The cover reads “You’re holding a book about a company you’ve most likely never heard of. This company has no Steve Jobs, nor does it have a CEO who jet-skis with starlets. It’s only the 461st largest company on earth, but were it to vanish tomorrow our modern world would immediately be the worse for its absence.”

The book in question is Kitten Clone by Douglas Coupland as part of a series of authors in residence, this particular edition focusing on being “Inside Alcatel-Lucent.” And if you think that the cover is hyperbole, think again. 

The current iteration of Alcatel-Lucent, encompasses what was once Bell Labs, the famous home of Claude Shannon, and home to the development of such things as the transistor, the laser, quite a few programming languages, eleven Nobel Prizes, five Turing Awards, and more patents than you can imagine.

Coupland uses this book to get inside the Alcatel-Lucent of its time of publishing 2014, and also uses it “as a stepping stone into larger meditation… about what data and speed and optical wiring are doing to us as a species–about what the Internet is doing to us as it relentlessly colonizes the planet and our brains, about how a totally under-the-radar company has transformed our interior lives, and how far the process will go before people step back and say, ‘You know, I really don’t remember my pre-Internet brain at all.’”

Coupland being no stranger to technology and generations may be more up to this meditation than many authors with similar credentials, because of two specific titles on his shelf, Generation X and Microserfs. But beyond that he’s an author who in 1992 was reprimanded by an editor for including a fax as part of the plot of a novel. 

“Not everyone can afford a fax machine, and including it here seems elitist and unfair to readers who can’t be expected to either afford or understand what a fax machine is.” In general, I try to include up-to-date technology in novels. Rather than dating them, it time codes them. People picking up, say, Microserfs, two decades later enjoy the book for its tech fidelity as for anything else.

So, while the inside of this multinational corporation is fascinating, being privy to the inner workings of Coupland’s mediation about technology is fascinating. 

Three candid examples being:

  • I think about cubicle photos. People once kept way more photos in their cubicles than they do now; nobody gets prints made of anything anymore. I kind of miss that basket of bad snapshots that used to live by the kitchen landline. Everything is now overdocumented and yet underexperienced at the same time. How many of the photos stored in my current phone will ever get printed? Maybe one in four thousand.
  • I’m getting a deja vu within a deja vu, the same sense of creeping recognition I get when I fly too much, land in too many airports, and realize that being able to go anywhere you want, whether online or in a plane, can actually feel the same as going nowhere,
  • Blank-collar workers are the new post-class class. They are the future global monoclass of citizenry adrift in a classless sea.

And what’s more, this over-a-decade-from-publishing treatise on a multinational telecommunications equipment company may stand the test of time. And aside from the biggest surprise being that Alcatel-Lucent is still branded as such, the idea that pure research being moved to the back burner may slow down development of the next new thing, but provides a breather for us mere consumers to actually come to terms with the technology we already have, seems like a great idea. I, for one, would love to sign up for a vacation from technological advancement. Personally, I would relish the idea of getting to fully utilize a piece of technology, discovering its ins and outs, and being comfortable with it, before the next thing comes along before I could even get accustomed to the last thing.

While there are plenty of interesting things in this book which make it worth seeking out, it is that pausing of breakneck speed for the ever-hunting corporate overlords looking for something new to sell that speaks most to me. 

Perhaps for you, it will be the frank early paragraph where Coupland acknowledges, “When I started researching this book, I thought that the Internet was a metaphor for life; now I think life is a metaphor for the Internet. I’m not trying to be cute. Just as it is impossible to point to a single spark within the human brain that proves life, so it is impossible to disprove that the Internet is a living thing. It is massive. It never sleeps. And more and more, it is talking about us behind our backs.”

That in and of itself is enough of a premise for another book or at least a mini-series. The point is, if you want to know more about our technology, this book from more than a decade ago is remarkably still relevant. And perhaps, it is that relevance that is most amazing to me. Think of all the things that have changed since then, the speeds, the platforms, the shrinking devices, expanding storage, and costs that dwarf the rest. Couldn’t we all use a break?

That’s not all that this book is about, but it definitely is something to consider. As is your picking up this book.

Read the Secret File of technical information and quotes from Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent.