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Notes from "Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology"

Wed, 28 May 2025 06:39:08 GMT

Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology is a book of essays by Ellen Ullman.

In the book, Ullman laments the bad parts of computers and the internet. These systems eroded privacy, deepened income inequality, and enabled the rise of modern fascism. And they were built by a tiny subset of people—young men, mostly white and Asian, mostly wealthy—to the exclusion of almost everyone else. Despite all this, she maintains a hopeful fascination with technology. Perhaps humanity can use these tools as part of a better world.

I share this sentiment, I think.

Many of the stories are old by Silicon Valley standards, but they feel prescient. The book is filled with ideas that could be written today, if you modernized a few incidental details.

These are my notes and quotes from the book.

“Outside of Time” (1994)

Ullman on the idea that low-level development is more respected: “If you want money and prestige, you need to write code that only machines or other programmers understand.” Oh, and these prestigious and lucrative jobs are primarily held by young men.

And these boys impart their ideas into the systems they build:

As the computer’s pretty, helpfully waiting face […] penetrates deeply into daily life, the cult of the boy engineer comes with it. The engineer’s assumptions and presumptions are in the code.

“Come in, CQ” (1996)

Learned about The WELL, an online community that’s been around since 1985.

I also learned that the elm email client was succeed by Pine, another tree name. Pine was then succeeded by Alpine, another piece of wordplay.

Quips like this resonate with me:

I do believe that the operational definition of a thing—how it works—is its most eloquent self-expression.

A lot of user interfaces seem to encourage immediate action:

Although we seemed to be delaying, prolonging the time of imagination, the email was only rushing us. I read a message. The prompt then sat there, the cursor blinking. It was waiting for me to type “r” for “reply.” The whole system is designed for it, is pressing me, is pulsing, insisting: Reply. Reply right now. Even though I meant to hold the message awhile, even though I wanted to treat it as if it were indeed a “letter”—something to hold in my hand, read again, mull over—I cannot resist the voice of the software, which was murmuring, murmuring: Go ahead. You know you want to. Reply right now.

A poignant paragraph about the demise of Morse code:

The [Morse] code had a personality to it, a signature in the touch and rhythm on the key. For Turner, the signature’s origin was no mystery: “It’s coming from a person’s hand.”

Makes me think about the things you trade for convenience, and the information that’s lost when you measure.

“The Dumbing Down of Programming” (1998)

This essay was originally published in Salon.

I learned what “BIOS” stands for: Basic Input/Output System. Never thought about it before!

To anyone who laments the messy design of modern terminals:

[…] we build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.

This was written in 1998 and sounds similar to modern opinions about LLMs:

My programming tools were full of wizards. Little dialogue boxes waiting for me to click “Next” and “Next” and “Finish.” Click and drag, and—shazzam—thousands of lines of working code. No need to get into the “hassle” of remembering the language. No need even to learn it. It is a powerful siren-song lure: You can make your program do all these wonderful and complicated things, and you don’t really need to understand. […] This not-knowing is a seduction. I feel myself drifting up, away from the core of what I’ve known programming to be: text that talks to the system and its other software, talk that depends upon knowing the system as deeply as possible. What a sweet temptation it is to succumb: Wizard, dazzle me.

Ullman explains the risks of these systems. When something inevitably goes wrong, you may be powerless to debug it.

I liked this bit which acknowledged the tradeoffs engineers have to make:

We were reminded that software engineering was not about right and wrong but only better and worse, solutions that solved some problems while ignoring or exacerbating others.

“What We Were Afraid of As We Feared Y2K” (1999—2000)

This essay was heavily adapted from a 1999 Wired article.

This essay made me think I should read an entire book about the history of Y2K. (If you know of a good one, let me know.)

“The Museum of Me” (1998)

Related to an earlier point about the developers encoding their worldview into the software they build:

I have long believed that the ideas embedded in technology have a way of percolating up and outward into the nontechnical world at large, and that technology is made by people with intentions and, as such, is not neutral.

The author talks about how the Internet glorified self-service, and only the very rich could afford human help.

Here’s one of those prescient passages. Remember that this was written 27 years ago:

But now, without leaving home, from the comfort of your easy chair, you can divorce yourself from the consensus on what constitutes “truth.” Each person can live in a private thought bubble, reading only those websites that reinforce his or her desired beliefs, joining only those online groups that give sustenance when the believer’s courage flags.

“Fiber Optic Nights” (1999)

You might be skeptical of the tech world. But when you’re surrounded by the techno-optimism of Silicon Valley, it’s hard to resist:

At this stage of inebriation, I can’t resist the atmosphere of wild optimism. I let myself fall under the delicious cloud of dreams: the great global internet that will change human life—indeed, change humans themselves.

Ullman laments how San Francisco’s diversity made way for tech startups, a “colonization” I noticed myself when I lived there. She expands on this much more in the final essay.

And another sentence talking about how engineers only value “hard” engineering:

Any serious software engineer would scoff at my dragging in philosophy, the fuzz of the humanities.

“Off the High” (2000)

Sad that this is still true 25 years later:

Maybe what has put the damper on this year’s conference is that, after the Canadians pass their law, the United States will be the sole nation in the highly industrialized world without legal data-protections. Or maybe it’s the fact of being in Canada, where everyone who is an American knows that, on crossing back into the United States, they will lose their constitutional right not to be subjected to unreasonable searches.

“Programming the Post-Human” (2002)

This essay originally appeared in Harper’s Magazine in a slightly different form.

Comparing Moore’s Law to software development:

[…] there is no Moore’s Law for software. On the contrary, as systems increase in complexity, it becomes harder—very much harder—to write reliable code.

This essay is mostly about AI, and what it means to be alive and conscious. I think this quote succinctly sums up the whole thing:

The more I thought about it, the more I decided that huge swaths of existence would be impenetrable—indescribable, un-programmable, utterly unable to be represented—to a creature that did not eat or shit.

“Dining with Robots” (2004)

Ullman rejects the often-used comparison that programming is like a recipe. Could a computer understand many of the subtle, and perhaps ancillary, parts of cooking? (To be fair, I’m a bad cook, so I probably can’t either.)

The world resists the rigidity of software:

The world, the actual world we inhabit, showed itself to be too marvelously varied, too ragged, too linked and interconnected, to be sorted into any set of frames or classes or problem spaces.

Reminds me of a point repeatedly made in Beyond Measure, another book I took notes on.

Computers are described as “fast, efficient, untiring, correct, standardized, organized”.

“Close to the Mainframe” (2014)

Ullman describes the intoxicating feeling of being sucked in by a tricky bug. This is one of the sweetest parts of computer programming!

The Party Line (2015)

Ullman talks about a small farm being affected by technological “efficiency”. This farm needed to start putting their milk in something called a bulk tank, or be left behind.

Technology promises efficiency, but it also messes things up:

Bulk-tank collection was surely more efficient [than] picking up individual cans. Consumers might benefit from the lower costs of production. It was technology at what it does best: standardize and homogenize and monetize, create efficiencies in sales and markets and distribution chains.

It was also technology at its worst. The coming of the bulk tank was another of those ruptures in society. Yet this one did not widen the scope of individual freedoms. The tank would effectively drive the small family dairy farm out of existence.

Programming for the Millions (2016)

Ullman describes a programmer’s job as that of a “translator”. That’s sometimes how it feels! It reminds me of “meeting the computer halfway”.

I liked this bit about breaking down the divide between humanities and software:

I dare to imagine the general public learning how to write code. I do not mean that knowledge of programming should be elevated to the ranks of the other subjects that form basic literacy: languages, literature, history, psychology, sociology, economics, the basics of science and mathematics. I mean it the other way around. What I hope is that those with knowledge of the humanities will break into the closed society where code gets written: invade it.

“Boom Two: A Farewell” (January 2017)

The final essay really laments how San Francisco has changed. This quote sums it up best:

The startup culture has overtaken San Francisco. It was once a place for kids running away from home, where people in their teens and early twenties came to get away from the lives they were supposed to lead but didn’t want to, to be gay or bisexual or other combinations of sexuality, all looking for some version of the old, wild, open San Francisco: the Beats, hippies, free love, the gay revolution. Yet nothing abides forever, and now we live in a city whose former identities, however mythical, have been swept away. A new wave of youthful seekers has come a-searching for yet another mythical San Francisco: a place where dreams of founding a successful internet startup are born, and fulfilled.

There’s also a short passage about someone pitching their tech as being easy-to-use, using a phrase like “Even Grandma can use it.” Ullman (rightly) calls this out as sexist and ageist. I used to say stuff like this and am embarrassed by that!

I’ll end with a quote about tech saviorism:

How far away was and is the true work of creating a more egalitarian world, the slow, hard job of organizing, the hours of contentious community meetings: the clash of need against need. Only those who work close to that ground, and take the code into their own hands, can tell us what technology is good for.

Curated by community on the bookmarksfor.dev