(2015-06-19) Startup Costs Silicon Valley Halt And Catch Fire And How Microserfdom Ate The World

Start-up Costs: ‘Silicon Valley,’ ‘Halt and Catch Fire,’ and How Microserfdom Ate the World

Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs is about the spiritual yearnings and time-frittering activities of youngish coders

Microserfs was fiction grounded in embedded reporting; it began its life as a magazine story for Wired.

Wired ran Douglas Coupland’s first Microsoft piece — which would become the opening chapter of the novel — in its January 1994 issue

It was published 20 years ago this month, which as far as I’m aware makes it the earliest significant stab by a fiction writer at the Great North American Tech-Company/Start-up Novel.

The novel was published in 1995, but Coupland did his reporting (several weeks at Microsoft, and later several more in the Bay Area tech-start-up scene) in 1993 and 1994. Rather than an on-the-ground account of the first tech boom, then, Microserfs is an inadvertent time capsule of the moment just before the explosive growth of the consumer-facing Internet transformed society’s relationship to technology

Microserfs hit stores in 1995, which turned out to be a pretty big year for Net-this and Net-that. Yahoo, Amazon, and Craigslist were founded; Javascript, the MP3 compression standard, cost-per-click and cost-per-impression advertising, the first “wiki” site, and the Internet Explorer browser were introduced. Netscape went public; Bill Gates wrote the infamous “Internet Tidal Wave” memo

1995 also marked the debut of Fast Company magazine, whose first issue shouted “WORK IS PERSONAL” in type as big and bold as the publication’s name. Inside that first issue, ideas about boom-time productivity and hipness and the search for meaning hung out and did whatever.

The magazine was a year old when the Microserfs cover story ran; the “Net Surf” column in that same issue makes note of the growing popularity of something called the “World Wide Web.”

Coupland’s characters can’t conceive of any of this yet. Capitalism still seems like it can be saved from within; no matter how much it takes over your life, work never seems like work in the traditional sense, as long as there’s a trampoline in the backyard that you can jump on while thinking about God. And that, to coin a phrase, is how they get you.

Even Coupland would never be this credulous again about the tech sector and its promises; nothing he’s written since could be mistaken for propaganda. He undertook a grueling book tour for Microserfs that left him exhausted and suffering from depression, and his fiction in the ensuing years went to a pretty apocalyptic and Ballardian place. He even took a hammer to his own back catalogue in 2006’s JPod, a bearded-Spock reimagining of Microserfs set at a video-game company, with side trips via human trafficking to the industrial wastes of China, where one character acquires a heroin habit after a stint in a bootleg-Nike factory.

Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley, which just wrapped its second season on HBO this week, turns that dispiriting reality into the premise for a sitcom.

he becomes a CEO overnight, and realizes almost as quickly that the job comes with requirements he’s not equipped to handle. “If you’re not an asshole,” Erlich tells him, “it creates this kind of asshole vacuum, and that void is filled by other assholes.” The tech sector is no longer a space in which you can be your best self — it’s a space that demands your worst, and Richard has spent the rest of the series fighting that reality, usually in vain.