do all day is sit in front of a computer screen moving around bits of digital space: words, graphics, pictures. The different thing about moving around bits of digital information as opposed to, say, moving around bits of turtles, is that digital information is a very “elastic” thing — it’s extremely easy to change — and that elasticity makes for a very different work life than what I’ve been used to. Think about the difference between typing something on a manual typewriter versus typing it on a word processor. If you get 7 pages into it on a typewriter and decide that you want to add a new paragraph somewhere on page 3, it’s out with the exacto knife and the rubber cement and 15 or 20 minutes of fiddling around. On a word processor, all you need to do is to pop up to page 3, hit insert and start typing. The simplest way to understand what being a digital worker is like is to take that example — typewriters versus word processors — and extend it to almost all aspects of a work life. For me, going to work means logging on to the ‘net. The tools I use are text editors and electronic paint programs and modems. And the work I do is like being a construction worker in cyberspace: I arrange bits of information so that people can find them and make sense of them. I don’t move around bales of hay or pizzas, I move around ferry schedules, soil test results and electronic pictures of horses. My job is to maintain a constantly evolving pool of information in good order QUESTION: That sort of work sounds very familiar… how is being a “digital worker” different from what we do here on the radio every day? We’re both in the “information moving business,” aren’t we? ANSWER: Well yes, we’re both in the information moving business. The important difference, though, is that come 9 o’clock this morning, today’s “Island Morning” is done; you can’t go back and change something that happened at 7:15, because it’s already out there in people’s radios… it’s done. Making radio — and, for that matter, making television or newspapers, or magazines — is a lot like using a manual typewriter. The rhythm of these media is hourly or daily or weekly or monthly. They start. They end. They’re done. Working with digital information, though, is a different story. If I take a piece of information, let’s say it’s a map of Charlottetown, and put it on the Internet. In the “old print world,” my job would now be done. But remember, digital information is very easy to change. Let’s say that in two weeks, a new road gets constructed in East Royalty, or a street downtown gets changed to one-way, or new park gets created. Because the map is on the Internet, because it’s a digital map, I can simply go and make these changes. As soon as I make them, the original map is gone and is replaced by a new, more up-to-date map. To do the same thing in the “old print world,” would mean printing and distributing a whole new map, something you wouldn’t tend to do very often because of the cost of paper and ink and distribution. Now this might seem like a pretty simple concept: digital information is easier to change. But the important thing here is not one example or another, but an entire work day, or work week, or work year, spent working in a world where everything can be changed, updated, redesigned — easily — all the time. That’s what being a digital worker is like. QUESTION: Now you call this the “death of time?” Well, I’ll admit that “the death of time” might be blowing things a little out of proportion, but let me explain why it feels like that’s exactly what it is… I don’t think anyone would disagree that the job you have, and how time factors into it, can really affect the rest of your life. If you work the night shift, for example, you’re awake when everyone else is asleep. If you’re a teacher, you get a two month vacation in the middle of the summer. If you farm potatoes, there’s not a lot to do in the fields in January. If you host Island Morning, you’ve got to get up before almost everyone else. Now, as you suggested earlier, time also factors into jobs in another way: every occupation has its own rhythm, or “life cycle” associated with it. This isn’t necessarily a day to day thing that has to do with when you have to get up in the morning, it’s more about the natural cycle of whatever it is you work at. If you’re a farmer, you plant a crop every season. Spring comes, you plow, fertilize, sow, roll, till, spray… harvest. Winter comes. And then you do it all again. When farmers talk about how things are going in their lives, usually it has something to do with how the crop is going. You’ve had a good year if you’ve had a good crop. You’ve had a bad year if you’ve had a bad crop. The rhythm of the farm is the season. If you work in a hospital emergency room, each “project” you take on is one case coming in the door. They’re hurt, you treat them, they go away. Total time, anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours. Then it’s on to the next patient. The rhythm of the emergency room is the coming and going of the patients. Again, these rhythms can have a profound affect on how people live their lives, not just in a practical way, but in a way which affects how they feel and think and relate to the rest of the world. Imagine then what it’s like to work in a job where the work is, quite literally, never done, where the “stuff” that you’re working on is constantly evolving, where everything is in a constant state of flux, where projects start, but never really finish, because they can always be changed, updated, made better, clearer, easier to understand. The rhythm of this sort of job — the rhythm of “digital work” — is very, very different than the rhythm of any other sort of work. It’s either so long that it’s endless, or so short that it’s invisible. For all practical purposes, though, it’s as if there’s no rhythm at all. And in a way, that means that there’s no time at all. Or at the very least it means that how people and work and time all relate is very different from what we’re used to. So that’s why it call it “the death of time.” QUESTION: What are the practical implications of this? What have you noticed about your life as a “digital worker?” ANSWER: One significant thing is that getting satisfaction from my job is difficult, or at least different. It’s not like there’s a pile of something getting smaller as I work, or a last nail to drive in to finish, or a published book to put up on the shelf. I have to get my satisfaction from the process of working rather than from the finished product because, really, the product is never finished. My day to day work life is different too. Because there’s no beginning, middle or end to the projects I work on, and because the tasks involved in digital work tend to be shorter rather than longer, I tend to be working on 25 or 30 little things all at the same time. And which 25 or 30 things I’m working on changes from day to day, from hour to hour. I might spend five minutes adding a bit to an Internet page I’m working on here on the Island, 10 minutes fixing up a database on a computer in Boston, another five minutes answering some email and so on, hour after hour. It makes it difficult to go home at 5 o’clock because there’s really no logical place to end the work day… there’s always something else to evolve a little bit before I call it a day, and sometimes I end up evolving until 9 or 10 at night. QUESTION: So computers have changed our whole idea of what is work time and what is home time? ANSWER: Well, certainly for me they have, and that too can be something of a challenge. Because digital work can be done from anywhere — including from home — it just makes the dividing line between work and home all that fuzzier. Perhaps most importantly, though, is the challenge of doing digital work in what is still largely an analog world. It tends to be the places where “old analog” meets “new digital” that are the most challenging. This is true in work — how do you set up electronic hotel reservations at hotels with no computers — but I tend to notice it more in just regular day-to-day life. I’ve started to notice, for example, that in my personal life, I don’t tend to think ahead very much; it’s hard to shift from a minute-by-minute digital way of thinking to a “where should we go on vacation this fall?” or a “when do you think the broccoli will be up?” way of thinking. It’s hard to move from a digital world where everything is malleable and elastic and easily changed to a concrete “real” world where pipes burst and ceilings fall in and cars run out of gas. Now I don’t want to make it sound as though I’ve morphed into some sort of digital cyberguy or even as though my life is any different, worse or better than anyone else’s. My mortgage still comes due at the end of every month and I still brush my teeth twice a day. But I do notice a difference in my life as a digital worker as opposed to my life as, say, a canoe instructor. And I do think it’s important to look carefully at the long-term social consequences of this transition to an “information economy” — with all the digital workers it will require — that we seem to be in the middle of. In the end, I think the real effects of digital work on society won’t be felt, or at least understood, for 5 or 10 years and it may be too late by then to have any control over them. QUESTION: In some ways, it sounds like it may be too late now… ANSWER: It’s very hard to say: the changes we’re talking about are so small and so subtle, and the nature digital work itself changes so much, that actually putting your finger on something and saying “no, this is something we don’t want to happen” or “hey, isn’t that a nice new thing to have happened” seems almost impossible. In any case, I certainly know that there are some days that I’d relish another go at the turtle bone pile or the chance to sell someone a muffler for a ‘75 Dodge Dart… EXTRO: Peter Rukavina operates Digital Island in Kingston, PEI… he’ll be back next week with another in the series “Consumed by Technology.”