I kayak in my spare time.’ You can tell they’re faking it.’Įscape comes early on when one housemate, the eccentric loner Michael, proposes that they leave Microsoft and create a start up in Silicon Valley, based on his idea for a sticklebrick-centred video game called ‘Oop’. All but one take the risk and hightail it to Palo Alto. You ask these people what they do in their spare time and they say ‘ Uhhh – kayaking.

As Dan says: ‘You wake up one day and you’re thirty and you haven’t had sex for eight years.’ And: ‘I know a few Microsoft employees who try to fake having a life – many a Redmond garage contains a never-used kayak collecting dust. While there is camaraderie and pride in achievement (Dan’s housemate Susan throws a party when her stock matures, and Dan displays his Ship-It trophy – EVERY TIME A PRODUCT SHIPS, IT TAKES US CLOSER TO THE VISION – with obvious pride) the work-life balance is seriously skewed, to the detriment of other important things. ‘My life is lived day to day,’ Dan tells us, ‘one line of bug-free code at a time.’ The housemates worship Bill Gates and have thrown themselves into their jobs. He works at Microsoft, so does everyone he knows. Dan lives in a geek houseshare in a dreary Washington byblow. Microserfs is a story of personal liberation. Wow, they didn’t even have Facebook back then? Readers his age today might feel the same for Dan and his 1990s geek friends.

There’s a moment where Dan, with a condescending pity, reflects that for people of his mother’s generation Pong was their only video game experience. His characters applaud the latest plodding IT discovery with an enthusiasm that seems laughable from a modern standpoint. The narrative abounds with references to now obsolete systems and process, that seem bewildering in retrospect. Like the best novels, Microserfs is dated and like the best writers, Coupland knows it. 1995 was the infantile stage of an interactive technology that would accelerate almost beyond understanding in the twenty-first century. The results are scattershot but can be interesting, profound, and sometimes unbearably moving.Ĭoupland’s image is apposite. A little way into Douglas Coupland’s 1995 Silicon Valley novel, his protagonist Dan Underwood theorises that ‘what if machines do have a subconscious of their own? What if machines right now are like human babies, which have brains but no way of expressing themselves except screaming (crashing)? What would a machine’s subconscious look like? How does it feed off what we give it? If machines could talk to us, what would they say?’ To develop this Dan begins to write random thoughts and phrases into his journal each day, which he saves in a subfile named ‘Subconscious’.

Microserfs book