Bianca Steele

Thomas Friedman thinks corporations are people.

In today’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman’s op-ed calls for real collaboration in Washington, like there is in Silicon Valley.  He quotes “an expert on networks who has been involved in several successful startups,” who notes the need for “collaboration both within and between firms,” where “’collaboration’ is defined as something you do with another colleague or company.”  Then Friedman goes on to contrast this with Washington, where it’s known that “collaboration” means always and only working with the enemy.  Silicon Valley gets things done, and Washington (especially nowadays) doesn’t.  So Friedman calls for Washington types to learn from Silicon Valley . . .

. . . but he doesn’t mention people collaborating anywhere in the essay.  Instead he talks about corporations collaborating with one another.  It seems that the idea of individuals, employees, being important, is something he actually can’t begin to imagine.  The people he mentions are: a corporate vice president, the founder of an energy company, a co-founder of LinkedIn, and the current CEO of the same company.  CEO’s and heads of marketing, in the world of the New York Times Business Section (written largely for people who aren’t themselves in business, but want to feel culturally au courant about the economy, as well as the theatre), are the only individuals who matter.

I could go all critical-theoretical, and claim that Friedman is telling us a little bit about The Truth about how the economy works, who is really important in Society right now, and so on and so forth.  But why would you want me to?  Does Thomas Friedman know anything about this world that he hasn’t read in the New York Times, himself?  Why should you, or I, believe that what he says has a basis in anything except his own head?

Finally, two paragraphs before the end of his essay, he mentions developers, the people who do the collaborating.  He refers to a corporation’s “developer community,” people who aren’t formally affiliated with the corporation, and who (if they get paid at all) aren’t paid by the corporation.  They use the software developed inside the corporation—by employee developers—who do, Virginia, exist—in order to produce consumer tools, or the kinds of tools they themselves would like to use, and they’re motivated by enthusiasm for the platform software, and by the wish to create something cool.  But this is not the only model for a company.  It isn’t even the concept Friedman started out with, about five paragraphs back.  Again, I could ask what Friedman may be trying to tell us, by saying this thing that I think is wrong (or, he could argue, that I didn’t already know, that had never occurred to me before).  But why?  What is it that’s supposed to have earned a reader’s trust?

The fact that he doesn’t seem to know this, that it isn’t at all obvious that he knows anything at all about the subject he’s writing on, beyond what a handful of sources, cabdrivers, and people at cocktail parties have mumbled in his presence, has already put me off.  Just in this same paragraph, he seems not even to know that “the developer community” and “headhunters” are different groups of people.  I suppose that a New York Times op-ed writer may be assumed to know the difference.  But the fact remains he wrote a confusing paragraph that doesn’t sufficiently distinguish between them.  No composition teacher would permit this degree of confusion.  Again, why is he supposed to have earned the readers’ trust?

I can only suppose that he really does think corporations are people, and that he understood the quote at the beginning of his essay in precisely that sense.

The Cookbook Collector, by Allegra Goodman

Here is the final installment of “Summer Boston Books,” a semi-review of The Cookbook Collector, by Allegra Goodman.  I’ve already written a little about The Cookbook Collector here and here.

As I mentioned in those posts, The Cookbook Collector is an overstuffed novel of a type that could be called a “social novel” (though see below), or, about equally well, a “women’s novel.”  The central plot strands revolve around two sisters, now living in Berkeley and Silicon Valley, but originally from Massachusetts.  Jessamine, or Jess, is a graduate student in philosophy, struggling to keep on top of her school work, her relationships, and her job at an antiquarian bookshop.  Emily, her older sister, is the CEO of a software startup.  Both women are marked by the death of their mother, so early that Jess has hardly any memories of her.

Emily’s fiancé is also a software executive, at a company in Cambridge, founded by friends of his from graduate school at MIT, on the basis of a project they began there.  They’re tenuously carrying on a long-distance relationship.  Jess has recently begun dating a celebrity in the world of environmentalism, and trying to fit into his way of life.  Her boss, George, doesn’t approve of him—or of her, much of the time, though he finds her paradoxically charming.  George was once a sort of hippie, then a graduate student and ultimately Ph.D. in physics, then a Microsoft employee and ultimately millionaire, and now an independently wealthy bachelor with eighteenth-century tastes.  (The reader might be reminded of Douglas Coupland’s novel, Microserfs, in which a similar life arc is taken by much younger characters.)  In politics, he tends libertarian.  In culture, he prefers the tried and true, especially the eighteenth century.  In lifestyle, he prefers the expensive.

The plot’s set in motion when Jess needs a few thousand dollars to invest in the “sure thing” represented by the Friends and Family program for the impending public stock offering of her sister’s company.  She ends up going to her neighbor’s rabbi for a loan.  The Bialystokers are an outside-looking group apparently modeled on the Lubavitch.  Eventually, unable to pay the money back, she’ll feel compelled to keep visiting the Bialystokers, if only out of politeness.  At about the same time, George is approached by a woman with a large collection of antique books on cookery.  He’s initially wary, but eventually is drawn in.

If you’ve guessed the ending already, you’re probably right.  But the journey there is enjoyable and the included side trips are worth the fare.

The software-startup strands of the plot are forward-looking.  George, on the other hand—computer guy that he is—is entirely backward looking.  He has renovated his house, which is an architecturally significant example of the Arts and Crafts style, so that everything but the kitchen is appropriate to the time at which it was built.  He collects old books and counts himself a connoisseur of the best things of the past.  He’s a recognizable type: someone who’s made a lot of money in technology and uses it to finance a lifestyle that’s as close as possible as he could come to a fairly traditional one (a privileged version of a traditional lifestyle, that is).

(There are MINOR SPOILERS below this point.)

The writing style is elegant, but fairly dry (a welcome change from the British novels I’ve been reading, which tend toward the extreme of the strictures set out by writing-instruction books, heavy on concrete images and shy of the more leisurely kinds of prose).  Thus, in so far as there’s a love story embedded in this novel, there end up being two ways of reading that love story.  In other words, some readers will feel that the characters who get together are pretty amazing, that they’re essentially made for each other, and that it’s totally understandable why they fell; but others may feel that they’re acting on a whim or another irrational emotion, and that things will never work out.  In this way, The Cookbook Collector is like the Jane Austen novels that George loves.  Can a modern reader really believe that Mr. Darcy (in Pride and Prejudice) or Mr. Knightley (in Emma) is such a good catch?  Are we simply used to thinking of a marriage as the happy ending to this kind of story, or can we show that Darcy and Knightley are, as depicted by their author, really good?  (There’s an interesting connection here to Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, which begins with Madeleine’s student preoccupation with this traditional novel form, which she’s been taught is nowadays impossible.)

The novel builds to the economic problems that began, in high-tech industries, in 2000.  Some characters get out of that crisis okay, some more than okay.  Some end up in something close to dire straits.  Whether or not this was the novelist’s intention, it’s difficult not to see the causes of these different ultimate fates in their differing individual choices.  The Cookbook Collector is not a “social” novel in the sense of telling us about society.  Goodman doesn’t detail elements of the software industry that link it up with the wider society (with minor exceptions like the East Coast MIT-venture capital link), or the elements in that wider society that impact on the people who work in the industry (again with exceptions like global terrorism and yuppiedom).  The novelist is concerned, rather, with the human factors—virtues and vices, greed, pride, lust—that affect their ability to cope, to work together, and generally to live their lives, without unbearable angst.

I would have liked to see the business elements of the novel placed in some kind of context, though.  We start the book in medias res, with two of the major characters already highly placed in different software startups on different coasts, in 1999.  We end it in 2002, when the principals’ dreams of outrageous fortunes have become a little less rosy.  What we don’t see is the recession.  Noticing that the rest of the economy is missing brings to the foreground the fact that the rest of the high-tech industry is missing too.  The novel focuses on what’s interesting or “sexy.”  That means the rich and fabulous, on the one hand, and what’s in the news, on the other.  Goodman seems to want to make large statements about what it’s like to work in that economy, however, and the missing pieces make for a misleading whole.

The overall effect is to connect the characters’ reversals of fortune to their personal failings alone.  A focus on individuals and their personal growth into (or out of) the environment that surrounds them is appropriate to the traditional social novel.  On the other hand, the attempt to convey a larger message, which is also present here, is undercut.  And there were plenty of people who were also in dire straits by 2002, merely because they had associated themselves with companies that later failed, and not through any vices of their own.  Those people are missing, and to the extent one assumes that they’re present implicitly, the implications are more than a little insulting to them.

Nor does Goodman manage to avoid—entirely—the literary cliché by means of which science and engineering types (or those who inadvisedly associate themselves with such) are rescued from the commercial world, either through art or through their recognition of the horror that world seems to them to entail.

At first, Goodman’s novel seemed to make a refreshing change from books like Diane Johnson’s L’Affaire or Ellen Ullman’s The Bug (the latter by a former programmer herself, the former by a literature professor).  Both of those are framed as events that have already happened, to a protagonist who has already abandoned the field for less specialized pursuits.  Johnson sets her character’s newly found (American) wealth against the context of the mostly European, mostly leisure-based society in which she’s beginning to move.  In Ullman’s novel, the pressures of the commercial-industrial world compel the narrator’s break with that world, to preserve her own sanity.  The Cookbook Collector, a little more novelistically, externalizes that kind of conflict by displacing it from within the protagonists’ psyches to inter-sibling conflict within a family.  Yet by the end of the novel, more than one of the characters (pretty much all the sympathetic ones) has similarly left in disgust.

I like this novel and would recommend it without reservation.  I think the questions Gabriel Brownstein raised about why The Cookbook Collector was not generally discussed as on a level with Freedom and The Marriage Plot are valid.  That it left me wishing for more is not necessarily a bad thing.

The Social Network: Baby, You're a Rich Man, Too

The Social Network, a fictionalized account of how the website Facebook was founded and then turned into a social and financial sensation, primarily poses the question whether its founder and creator was a nice person.  But it actually raises some much weirder questions.  The film has two large problems: its creators’ inability to depict a plausible narrative of the creation of something like a website, and its creators’ inability to depict a plausible version of success that involves more than buying a nice house with a pool, throwing wild parties, and getting your name in the paper.  The plot seems to be—oddly—Mark Zuckerberg becomes a Hollywood superstar, very much like the filmmakers themselves; there is almost nothing in the story to mark his success as being of a different kind than theirs.  Everyone knows that the moral of the film is that Mark Zuckerberg is a bad guy who has been living a bad life, but if the story has the fictional Zuckerberg living the life of those who imagined him, what is it that’s supposed to be bad about it?

This is not the story of how Mark Zuckerberg struggled and worked to overcome obstacles that arose as he tried hard to accomplish a difficult goal; this is not Apollo 13, in which people were called to go above and beyond, working extra shifts for no recognition greater than a gift of a new tie from their wives.  This is the story of how Mark Zuckerberg ignored every obstacle that put itself in its path: and all of those obstacles arose from the will of others’ opposing themselves to him (usually by telling him there’s something he should pay closer attention to).  Actually, there are no real obstacles.  He and his friends tell a few friends about “The Facebook,” and they tell a few friends, and so on and so on and so on.  On campus after campus, within a couple of weeks of students’ getting access to the site, it is the biggest thing since pitchers of beer.  The coding goes smoothly, and everything just falls into place.  There are no technical challenges that require hard work and thinking even from a programming genius.  There are no unforeseen hardware failures, no power outages that make prearranged deadlines impossible.  There is nothing Mark Zuckerberg got wrong—except the rule that one should never stomp on the little people on his way up the ladder.

The only problem Zuckerberg has is that he doesn’t know an algorithm to create an absolute ranking of a large group of competitors on the basis of a limited number of real competitions between selected pairs of them.  He has to ask his friend Eduardo Saverin for that information.  We do see him in an Operating Systems class, in which he solves a complex calculation, involving addressing theory, on the spur of the moment (Zuckerberg’s actual Harvard OS professor has written up some of his reminiscences, with reference to The Social Network, here and here).  But there is no sense, in the film, that memorizing theory and doing quick mental math is not enough to create a successful computer application, much less a distributed application.  Admittedly, a focus on technical issues would be boring.  But the filmmakers suggest that Zuckerberg’s accomplishment lay in finding an opportunity and making sure he was the only one who profited from it: the near equivalent of climbing onto a speeding train and pushing those already riding it over the side.

It was not necessary, moreover, to hinge the film on the bizarre personality (as portrayed in the film) of Sean Parker.  (He is described in the film as the founder of Napster, though according to Wikipedia his real involvement is questionable.[1])  Parker, as depicted, and presumably as can be shown through publicly available documentation, is a flake.  He has a history, not only of being unable to work with colleagues, but of fallouts with police, over cocaine use and underage girls.  He appears to be paranoid and (in the words of Saverin in the film) delusional—which is not so surprising if the allegations about cocaine are true.  He does have contacts in the business world that Zuckerberg and Saverin lack.  His intuition that Facebook could have an even bigger impact—on something—than Napster had, on music sales, turned out to be right.  Saverin’s apparent feeling that what they had was just an ordinary dot-com business success turned out to be wrong.  Yet the narrative is set up as Zuckerberg’s choice—between remaining on the East Coast, finishing college, and being ordinary—and breaking into the big time in California, turning himself into a superstar.  Saverin remains committed to the first of those choices, while Parker tempts Zuckerberg towards the second one.

The problem is that the film does not successfully distinguish Parker’s way of life from his business and technical ability.  There is a relentless focus on the way having lots of money gives men the wherewithal to form private all-male clubs and party, to stay out all night drinking and taking drugs and getting hot women to take off their clothes and dance with one another.  At Harvard, this is the province of the final clubs, like the Porcellian, to which Zuckerberg’s nemeses the Winklevoss twins belong.  Mundane fraternities like AEP[2] only have lame-looking mixers, and people like Mark Zuckerberg—because of their aggressively ambitious personalities, the film suggests—will never be accepted into those people’s clubs.  In California, on the contrary, a smart guy with lots of ambition has the chance to become Sean Parker.  You can write code in your rented house and party with college girls at the same time.[3]  You can get hot women who wouldn’t have looked at you twice before you were rich.[4]  There is no real sense of irony in the film’s idea, expressed by the Beatles’ song that plays over the film’s final shot, that Mark Zuckerberg is now “one of the beautiful people.”

And Parker’s personality is certainly typical California.  The drugs, the partying, the contempt for the East Coast as old and stodgy, the idea that nothing of any importance is going on anyplace else.  The identification of expertise with knowing the right people and being willing to play them, of creativity and intelligence with business sense and aggression.  Parker is Zuckerberg’s Paul Simon to Saverin’s Woody Allen (with Mark Zuckerberg, then, as Annie Hall, if rather more successful than she will ever be).  And he behaves, and talks, in a manner more frequently associated with Simon’s and Allen’s generation (or with Sorkin’s) than with that of today’s young people.  There is no apparent irony in this, either.  The idea seems to be that California tech executives and Hollywood stars are the same—and better than everybody else—and, not least, just because they are free enough and rich enough to party.  At least the filmmakers don’t seem to have cared to do some research and find out whether they and their subjects are different.

Which raises the question: Are the filmmakers capable of understanding success as anything deeper than money, fame, and personality, as anything more important than the ability to gain access to a kind of secret society where drugs and free love are the rule?  Is joining a men’s club (a gentlemen’s club in the real meaning of the phrase) what “making it” means?  Are rich people better than the rest of us, really, only because they know how to party?[5]  It’s as strange as if “the music of the night,” promised by the phantom of the opera in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical of that name, were only what could be heard from a ladies’ room stall at Studio 54.

(For more, here is an interesting story about Mark Zuckerberg and the origins of Facebook, by Zuckerberg’s Harvard classmate Rebecca Davis O’Brien.)

[1] It’s interesting that the MP3 format used by Napster is, technically, a very poor format.  Its great advantage is its simplicity.  It is easy to program to.  I’ve wondered whether this is an example of technical lock-in as a result of nontechnical path dependence, something that is far from rare (Sony Betamax is widely regarded as superior to VHS), but in this case arose because the only broadly available application for downloadable audio files was created not only by amateurs, but by student amateurs.

[2] At Columbia, for what it’s worth, AEP renamed itself as TEP when it decided to become coed and admit women, not just as “little sisters.”  Does Harvard have any coeducational fraternities?

[3] Was the racist garbage about how perfect Asian women are for Jewish men really necessary?  And while the male characters were cast to resemble more or less plausible college students (as opposed to, say, characters on The Practice), the women looked like Victoria Secret models more than like Boston undergraduates.  There are plenty of good-looking women in Harvard Yard.  Couldn’t a little effort have been made to find out how they dress? 

And what was up with the BU girlfriend, Erica’s, beret?  Did dating Zuckerberg upset her so much she decided to become Orthodox?

[4] Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue, as usual, goes by too quickly, but especially in the first scene, he definitely nails a certain sort of man and the way he talks to women.  Believe me, they are not all geniuses.

[5] Do they think poor people don’t party?

P.S.: It's been pointed out to me--by my husband, who has a Facebook account, which he signed up for initially for distributing baby pictures--that it's ironic I would be writing a post about The Social Network when I don't use Facebook myself (except when he shows me his account, so I can see my relatives' pictures, or updates from female acquaintances of his who cook much fancier than I do). 

Isn't It Cool?

Isn’t it cool when you get clicks on your blog?

I left a comment at Andrew Seal’s Blographia Literaria and today I have five clicks (only one of them my husband)! Over the weekend, I had . . . zero. Yesterday, I had three, and at least one of them was me testing something or other. My lifetime maximum so far is fourteen, on December 17.

I was commenting on his New Year’s resolution to read no novels by white American males in the coming year. In a reply to my comment, Andrew mentions Richard Powers as a novelist he will forgo. I agree that no harm will be done to anyone if he skips The Echo Maker for another twelve months (I hope not, because I haven’t been able to get to the second chapter), but if he hasn’t read any Powers, I’d recommend Ploughing the Dark and Galatea 2.2 to begin with. I’d actually be interested to see what someone with more knowledge of literary theory and current literary study makes of the latter. And Powers’ depictions of female characters generally aren’t at all bad.

Isn’t it cool when you find people who’ve been on the Internet since the 1980s?

Dan Tobias, a computer programmer, has had a web page since 1995, and ran a BBS before that. Read his essay on the danger of software monocultures. In the terms used by Geoffrey Moore, this is the danger that a single “gorilla“ will crowd out all the other players. (Moore points out that IT departments don’t like monocultures because it restricts their leverage: they like there to be two or three gorillas around between which they can choose, but in the decentralized world we’re in now, IT departments have too little leverage to maintain their own leverage, so that might no longer apply.)

I haven’t had much time to post, unfortunately, and few good ideas for short posts. I’m working on more lengthy posts on Doris Lessing’s feminist science fiction novel The Cleft, and The Valve’s group read of Dickens’ Christmas story “The Chimes,” though.

This world in which we live in

Ted Nelson wrote:

In this crazy, mixed-up world in which we live in,
Paul McCartney is forgiven.

This Blog Has Unquiesced

Mark Liberman at Language Log wonders about the origin of the unusual verb "quiesce," and gets some reasonable sounding feedback.

I suspect Liberman's colleague Arnold Zwicky is right -- in a sense -- that it's a backformation from the noun "quiescent," but I'm not sure this kind of formation is as unusual as he makes it sound.  I'd speculate the invention of the word could have happened something like this: the state machine for the protocol being used had a state for "quiescent"; it had a state transition to "quiescent" from some other states; a descriptive label was needed for the state transition; and the obvious label was then "quiesce."

A few commenters on the original post suggest this is somehow really, really weird.  One likens the invention of something useful by a computer scientist to an out and out miracle.  Another guesses that the invention of new technical terms is practically unique to only one corporation on the planet.  You get the sense that in the view of most people who read the blog, the way computer scientists normally work, think, and use language is psychologically extremely peculiar and probably even horribly ungrammatical (after all, everybody knows computer science is as far from "warm and fuzzy" fields like English as you can get).

How many people have to do a thing, and for how long, before it's not seen as pathological?