Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

Life In Code - Three Stories About What We Owe The Past (Patreon)

Published:
2024-09-07 19:14:00
Edited:
2024-09-10 00:55:40
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

hiiii i'm a day late again :3 ♥‿♥ >:]

i'll stop being late after today (this pic is me with the pic i was meant to post yesterday)

btw fyi jsyk we just reached the point where I have read up to. I have been doing this whole book club ahead of you all and now we are in sync. I had to read The Party Line afresh.

My feeling about this set is I did not quite enjoy While I Was Away and have little to say of it, and then the next two stories are some of my favourites in the entire collection. I liked the vignette with the iPhone drop. Anyone feel differently?

Close To The Mainframe (2014)

So many great quotes, complete with an Aaron Sorkin montage and overly technical catharsis.

He looked to be about forty-five. But I could have been wrong, since I was thirty, and anyone who looked older than I was, but not yet really old, seemed to be about forty-five. (p. 210)

Real. I loved the bit about how bad interviewers use interviews as an opportunity to make themselves look big and important, and the overall extremely vivid simulation of starting a job that you're not sure you can do, pretending to understand acronyms and figuring it out on the fly.

So this was my job: Go to a floor that did not exist as far as the elevator was concerned. Work on programs that were completely useless. Make sure they ran anyway. Keep track of flowered house-dresses. Go to a group meeting once a week with Mr. M, a man whose disappointment in life was a warning to me of how not to conduct yourself in the face of failure. (p. 215)

I can't quite quote the whole journey through minutia that is Ullman's solution to the deep bureaucratic code glitch, but it vividly took me back to some of the most meaningful challenges in my life, in music work and story writing and philosophizing. Crack knuckles and get in the actual cracks, do it by hand do it until you find the fuckin thing that's making that incorrect noise. Kind of religious experience. Not quite the meaning of life, but good to do at some point or another.

The Party Line (2015)

...during that time away I got married and divorced and escaped committment to a mental institution. (p. 224)

Part of the thrill of reading these essays are these glimpses into Ullman's beautiful sexy exciting life and all the different Things she has Experienced.

Also noting that she uses the word "Idyll" again here, which she used in The Museum of Me. Strange I use the word "idyllic" but I haven't much used the word "idyll". Imma try it out this week

I lived on a farm between the ages of 11 and about 16, this took me back in little ways.

Artist Boyfriend stood over the table, pronouncing in transcendent tones what a singular moment that had been. (p. 226)

I'm sure I have been the Artist Boyfriend with "messianic tendencies" at points in my life hahaha

Deeply touched by the little mythology about the sailor and the anchor that spices up this difficult rural life aa!!!!!

I could see it added a sense of glamour to their lives, of happy serendipity, of which they had very little. (p. 227)

re the Portapak, Ullman is so good at making you feel the significance of technologies, the spirit that accompanied them and the cultural evolution associated with their arrival on the market.

What seems obvious now, video recording machines in the hands of the millions, began with the retail sales of a mass-produced media machine called the Portapak. (p. 229)

Describing some art film she made so simply and sincerely made me so fucking wistful for the mere act of creation. Made me want to make art. Good thing I'm makign art this month.

I went ff to a video workshop at Creighton University, in Omaha, which turned out to be a hotbed of art video. For my attempt, I pointed a camera at the screen of an oscilloscope and manipulated the sine waves, colorized the images, recorded my own voice, and added a deep echo. I had glorious fun. (p. 230)

Also loved this moment:

Reader, I bought it. (p. 233)

Oh, I know Ellen.

------------------------------

Overall delicious few chapters, God I quite enjoy this book.

hbu?

.

Messianic Prophecies and Wistful Memories Below!

Files

Comments

Hex Diesis

"There was a world before the internet, and there will be a world after it. There will be an end to this internet. Given the omnipresent surveillance it has become, the internet as we know it may already be dying" -p206 DAMN RIGHT IT IS ALREADY DYING BECAUSE WE'RE KILLING IT. KILL THE INTERNET. THEN WE RISE TOGETHER FROM ITS CHARRED CORPSE.

Chandler Sterling

"Human history has been passed down to us through story and song and rhyme - the makings of memory, the roots of recall. The act of narration never leaves us." (pg. 206-207) I am a very big fan of Tolkien, specifically The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit (I'm sure the extended lore is good, I just haven't read it.) I am especially taken by the story that the world was originally started as a bedtime story for his children. The version I've heard even goes so far as to say that the reason Tolkien started writing down the Hobbit was because his son kept pointing out plot holes from previous nights. His books might not always be everyone's favorites, but they capture such a pure love for stories that I can't help but adore. Story and song and rhyme live abundantly in this world, and the heroes sacrifice so much to make sure that the beauty and good in the world can survive. I have spent many nights wondering what people thousands of years from now will think of as our myths. What tales do we tell today that will live long enough to be studied by those who hardly recognize the world we consider to be normal? It is important to leave behind tales. Stories are a way of collecting moments and preserving them for the future. I love the title of this section of the book because I have always believed that what we owe the past is a chance to tell their stories. In a world where everything is preserved, it seems more important than ever to ensure that we never lose the ability to tell stories. Each telling is an opportunity to examine the past and give it a new context. Our stories are the throughline from the first human to the last. We will cease to be human only on the day we stop telling the stories of old. That's what I think post-human would really mean. When we become data collectors instead of interpreters, contextualizers, story-tellers, that is when we fully turn into the machines. We can't rely on Google to preserve the past by the mere act of scanning PDFs into a digital library. The tomes are only useful if we continue to carefully turn their brittle pages and rediscover the tales within. "While I Was Away" was fine if a bit slow. It seemed like an apology for the leap between years in essays. I was a little surprised by the way it felt like someone announcing that they were leaving Twitter for a while for their mental health. I don't begrudge Ullman the time jump, but I am shocked that she felt the need to explain it so much. I don't think it was her intent when writing this essay to apologize for being gone, but this whole thing felt so unfocused that it was the only lasting impression I have of this chapter. A bit of a bummer, but it still had its moments. Even in the slowest chapters there is a very real sense that Ullman cares deeply about telling a story. Every choice is made with the care of someone sitting beside the fireplace trying to hold the attention of skittish 5-year-olds. Done poorly, this would feel demeaning, but it is a comforting presence. "Close to the Machine" was an uncomfortable parallel to my day-to-day lately. The feeling that your entire life is dedicated to working on a useless report that no one cares about is real! I spend hours formatting in Word so that the client can tell me that they forgot to send me a critical piece of information which will require me to delete the section I just spend the past week on. My first few months on the job felt like an exercise in futility. Why did we waste so much time on things that inevitably had no point? "The veteran took me by the elbow and pulled me out of that dark cave of IBM bulletins. 'Go fix some bugs,' he said." (pg. 213) It sucks, but sometimes the only thing you need to get out of a terrible job is experience in the corporate machines. I write better reports now, even if most of them are read by no one. Learning how to word something professionally made me better at writing these book club posts (and more!). I have found new ways of describing things which I prefer to my older, clunkier ways. Fixing bugs is slow, grueling work. Ullman's descriptions do it justice; it's a hunt for a needle in an ocean of hay. An underscore instead of a dash. You will most likely learn a hundred different ways not to do something in an attempt to find the one reason this particular error exists, and it won't be satisfying. Despite that, you will find that the next time you go looking, you are far better at finding the problem. On top of that, you're much less likely to make similar errors in the future. It reminds me a lot of a section of ZMM where Pirsig is describing the need for a good attitude when fixing a motorcycle. If you get frustrated with the problem, you won't solve the problem any faster, and you might even manage to make it worse. You have to understand that this problem could take you all day. It might even take many days, but when you solve it, you will be so much better off for taking the time to do so. Your understanding and knowledge will increase rapidly when you take the time to approach every small problem with care and attention and most importantly, a good attitude. Apparently I'm a sucker for people describing really particular work in solving small-scale problems. I'm very fun at parties. Read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila!!! "The Party Line" really tied this section together for me. It seems to try to answer the question of what we owe the past, and it's a bit scary that we're ending on the note that she came up short. The Portapak didn't take down the bulk tank. New tech isn't an Uno reverse card against other new tech. Every new technology creates a new group of Luddites. Someone whose very livelihood has to be weighed against convenience to see if their right to keep working is more important than making things cheaper and easier. It's an old problem, of course the weren't going to solve it with a couple of videos. Even artistic, high Quality ones. Without the support of a larger community, there was no way that a few individuals could turn the tides. That doesn't mean that what Ullman's team did was useless though. They documented the story of the Richards and, by proxy, every other person whose livelihood was upended out of the blue by the bulk tank. All these years later, that story is still being told. The actors change, but the beats remain the same. New versions of old myths crop up everywhere you look, and even though the story isn't wholly original, we still have to keep telling it. We owe the Richards/the Luddites/the Past that much.

azalea water

Moog mentioned on page 231!!! ---------------------------------------- So much of this book feels like a lost relic, like you’re digging up something from a long-gone civilisation. But it isn’t. This book was published in 2017 – the earliest essay dates back to ‘94. It’s only a few decades old, and yet it all feels so foreign. The marker of where old starts to become new is 2007 with the introduction of the iphone. “It was January 2007: Apple introduced the first iPhone. Beautiful! A computer in your hand. Apple would support third-party applications. I knew that programmers by the thousands would flock to writing code for this device; I knew that nothing in computing would ever be the same again.” (page 202) The world shifted so dramatically from the invention of the iphone to the publication of this essay in 2012, it’s frankly terrifying. Social media became commonplace, the internet became a means to create a career for yourself, you could connect with everyone you knew with a tap of your finger. We’ve had that technology since the telegram, but something about social media just spun the entire idea of communication on its head. “It is not as if I could ignore all that—I wrote a few short pieces—but the events of those years, 2008–12, were like roaring crowds in the street.” (page 204) The weirdest thing about phones becoming so ubiquitous is that storytelling has become so much stranger. One of the key tools of narrative is the ability to have your characters simply not know things, not be able to tell each other things. Once you add phones into the equation, that rich plot beat becomes smoothed over. Nearly every fantasy/sci-fi story now has a communication device that transcends physical boundaries because of how phones have impacted us. Every companion in Doctor Who has their phone upgrades so they can talk to anyone across time and space. The Owl House has scrolls that are basically paper iphones. When you need your characters to suddenly be in pearl, step one is take away their service and cut the wi-fi. There’s a video essay by Red from Overly Sarcastic Productions called “Those Dang Phones”, in which she comments on this trend in media and the struggling with the internet in her own writing. Like Red, Ullman mirrors this struggle when she decides to set her story before the web. “The narration fails. The story will not adhere. The memory of it evaporates upon waking.” (page 207) We move with tech. And when we do, our stories move with it. ---------------------------------------- Ullman didn’t need to fix the bug in her department store’s code. She was paid to do a boring, bullshit job for the hope of it looking good on her resume. But she did it anyway. She spent months of her life – more than a year – working away at the minute of a system for the benefit of others (and to piss off her fuck head of a boss). “So I worked around the obstacle. I wrote a little program that read the master tape and printed a separate report that listed the full total-sales amounts. At the report’s first distribution to the buyers, my darling Ms. Shalimar came to my cubicle, took my hand in both of hers, and gave me a “thank you, thank you, thank you” that sailed on and on, then sweetly sailed off. [...] Glory. My system was no longer useless.” - (page 217) I want to appreciate how kind of a gesture this is. She hated the job. The people around her thought she was insane. She turned her cubicle into a self-described “mountain range” (page 220) of paper. There wasn’t a reward for her action outside of spite. And yet she did it. She tracked down the bug in the code and fixed it – just because she could. I’m in love with the little bites of prose scattered through the essay. “Eleven months, november” to “Post-Halloween” and the rainy streets of San Francisco. They cement the passage of time in such a simple way, but they're so effective, they make the months pass like pages in a flip-book. That central image of yellow, 2B pencils slowly stacking over time breathes so much life into the essay. It’s like a bow tied onto what is already an amazing piece of writing. “Weeks went by. Months. I reached my nine-month anniversary. Two hundred and seventy pencils in a box on the floor.” (page 217). The pacing is incredible. In two lines, Ullman is able to communicate all the information she needs. No fat. No fluffy metaphors. Not even a comma. Just simple, blunt sentences that work in unison to deliver an effect. I could write a dissertation on how well Ullman writes her prose. ---------------------------------------- “The Party Line” is incredibly reminiscent of the “Witch Hazel” essay from Braiding Sweetgrass. Both are stories about simple connections with loving, humble people – taking place in the middle of rural America. “Witch Hazel”, however, is a much more innocent story. It’s about an old woman who takes care of those younger than her, not for any reason other than to nurture and be kind to the author’s children. “The Party Line” is a harder pill to swallow. Where “Witch Hazel” hides its bittersweet tone through decorating Christmas trees and a child’s point of view, this essay confronts you head on with the reality of the situation. “From overhearing her quick phone calls, and seeing the pile of old sweaters over her thin shoulders, I understood I’d just had my first real look at rural poverty.” (page 227) Ullman is a student, and (presumably like most students) has very little money. So there is a very real connection between Ullman and Mrs. Richards when Ullman comes to learn of her situation. She helps where she can, carrying out odd chores and offering tea, but is ultimately held back by her situation. And despite that, she cares. “Yet we listened and smiled as she told the tale multiple times. I could see it added a sense of glamour to their lives, of happy serendipity, of which they had very little.” (page 228) “Witch Hazel” ends with Hazel’s death and the family moving north. But the emotion of the essay comes from the experiences between Hazel and Wall-Kimmer’s family. You’re safe in the stories of people helping one another and sharing food as a community; it’s a heart-felt ending. “The Party Line” does not have that sweetener. “In the end, the result was what one might have expected. The milk collective prevailed; their big disruptive machine trumped our little Portapak; we were powerless to prevent the coming of the bulk tank.” (page 234) -- Technology will move onward because it’s technology. I just hope we can find a way to sustain the little farms out there, the art kids making movies on their fancy new cameras. In the last few years, we’ve seen smaller spaces on the internet pop up and make some incredible art: the PC music collective, webtoon comics, the entire genre of video essays. These smaller spaces keep turning up and presumably will for a good while longer. There are stories like the Richards’ farm – there always will be. But we can hope for those little artsy communities and recognise them when they come. ---------------------------------------- those dang phones - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Pw_7vAK9k8

D.S Films

I absolutely adore the part in 'While I Was Away' that explains how writing about pre-internet time relates to the internet. It shows the deeply human desire to search, which has now been hijacked and commodified by Google. By showing us what it was like to desire before the internet, Ullman illustrates how instant gratification has robbed part of what makes us human. 'The Party Line' is possibly one of the most striking chapters to date, with the excited description of the Portapak, which allows anyone to capture at their hearts content, leading to the YouTube that we see today. But also, less optimistically, it tells the story of the Richards and the Bulk machine, and how young creators couldn't save them.

halley

~~~while I was away~~~ I thought this was an interesting peek into the tormented mind of ullman-the-writer. it sounds exhausting to have the urge to conjure characters with such care for their complexity. I found the parallels between berlin and san francisco interesting because these are two places that hold an almost mythological fascination in my own imagination as exciting and dangerous hotbeds of art and culture, probably because of stories that gripped me during certain periods of my development- cabaret, the lives of others, the electric kool aid acid test, the grateful dead. in her writing about 'the madness of our time'- that people would know they were being surveilled and yet go on revealing themselves- I'm reminded of arguing with my parents about how they could invite an amazon alexa into their home. my dad said 'well, since I don't have anything incriminating to hide, why should I be worried?' ・_・ I loved the last few paragraphs, about taking back this primal need to search from the domain of google and connecting it with narrative, stories, and the body. "the act of narration never leaves us. the need for story is in our bodies, in the evolution of our minds. we sleep. the brain is doing its housekeeping, weaving today's experiences into the synaptic connections of all that happened before this day. shifting moments. pathways strengthened, or fading." ~~~close to the mainframe~~~ this was a delight to read, though I don't have much to say about it. I especially loved her characterization of mr. m and her ability to channel her disgust into useful anger. "what a useful loathing he invoked in me. anger! drive me!" ~~~the party line~~~ "what could you do with a TRS-80? could you make art?" the unraveling of ullman's lore and her formative experiences keep making more sense as to why I feel so drawn to her and sympathetic to her perspectives. I feel ever more invested as she reveals more about the way her mind works, the experiences that shaped her biases; the nuance from a nexus of experience and maturity, empathy and care for others, and a giddy joy in the act of creation. I can feeeel her disappointment in coming to terms with how the world really works, from the idealism of youth to the immensity of ingrained power structures. the chasm between seeing the beautiful possibilities technology unlocks with what it does best, and experiencing the painful realities of technology at its worst, watching it hurt people you care about despite your best efforts. I appreciate her instinct for skepticism, and I admire her for staying that way without collapsing into cynicism. this is something i'm trying to emulate in my own journey- to stay critical and hopeful without letting the disappointments rob me of my energy and my ability to serve others.

Xaris _

Y'all I finally caught up lmao. I may not have absorbed everything I listened to but I'm glad I stuck with it.

Just Connor

has anyone found a pdf or anything of john macmurrays religious experience book? i can’t find it anywhere

Joe Trickey

I’ve been a little behind the club but I’m caught up now, and I am so glad to be reading this book. The way she writes about living through the changing landscape is beautifully evocative, I can really feel the weight of a history that isn’t that long ago, but feels like lifetimes. Her talk of analogue synthesisers, video cameras, early computers, learning to code; it makes me want to embrace technology but in an offline way, where it’s a tool, not a subscription. Thinking about how things worked in the 1980s, people were customers who could buy products and keep them, rather than money/data springs that companies can keep coming back to drink from again and again. My favourite chapter so far is the one about the cat Also I really want to see her film about the Richards’ farm

Louis-Antoine LeBel

It's interesting to see that after a good few "This is what's happening Right Now in technology and in my life" essays, we get an 8 year gap in essays and Ullman returns to reminisce on her earlier years. It was slightly surreal to read Close to the Mainframe since, for the past two weeks, my current task at work is to debug some neglected cobol-like code. In 1981, Ellen Ullman was losing her mind fixing bad code, and 43 years later, I am too. For as cutting-edge as tech may seem, some things change very little. Maybe I also need to imagine the code I'm debugging as an elusive dame, that might help.

Lucas Regis

Thinking about the way the essays are collected in this book, it'd have been very easy to set them chronologically, to start with "The Party Line". Instead, we get to travel into the past and see Ullman's origin story with the knowledge of adventures to come. It evokes a powerful sense of nostalgia. It's especially compelling after the slightly depressing - but still transcendent - Close to the Mainframe. Ellen is great at capturing the minutiae of the coding experience, and with Mainframe I think she really grasped the quasi-religious experience of having your life taken over by one specific project that refuses to become whole. I think it's a fact of life as a programmer that you have these periods of multiple weeks or months where you become a hermit because a piece refuses to fit. It brings back the idea of becoming "closer to the machine" from the start of the book, obvious in the title, but here it is depicted somehow more lovingly and more coldly. Ellen pulls no punches: it's unrewarding work. Programming is a lot like creating art except the result of that agonizing process is the furthest thing from it. It reminds me of that quote from ZMM about the ugliness of the relationship between the people who produce technology and the things they produce. "There's no sense of identity with it." Of course there isn't, if programmers felt a sense of identity to the code they produce, they might die of shame.

reva

this part has such an interesting tonal shift compared to the rest of the book. it wouldn't have meant much to me if it was earlier in the book, but after reading the first three parts i get its importance. what stuck out to me most about while i was away was the beginning. the way ullman described an idea squirming its way into your mind like a parasite really got to me. it causes such a visceral feeling in me. this doesn't feel that relevant to the whole chapter but it really stuck out to me i was thinking about that the whole time. i also liked her imagining a physical existence for the characters in her story, it felt very fitting after dining with robots. characters as more than a set of variables, but as an ineffable set of experiences based off of every single thing they've ever encountered in their lives. "what we owe the past" was quite explicit in this one: we owe it to the past to continue telling their stories. close to the mainframe was reeeeeeally really good. when i think of this chapter distinct images appear in my mind and they all have Feelings. discomfort and annoyance and boredom and helplessness. this is an effect of a compelling narrative on a human that a computer could never understand. also tbh i am job hunting right now and this chapter helped me see a bit into what that process is like. like ah yes sometimes you get hired without actually having the right qualifications and then you get a very different job than you were expecting and it seems useless and kind of sucks for a year and then you can move on. nodding my head. i think this chapter tells us that we owe the past the upkeep of all of its mistakes and redundancies. there seems to be no purpose to ullman's position, but it was established many years ago, so it exists now and she must fill it. there is a bug some programmer left years ago that makes her position especially useless, and she must pore over code for months to find it. a manager gets demoted and is stuck in his dull position on a floor that doesn't exist until he retires. he has his own "past" to contend with. maybe he represents the past to ullman, who has to deal with an angry and resentful boss for a year while she works, before she gets to move on. reading "in 1970" at the start of a party line made me suddenly realize we were stepping backwards in time, because it felt like we suddenly went so far back. i think it felt especially old to me because my parents weren't even alive in 1970. unrelated/related, ullman is my age in this chapter. honestly i have a hard time saying anything about this chapter because i don't want to reduce its impact into descriptive words. i will reeeeeally be thinking about ullman's youthful, dumb belief that her promising new technology could meaningfully change the richards' struggle with poverty. wooooooof. this chapter tells us that ullman personally owes the past her instinctive wariness of new technology. she would not be the person who wrote this book had she not made a video about the richards and the bulk tank. now i get to keep reading!!!! see yall in the threads!!!!!

Natthew Lee

I agree that while I was away didn’t hit like the rest of these essays. Really loved Close to the Mainframe. So many juicy things in this story. Digging your heels in and doing The Work. Feeling out of your depth then getting your bearings then realizing you need to move onto greener grass. Especially the image of the bug as Carmen Sandiego winking and disappearing around the corner just as you almost catch her. I really like the way the book is organized. The essays grouped chronologically but also thematically. Enjoying this book a lot in themes and ideas but also just in the prose. The way she writes is so beautiful to me. She makes me care a lot more than Lanier did.

Leo V.

[[I got a creative tech residency mid-way through the year. I forget whether I brought this up in other bookmarks. Their application criteria described the requirements of your practice as exploring creativity, tech and society. I sold my vocation as “narrative (creative), user experience (tech?) and healthy relationships with both (social)”. I am a creative but not a technician. However, if you got the residency, the studio gave you free hotdesking space from 9AM to 9PM, 7 days a week. So I’ve been intensely studying all of these things as a result.]] I think a lot about user interaction and how stories are built, and a few aspects came up here that were already taking a lot of stock in my head. Curiosity and its feral drive, not implicitly married to a code of ethics, which comes up in the first two. How often people cut corners, or do something “good enough to get on with it”, which comes up in the second one. Narrativisation, which comes up in all of them. I nearly considered hiding in comments threads for this one, because all the contributions to The Party Line already bring up beautiful and empathetic ideas about narrativising. But Close to the Mainframe made an impression on me. The hunger of Ullman’s curiosity. How the program she is up against shows evidence of cutting corners — and how her own exhaustion, isolation, depression and weariness might push her into cutting corners herself. Above all, it’s so entertaining to see Ullman write her own kind of narrativisation, only to be confronted by totally different characters and events by the end. The anticlimatic resolution *is* the theme. You find joy in steering the ship, even if your point B is going to differ wildly by the end, or be far less glamorous than you’d set it up: “All along, I had imagined the joyous satisfaction I would feel in cornering my illusive, diabolical, beautiful lady—my fantasy of her wearing a stunning gown, smoking a cigarette, and saying to me, So—you finally found me. What I had found instead was the detritus of some jerk of a programmer who did not know what the hell he was doing, one of the dissemblers who had fiddled with the code and declared the bug fixed. I was too angry to forgive him; years later, after writing my own idiotic code, I would.” (pp. 221-222) I understand this chase in my own ways, but you have to be such a specific kind of investigator to find pleasure in this. I’ve dabbled in coding, and will probably continue to, but I can’t narrativise a bug like this. I don’t find beautiful experiences in bugs, I find mild obstacles that infuriate me slightly. But the pleasure of curiosity was conveyed well in this chapter. In a nutshell, we are different kinds of freaks, but I respect the need to find these leads.

katie foley

i enjoyed while i was away quite a bit! though i think it veers off slightly from the thesis of the book- definitely feels like a peak into another side ullman's thinking. i did feel that the iphone release framing was only there to make the essay fit into this collection. its connection to the main point felt flimsy and vague. but, im a sucker for any discussion or narrative, memory and especially dreams!!!! the final brief passage mentioning dreams was enough to sell me on the whole thing haha

Lou Corben

**While I was Away** Bob Dylan mentioned! No actual thoughts on this section - it was a bit difficult to follow. Is she talking about a novel she wrote? I’d rather read that. I think it’s this one: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250023964/byblood **Close To The Mainframe (2014)** The office floor that doesn’t exist and the low ceilings is very ‘Being John Malkovich’. I started reading a little bit of ‘Bullshit Jobs’ on the first day of my new job lol. I didn’t continue it but I took a bit of umbridge at him in the first chapter when he called being a Receptionist a bullshit job, as someone who’s done a lot of that kind of work between creative things. I’d like to see a lot of buildings try to operate without one and see where it leaves them. See also the earlier chapter talking about the internet cutting out middle men who do actually help a lot sometimes, and how only the wealthy will have human help in the future. I’m actually dealing a lot atm with the fallout of another company who don’t have a phone line - their disabled patrons need to speak to a human to discuss their access needs, but when you look for a phone number ours comes up thanks to Google’s shitty AI results and all I can do is say sorry I can’t help but here’s their email, even though I know they have such a huge backlog that they won’t be getting any help any time soon. I also have a friend who thinks his job is a bullshit job, but he’s earning over £120k while I struggle by on under £30k. Sigh. At least mine is in my chosen industry, lets me meet cool and interesting people, and is a *little* flexible… I guess….. **The Party Line (2015)** Ullman’s background as an artist who learned to love technology through art makes a lot of sense to me and her thoughtfulness and empathy throughout shows we need more “humanities people” in tech.