Microserfs

Marxism’s 19th-century creation lends it an attractive distance in the postindustrial, late capitalist era.”

Ethan: “There is more to prosperity than envy and redistribution.”

Susan: “I‘m sure the Hollywood unions are just waiting with bated breath for coding and multimedia production to unionize. What’s it going to be — I write the code and then somebody from I.A.T.S.E. comes in and has to press the RETURN key?”

Me: “TIME OUT!”

Politics only makes people cranky. There must be some alternative form of discourse. How is political will generated? Susan is embarrassed to be agreeing with Ethan over something. Normally they squabble over everything.

Michael caught us playing Doom on the office operating system and flipped out … or rather, he deleted it from the system and gave me a lecture about lost people-hours when I later asked him to please reinstall it. In the end he did, because it would be catastrophic to worker morale to not be able to hunt and kill your co-workers.

“And Daniel, they have a new version called Doom II coming out in October, and rumor has it that pirated versions have a hard-drive-trashing virus, so all I ask is that you don’t even consider installing it.”

Good luck.

Bug was so mad that he wanted to write a Marburg virus and stick it in Michael’s machine, but this is just typical Bug ranting. The Marburg virus is so dangerous, it can’t even be studied. Thirty-seven German laboratory workers died in conjunction with it.

THURSDAY

Todd called me a cryptofascist today.

In honor of this,

I’m formatting this particular paragraph

flush right.

Michael said something cool today. He said something remarkable and unprecedented has occurred to us as a species now—“We’ve reached a critical mass point where the amount of memory we have externalized in books and databases (to name but a few sources) now exceeds the amount of memory contained within our collective biological bodies. In other words, there’s more memory ‘out there’ than exists inside ‘all of us.’ We’ve peripheralized our essence.”

He went on:

“Given this new situation, the presumption of the existence of the notion of ‘history’ becomes not necessarily dead but somewhat beside the point. Access to memory replaces historical knowledge as a way for our species to process its past. Memory has replaced history — and this is not bad news. On the contrary, it’s excellent news because it means we’re no longer doomed to repeat our mistakes; we can edit ourselves as we go along, like an on-screen document. The transition from history at the center to memory on the periphery may prove to be initially bumpy as people shed their intellectual inertia on the issue, but the transition is an inevitability, and thank heavens we have changed the nature of change itself — the prospect of cyclical wars and dark ages and golden ages has never particularly appealed to me.”

Finally:

“And the continuing democratization of memory can only accelerate the obsolescence of history as we once understood it. History has been revealed as a fluid intellectual construct, susceptible to revisionism, in which a set of individuals with access to a large database dominates another set with less access. The age-old notion of ‘knowledge is power’ is overturned when all memory is copy-and-paste-able — knowledge becomes wisdom, and creativity and intelligence, previously thwarted by lack of access to new ideas, can flourish.”

I changed the subject to that of tickets to the upcoming Sharks game in San Jose.

FRIDAY

Todd apologized for calling me a cryptofascist and called me “benignly centrist,” instead. The formatting for this paragraph is obvious.

Dad had his interview with Delta. “An interview’s an interview’s an interview,” he said. I think he just doesn’t want to overly raise his hopes.

I later told Dusty Michael’s theory of history being dead and she went goggle-eyed. Dusty said conspiratorially, “Michael may be a crypto-Marxist.” (Oh God …) She kept blabbing, and it’s so weird to see Dusty’s mouth moving and genuine political words emerge. It just doesn’t mesh with her computer image. I get the impression she should be discussing exfoliation or tanning factors instead, but then, bodies are political, too. Or so Dusty has informed the office.

I surprised Dusty. I said that, “Since Marxism is explicitly based on property, ownership, and control of means of production, it may well end up being the final true politik of this Benetton world we now live in.” She said, “Hey, Danster — I underestimated you.”

It was interesting to briefly enter the political realm — as such.

SATURDAY

Dusty made a “Bulimia Top Ten List.” Dusty is so incredibly willing to discuss her body. She even confessed she had to become a big-time shoplifter to support her habit. “Hey babe — bulimia ain’t cheap.” Karla was, needless to say, silent on the subject.

Bulimia Top Ten List:

• several buckets of Haagen-Dazs strawberry

• two large spaghetti dinners

• large box of Godiva chocolates

• stack of eight grilled cheese sandwiches with ketchup

• entire cheesecake

• two dozen chocolate pudding cups

• four hundred grapes

• bucket of McDonald’s french fries

• even larger box of Godiva chocolates

• largest box of chocolates in the universe

Dusty is designing a cosmetic surgery program for Oop! as her creative project. Basic body and facial structures are loaded into the system, and by sucking and implanting bricks in and out, Oop! users can reengineer whatever body shape they want.

Dusty’s being stringent in using 100 percent genuine medical parameters, so even if you wanted to, you couldn’t transform Arnold Schwarzenegger into Christy Turlington. “You can only max out the potential of what’s already there. Users must know the body’s limits.”

She and Susan are sharing bone parameters from Susan’s dancing skeletons product.

Speaking of Christy Turlington, I have noticed that a fair number of women seem to want to be her. In fact, I have noticed that if modern conversations don’t switch to the disappearance of time, they shift to discussions of supermodels. I guess supermodels are like geeks, but instead of winning the Punnet Square of brains, they won the Punnet Square of looks. It must be bizarre being fabulously good-looking. I mean, at least you can disguise brains.