Microslaves

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Douglas Coupland, 2013

Microsklaven , English original title Microserfs , is a novel by the Canadian writer Douglas Coupland . It was published by Harper Collins in 1995, after it waspreceded bya thematically similar short story in Wired magazine in January 1994.

Microslaves is about a handful of computer specialists who initially worked in the Microsoft group, headed by Bill Gates , in the fall of 1993 , but then left this group voluntarily, but who again created a world of work with similar elements. The novel addresses the working world of those employed in this industry before Windows 95 was marketed and also points to the advent of the Internet. The plot is told in the form of diary entries that the narrator Daniel records on an Apple PowerBook . Because of the formatting as well as the use of emoticons and the narrative form, the novel is similar to a blog format that became common about a decade later.

Microsklaven is the fifth novel by Douglas Coupland, best known for his 1991 debut Generation X. In 2009, the British newspaper The Guardian included , in addition to Coupland's novel Girlfriend in a Coma , microslaves in its list of 1000 novels that everyone must have read.

content

The novel begins on the Microsoft main campus in Redmond, where the protagonists of the plot work on various projects of the group. This campus life in the fall of 1993 has features that are reminiscent of a feudal society. Bill Gates, who is only referred to as Bill in the novel, has the role of a distant, revered leading figure, the employees are no longer serfs (the literal translation of the English title Microserfs would be "Micro-Serfs"). The novel ends in 1995. At that time, Microsoft was the dominant company within the software industry and had just successfully won a lawsuit against Apple Inc. , whose continued existence at the time appeared doubtful. The 1994 Northridge earthquake also plays a role in the novel , so that a clear temporal reference is also created through it. Characters in the novel recreate parts of the infrastructure destroyed by the earthquake in Lego in order to honor them.

Major characters in the novel - including the first-person narrator Daniel as well as Abe, Bug, Michael, Susan and Todd - share a house, their lives are dominated by their work. Daniel begins to question the world of work and life when his father, a long-time IBM employee, is unexpectedly fired. He is becoming increasingly aware of the low average age of his colleagues at Microsoft and the employees at rival Apple, and he is increasingly concerned with the question of what life after Microsoft might look like. One of Daniel's most traumatic experiences was the death of his brother Jed, who was killed in a boat accident as a child. He believes that if Jed stayed alive, he would be better off.

Michael is the first of the characters to split from Microsoft. After lunch with Bill Gates, he first takes on a special project. But then he decides to set up his own company. He offers a number of his colleagues to work for this company in Silicon Valley. Little by little, all of the people who shared a house with the narrator Daniel in Redmond are joining the change.

In Michael's start-up company they begin to work on the “Oop!” Project. The latter is a Lego-esque design program, similar to Minecraft . Although their working life is still very similar to that at Microsoft, they are now ready to enter into relationships or even become parents.

characters

Daniel Underwood , the first-person narrator, 26 years old, writes a diary to understand the pattern of his life. In addition to his diary entries, he also records terms, like in a stream of consciousness , which he is convinced that they come from the subconscious of his computer. He worked his way up from customer service ( telephone purgatory, in which I helped six months old women format their Christmas address list with Microsoft Works ) to become a bug tester at Microsoft. At Oop! he works as a programmer.

Like Daniel, Susan is 26 years old and already worked as a programmer at Microsoft. She becomes a partner in Oop! and founds “Chyx,” a network of women programming in Silicon Valley that puts her in the public spotlight.

Todd is 22 years old and, like Daniel, was initially a bug tester at Microsoft. His obsession is his body. He comes from a Christian fundamentalist family and is looking for new beliefs. In this search he became, among other things, a staunch communist and then a Maoist.

Bug Barbecue , described by Daniel as the most bitter man in the world , is one of the older characters in the novel at 31 years old. He still counts bug testers as losers in the eyes of his colleagues - his loser status is also manifested in the fact that he has never been one of the employees who was offered shares in Microsoft because of their performance. He also quits Microsoft and starts at Oop! to work.

Michael is a sensitive programmer with autistic traits, a Lego addiction, and a passion for elegant streams of coding commands. He is also addicted to a cough syrup that contains psychotropic substances . At the beginning of the plot, Michael locks himself in his office after Bill Gates personally criticized a programming code he had written by email. He also works on new programs in his spare time and follows a Flatlander diet. Michael is the first to leave Microsoft and starts his own company with Ethan. In the course of the action, he falls in love with his Internet acquaintance "StrichCode", with whom he has pure e-mail contact for a year without knowing the age or gender of his Internet acquaintance.

Karla is another colleague of Daniels at Microsoft and is leaving this company to work as a programmer at Oop! to cooperate. As the plot progresses, she becomes Daniel's friend and learns to overcome her eating disorders.

30-year-old Abe is one of the few who cannot initially make up his mind to leave Microsoft. He has been with Microsoft since 1984, making him one of the longest-serving colleagues. He has received shares in the company several times in his life and is now a multimillionaire. Parts of the novel depict the e-mail correspondence between Abe and Daniel. Abe, who feels increasingly lonely in Redmond, finally also turns his back on Microsoft. He becomes technical director at Oop! and uses his financial means to save the company from financial ruin.

Ethan has managed to become a millionaire three times in his 33 years as a start-up founder. But he has also gone bankrupt three times. He is Michael's business partner at Oop!

Mr. and Mrs. Underwood are Daniel's parents. Mr. Underwood went through a crisis of meaning when he was fired despite his many years of service at IBM. His contact with Michael helps him out of this life crisis. Michael hires him to build the new Oop! to design and implement. Da Oop! initially using the Underwoods' house as business premises, they are also financially able to cope better with the loss of their jobs. Mrs. Underwood is a life-loving librarian who, among other things, takes a swimming course for women aged 60 and over and successfully competes in swimming competitions.

Backgrounds and influences

With his first work Generation X, Coupland had earned the reputation of being an intelligent observer of everyday life and being able to take up and name current phenomena. In a 1998 interview with The Times newspaper , he said it was astonishing that current literature fails to address the phenomenon that more than 90 percent of the working population in the United States now spend their working day sitting at a PC.

While researching microslaves , Coupland lived for a few weeks in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft headquarters, and then for four months in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, to better understand the lives of the people directly involved in the information revolution. He himself compared his research with the approach of the well-known behavioral scientist Dian Fossey . He observed the people living there as intensely and curiously as Dian Fossey observed her gorillas. Anything would have been of interest to him; What they keep in their glove compartment, what kind of fast food they prefer, what posters were hanging in their bedroom. Coupland, who himself came from a religious family, called the "now" orientation of the people he observed particularly striking. Machines are the idols that influence their wishes, hopes, goals and dreams. He described it as particularly astonishing that they would not deal with questions like death and the question of an afterlife.

review

Sabine Peters called the novel naive and angry in a review for Deutschlandfunk:

"Computer freak remains computer freak, and yet there is the all too clear, naive development at Coupland, a maudlin happy ending with tears and pious thoughts: If the programmers were initially emotionally impoverished zombies, they ultimately become loving," whole "people . The novel is annoying in many ways. Numerous pages are not told, but listed: The food of the protagonists, their cars, objects in offices, home furnishings, electronic toys, similarities and differences between Apple and Microsoft. A purely additive structure based on the simple "and-and-and" pattern. Then there are the randomly inserted word lists that Dan's "subconscious file" spits out; one reads helplessly or bored about the following: "Kung Fu Platform Kraft-Scheibletten cordless brain-dead Silo Manager-Lifestyle Implicator format tools". "

Book editions

German first edition:

Other German-language editions:

Web links

Single receipts

  1. ↑ 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read: The Definitive List , accessed February 4, 2014.
  2. ↑ Coupland, Microsklaven, Chapter 1. The original quote is I spent six months in phone purgatory in 1991 helping little old ladies format their Christmas mailings lists on Microsoft Works
  3. ↑ Johnstone, Susan. "Talking 'bout his generation". The Times , July 24, 1998.
  4. ^ Soriano, Cesar G. "Dateline: Cyberspace and New York," The Washington Times , June 28, 1995
  5. ↑ Folmar, Kate. "Channeling the lives of Silicon Valley," The Globe & Mail , June 1, 1995.
  6. ↑ Grimwood, Jon Courtenay. "Nerds of the Cyberstocracy". The Independent , November 13, 1995.
  7. ^ The New York Times Interview, Sept. 9, 1994
  8. ↑ McClellan, Jim. "The Geek Factory". The Observer , November 12, 1995.
  9. ↑ Book review on Deutschlandfunk , accessed on February 12, 2014