Douglas Coupland is a tricky one for me. I should be a huge fan. His name is synonymous with Vancouver, my home city. He is bright and highly observant — the slightly awkward local son you ought to love because he knows your city and by extension you, and his work reflects your personal, political and spiritual experiences at a very local, nascent level. He is someone I would love to sit next to at a dinner party. But his novels have never done it for me. I think of Coupland as more of a thinker than a fiction writer: I want his take on things and I’ll work my way through a novel to get it, but if it were down to me I’d rather get my hit in essay format.
While I have read most of Coupland’s work, Microserfs never made it to my bedside table. When the book came out, its subject matter — human life within an increasingly controlling tech infrastructure; the worrisome question of whether people were becoming less human and more tech-like — didn’t resonate with me and the book fell off my radar. But one boom, two busts and a whole rethinking of the digital-human divide later, Microserfs seemed like a worthwhile read.
I think time has proven Coupland’s fears unfounded, but I suppose I would think that: I adamantly believe that technology is becoming more human, as opposed to vice versa. (Full disclosure: I am employed as a writer at a very creative, agile tech company.) Yet Coupland’s exploration of the flexing lines between man and machine is a thoughtful one, even if the passage of time and the dulling of fears (was anyone really that afraid? Seriously, this was the nineties!) have cast a slightly earnest shadow over the whole thing.
The question at the centre of the book is whether change, specifically technological progress, is always for the best. Coupland’s introspective protagonist, Dan, is a techie at Microsoft and a card-carrying member of the cult of Bill. He is of a place where you can only be tech, but something doesn’t feel right.
While Coupland uses the set and accoutrements of dot-com boom culture as playing pieces, the book is less a Wall Street-esque meditation on that world and more an exploration of the interaction between the human experience and technology. The setting is just a vehicle, if an especially well-suited one. If you’ll allow me to go all meta for a moment — and wield a cliche to do it — the beating heart of the book is Dan’s exploration of his own human-ness and his subsequent reconstruction of his life in favour of a more balanced whole that is part techie and part emotionally, fluidly, unpredictably human.
I think Coupland takes the teeth out of his own argument by creating a binary (ho ho) and pitting technology and the human experience as mutually exclusive ways of being. Of course, they’re not, as Dan and his crew of techies and civilians eventually discover, but the journey to that point loses a bit of thrust with the whole hindsight thing: I already know technology can help me be human in so many meaningful ways (sharing experiences, connecting with people, and so forth).
There is a passage where one of my favourite characters, a body-building, Barbie-barneted ex-Communist named Dusty, initiates a historical tour through several isms — Marxism, Leninism, Maoism and the like. Each is implicitly held up the cult of tech, yet the triumphant ism, Coupland rather sweetly reveals, is of course the ism which isn’t: the human spirit, and the real, emotional, unprogrammable, physical human experience.
One of Coupland’s motifs is around shipping — as in, finishing software and delivering it. Being done. For microserfs, it’s all about shipping. Forget what you’re shipping and why, just ship it. It’s not hard to see the metaphor here and I wonder whether, had I read this book in its original context, I would have found this strand of the story as heavy-handed as I do now.
I would be curious to know what other first-time readers of Microserfs think, and whether they concur that the passage of time and relative humanisation of the tech industry have taken some of the punch out of Microserfs. The man versus tech crisis has been avoided, for now, and for me, Dan’s practical and existential tussles with it ring as slightly jejune.
Given my comment at the outset of this review that a Coupland novel is a process I’ll go through for a few quality Coupland insights, this was kind of like eating an Easter egg from a year gone by, only to find it overly sweet and with a slightly bland centre. Not bad, but not what I was hoping for. Still, I might have expected as much.
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