the inmate's journal : the corporation vi : technology

The Technology Division of New Bank was a halfway house between the prison of the branch—mired in the deep-fried perimeter of irrelevance—and the labyrinth’s fiery center:  Hal Blood, that King of Glory, the CEO Strong and Mighty, the CEO Mighty in Battle.

 

As a halfway house, it provided a safe environment for its particular brand of inmates—8,000 geeks, nerds, and quasi-autistic morons and geniuses, released after their term in childhood into the happy brutality of workaday life to see if they’d be able to integrate with normal society, its expected talk and tics, or slip back into their fantasy lives of a scat-free future.  The Division was considered an essential part of head office, but not sufficiently close to Mr. Blood that it had easy access to Him.  It was too tainted by geekiness—a dubious attribute on Planet Divinity.

 

Now we all know, don’t we, that we’re charmed by technology—its detachment, its verve.  We know too that the kind of people who beget and nurture machines must be the very salvation of our war-torn and lecherous race.  That we’d be stuck in bug-ridden night-infested tiger-chomping prehistorics if it weren’t for these glorious messiahs of toys.  Tell me then … why do aspiring executives everywhere distance themselves from bits and bytes and the principles of geekdom as if computers gave off cooties instead of being the arbiter of hip?  And why do the wonderboys responsible for our daily joys and conveniences congregate in compounds of geekity on Route 128 and Silicon Valley, cloistering themselves from the rest of us? 

 

I’ve labored long in Google’s cellars to find answers to these troubling questions … but those boxes of knowledge only give me facts and ads and rants and porn.  I wait for you, studious reader, to give me calm insight.  I happily drool, anticipating our upcoming adventures into the Academy’s stellar wisdom, its studies of technology and power and gender and rhetoric packaged into tight systems of clarity—then, surely, I’ll have understanding.  And if I get it, here’s my guarantee … I’ll share it with you at a low low cost—only the cost of a book.

 

But in the meantime, we must press on through New Bank’s Tech Division, that center of data and light.  For in data it dealt and in data it found its light.  It managed relationships better than you or me; it could tell that you drank more when in southern Arkansas with your husband than in northern Iowa with your gigolo.  It knew that there is a direct correlation between rainy Fridays in Paris and your online porn purchases.  It even went so far as to speculate that your unexpected third son affected your marriage to such a degree that your eldest daughter irrevocably modified her fashion expenditures and how this was likely to affect genocides in Zimbabwe.  What knowledge sleeps behind the lidless eyes of the banking industry’s global data centers!  Where is the one who could harness such truths to predict our actions tomorrow?  The direction of Microsoft stock?  The fall of America to those smiling yellow swarms across the sea?

 

For everything we do passes through money’s portal … the second it does … there it is in data heaven, relating in the light that never dims to all things past and future … forever.  Somewhere, on banking tape and on banking metal, your life is being immortalized.  More secure than your photographs at home.  More backed up.  More scrutinized.

 

There’s no greater source of light in the modern world than the computer.  Walk, if you still can, along the sidewalks by the glittering suburban homes.  Look in the windows, past the fried chicken and battered fish, the central vac and billiard holes, onto the lovely light streaming from monitors onto earnest human faces.  Look further, across the contaminated seas, across the landfill mountains of China, onto the hope of the Third World streaming from TVs and billboards.  And if you can stand the strain, look further still, past the limits of the present age into a vision of things to come, where priests of metallic dreams living far from the demands of blood live in a harmonious bubbled city of energy and facts, a lovely union of power and bliss and democracy and radiance.  Who but the most egregiously insane would not worship at this luminous perfect shrine?  Who would not praise its useful angles?

 

Not I.  For I had joined the joyful chorus of data and light and would ensure my voice sang its triumphant part.

 

Upon arrival in Tech Division’s expansive domain, I was told to read a stack of incomprehensible manuals and given a 29.5 square foot office, surrounded by 4’ high puke orange dividers; the space was perfectly ordered—desk condiments in containers specially designed for their comfort; wires neatly stuffed away so as not to give offense; chairs licked clean each night by fat dolorous Portuguese women; garbage, recycling, and compost bins color-coded and discreet; two plastic-looking plants, bug-free symbols of the ancient age of nature; an art print, as if there might be meaning; the requisite computer, schizophrenically calling for productivity and play; and me, Jude, a human resource to complete the scene.

 

I was assigned to Project Lazarus, a vast ambiguous congested enterprise, and was told to write executive briefings and marketing paraphernalia.   I didn’t know what I was doing, but people seemed to be impressed by it, and I wandered among the technically obsessed as through some futuristic zoo of the psyche … but here I was getting paid to visit.  What privilege! What fun! What voyeurism!

 

There was Lief, the child of the union of an 8-track player and a nested loop, who ranted against the evils of honey; H. Maladrit , born of static and faulty wiring in a Burmese toaster oven; Teve, devoted to distributed computing and the right of robots to vote; Spacal Finn-Chung, world record holder for the most viewings of Blade Runner while inebriated, obscure medievalist, and proud owner of a pair of Steve Job’s underwear; Vavakananda Madangapal Salaman, advocate of death … a horribly dressed flurry of freaks so eccentric Alice would have found Wonderland normal.

 

Caffeine, modernity’s blood and eucharist, flowed freely into their unkempt mouths; conspiracy theories, hacking tips, and software forecasts flowed freely out.  These were men—they used urinals, after all—but only in the most rudimentary sense of the word.  They woke up each morning, surprised to find themselves still entombed in flesh, waiting for the software gods to allow them to shed their cheap mortality—its mess and finitude and strange circumference—and march, glorified, into the two dimensions of virtuality.