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Computing the Future [Sojourners Magazine]
[November 03, 2014]

Computing the Future [Sojourners Magazine]


(Sojourners Magazine Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) tV tackles the digital revolution.

"tHe CoMpUter'S not tHe tHinG. It's the thing that will get us to the thing," intones Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace), the enigmatic visionary at the heart of AMC's new techno-drama Halt and Catch Fire. Set in the early 1980s in Texas' "Silicon Prairie," the series chronicles a small, fictional software company that enters the per- sonal computing fray. This is the age of IBM dominance and the improbability of an underdog company taking down the computer Goliath is the premise of the show.



HCF is a kind of origin myth: a drama that tries to capture the spirit and per- sonalities that drove the personal computing revolution that reshaped the world we now inhabit. Across the cable universe, HBO offers another riff on the same theme set in the present day. Silicon Valley is a satirical send-up of startup culture and the boy-men who rule the northern California empire to which we are all in thrall. In tone and style it is the antithesis of the self-consciously serious HCF. But the two shows share a similar preoccupation with exploring the humans who make tech- nology even more than the technology itself.

This is partially a necessity of good storytelling. Nothing slows down a story like having to explain technical expertise. At best you can get a few gags out of the science geek spewing unintelligible jar- gon to the bewildered "everyperson" (think Sheldon's whole persona on The Big Bang Theory). But this narrative limitation also hints at the enigma both shows are trying to explore: Who are the people who under- stand the jargon and create the technology that defines our new digital age? What is the nature of this kind of power? One of tech culture's favorite answers to that question is to insist on the utopian, non- hierarchical nature of digital power. We all know some version of this song. The inter- net unleashes the core democratic potential in human nature: information flowing free of traditional political or economic con- straints-instant access to everything by everyone! And you don't have to be a tech geek to participate. Anyone can post any- thing to YouTube! The revolution can be tweeted! Facebook connects the world in solidarity and community! It does, however, take a considerable amount of technical expertise to create the platform that hosts YouTube. Ordinary users have no power over the basic design of a Facebook page, which all look basically the same. More data about our behaviors, pref- erences, movements, and relationships are being collected-to uncertain ends-than was feasible at any other time in human his- tory. And at least for the time being, only some people can build and code those com- puters. It is not surprising, then, that pop culture fictions are turning an eye to the per- sonalities and cultures of the people who are setting the terms of our future.


Those personalities run a rather clichéd spectrum from madman to wunderkind in Halt and Catch Fire. There is Joe. Part vision- ary leader, part sociopath, he manipulates everyone around him into his master plan to build a personal computer to compete with IBM-starting with Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy), a washed-up computer engineer turned software salesman, and Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis), a coding prod- igy whose punk-rock attitude and double X chromosomes rub up against the old-boys club.

This triumvirate-narcissistic visionary, experienced engineer, and tech savant- form the backbone of the new "tech culture" that is challenging the 1980s corporate cul- ture. The bad guys are still the men in suits who treat computers like one more com- modity in their portfolios. Even the threat from IBM is not superior technology but the number of navy-clad lawyers they can fly in to intimidate the locals. Real power is corporate power, and corporate power looks like a 1980s Wall Street film: power lunches and deals cut in smokey bar rooms, brief- cases and pinstriped ties, country clubs and Ivy Leagues.

This world feels light years away from the insurrectionary vibe cultivated by Silicon Valley today. Which is to say that Joe might be prophetic when he declares that the com- puter is the thing to the thing, but even he can't exactly see what "the thing" is.

SILICON VALLEY, on the other hand, con- fidently lampoons where Joe's hoped-for revolution has headed: "The thing" com- puters will make possible is an easier life for 24-year-olds with time and money to spare.

The series follows a group of young men living together in Palo Alto hoping to strike it rich in the silicon gold rush. Clearly they are all talented programmers, yet they can't escape the mindset of adolescent boys. One is hard at work creating an app that will locate the nearest pair of female nipples using GPS technology; another is designing a program to help you remember where you parked your car in a crowded garage. Not exactly a techno- utopia in the making. Even when the show's protagonist, Richard (Thomas Middleditch), creates a file compression algorithm with implications for military, health care, and governmental uses, he is so wedded to his original music-sharing platform he can't see the digital gold in his hands.

The show skewers this collective waste of time and talent. Surrounded by feel-good mantras ("making the world a better place") and empty slogans ("it takes change to make change"), the programming class is just as enmeshed in corporate groupthink as any 1980s Wall Street broker. Everyone is search- ing for the ephemeral "next Facebook" that will catapult him to Zuckerberg status. None of them have any idea what to do with a good idea when it strikes or even what might con- stitute a truly original idea. When asked to present a business plan, Richard has to Google the term and he is incapable of for- mulating a simple explanation of what the new company he is founding actually does. This does not stop investors from starting a bidding war to buy or fund his ideas.

Like all good satire, Silicon Valley's comic genius is in the details. The unrelenting "youthism" of the Valley is parodied with a preteen programmer who is called to save the day when the 20-something Richard hits a wall. There is a very funny scene in which a group of neighborhood fifth graders are hit up for their Adderall prescriptions. The glaring absence of women from most tech culture and the social immaturity of the young male programmers is spoofed at least once per episode. And the show does a superlative job nailing the self-congratu- latory culture of the corporate heads who really seem to believe they are "sticking it to the man" with their on-call spiritual gurus and voluntary mindfulness retreats.

The real bite of the show, however, is the implicit question behind the satire: What happens to the revolutionary rhetoric when the Valley is "the man"? Nap rooms, espresso bars, and a relaxed dress code, after all, don't make tech firms less of corporations than their buttoned-up predecessors. Richard and his friends learn this the hard way when Hooli (a fictional Google stand-in) uses its exten- sive corporate muscle to steal Richard's idea and market it as their own. The costumes have changed from pinstripes to flip-flops, but the power play is all too familiar.

If Halt and Catch Fire is still enamored with the possibility of a technological insur- rection-freeing the world one personal computer at a time-Silicon Valley reminds us that we can no longer afford to think uncritically of tech as an insurrectionary out- sider. The emperor might be a 24-year-old at a toga party, but with billions of dollars at stake, he is still the emperor.

This does not mean that there are no disruptive or insurrectionary possibilities left for the digital age. Digital networks do have the capacity to create nonhierarchi- cal, interconnected communities, and there is genuine democratic potential in more open information flows. But as both Joe and Richard learn all too quickly, the drive to centralize, control, and monetize these lib- erating technologies is often more powerful than the impulse to freedom.

Of course, origin myths and satires won't start a new tech revolution. But they might help us understand how and why the revolution fails as we try to imagine other possibilities. n Mackenzie Davis in the AMC techno-drama Halt and Catch Fire.

Who are the people who understand the jargon and create the technology that defines our new digital age? Kathryn Reklis is assistant professor of modern Protestant theology at Fordham University and co-director of the Institute for Art, Religion, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary, which she founded with artist AA Bronson in 2009.

(c) 2014 Sojourners

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