Kitten Clone
Author: Douglas Coupland
Release: October 28, 2014
Tagline: Inside Alcatel-Lucent
Publisher: Visual Editions
Genre: History, Photojournalism, Business, Technology
ISBN-10: 0956569285
ISBN-13: 978-0956569288
Declassified by Agent Palmer: Coupland Uncovers the Future of Bell Labs and More in Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent
Quotes and Lines
This book also uses what I learned about Alca-Loo 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.”
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.
Welcome to the early twenty-first century, a world where the future somehow feels like… homework.
Genuine fun fact: in 1992 when I handed in a manuscript, I was reprimanded by the editor for using a fax as part of the plot. “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.
The one appalling thing about electric cars is that one plugs them into already overtaxed municipal power grids. Try mentioning this to a politician or manufacturer who wants to ride the green wave and you will quickly find yourself escorted out of the room. Mention this twice and you’ll magically find yourself on the No Fly List. Mention this three times and your cold lifeless body will be found in a clump of brambles off the nearest motorway.
Randomness and unexpected bits of information have the effect of breaking us out of our too-linear thinking–and our overly rapid thinking. And one can’t help but wonder about this overabundance of rapid sequencing from the Internet and its effect on our internal rhythms; the constant jostle between work and diversion, between diversion and friends and family and so on. The opposite of this jostle is possibly the reading of books–fiction–a highly focused leisure-based activity. Reading inculcates in readers a strong sense of individualism. The act of reading gave the world, for a few centuries or so, a society composed of “individuals.” The Internet as a medium, however, has imbued most of us with the feeling of being one of many–seven billion, to be correct. If reading books made us long for our lives to be stories, the Internet has changed our lives into a mere series of tasks performed in sequence. The narrative flow of our lives has somehow been stripped away.
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.
Ahhh… meetings. Those spiritual cattle slaughter facilities where so many of our cherished dreams go to die hideous protracted deaths.