How Silicon Valley’s past predicts its future: an interview with Ellen Ullman

I first came to the writer Ellen Ullman through her second novel, By Blood, which I

read in gulps. When I went to see what else she had published, I discovered her other job: programming. Her memoir Close to the Machine, which takes place during the late-90s internet boom, captured the emotional draw of creating code. And her first novel, The Bug, was inspired by her real-life experience with a particularly persistent bug — only the novel got much darker. Her new book, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology, is a series of essays beginning in 1994 and ending in 2017, coinciding almost perfectly with the rise of the Internet in most people’s lives. (You can read an excerpt here.) The first essay in the new book is the one that inspired Close to the Machine; it was written with “a beginner’s mind,” Ullman told me, “I never could write like that again. You can only get a beginners mind once.” Part of the pull of Ullman’s work is that she’s aware of the humans who make technology, and the effect tech can have on ordinary users. But part of it is the undeniable style with which she writes; when she describes algorithms as beautiful, you believe her because her handling of the English language suggests a mind alive to beauty. Parts of the book, particularly around the Y2K bug scare in 1999, feel as though they wouldn’t be out of place in a history curriculum, but others — particularly a prescient discussion of artificial intelligence — still resonate.                                                                                                                  https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/29/16215836/ellen-ullman-life-in-code-interview-technology-ai