ENGL 668k: Digital Studies (Spring 2004)

Thanks for the post, Melissa--I'm anxious to know what people think of the Bug.

I definitely don't think that the point is so unidimensional. Ullman isn't just dealing with the boundaries of the self... she's also dealing with the incompatibilities between human time and machine time (explicitly at the end, in the bug's solution, but also throughout the book -- look at the way Ethan experiences time while coding versus people-time); the similarities and (crucially) the differences between coding and linguistics; and the fact that any interaction we have with the computer, absolutely any output or interface, is a translation from the machine's own language and is necessarily mediated. I'm not sure where your set of questions is leading... I think that one of the basic ideas is that it's partly Berta's lack of experience, partly the fact that she *didn't* know how Ethan's mind worked that allowed her to find the bug. As Harry said, you need to treat the code as though you don't know what it does, shed all preconceptions... Berta can do that, paradoxically, because her relationship with the code is even more mediated than Ethan's (by her inexperience, and by the fact that it's his code). Kind of ratifies Ethan's Aspergers-esque way of dealing with the world, huh? Treat everything as alien and it opens its secrets to you... of course, Ethan's problem in human interaction as well as in code is that he treats people as alien but remains convinced that he knows what's going on with them.

Uh, off on tangent... let me collect my thoughts. Okay, one, I don't believe Ethan hangs himself over "just a bug" complicated by "personal issues." If we're going to ascribe opinions about the permeable self/machine boundary to Ullman's story, let's at least allow her this: Ethan's bug problems and his personal problems are interpenetrating. The bug, before it's nailed, acts as a sort of poltergeist, a focusing of Ethan's (and Roberta's) negative thoughts and actions... not because the bug actually works that way, since it's simply a few flawed lines of code, but because it takes on a significance beyond its function in the program. Two: I don't think the actual piece of buggy code is of that much importance. What's important is the fact that it does exist, that the Jester can be traced to one flawed subprocedure... unlike the bugs in Ethan's analog life, which (despite his epiphany, such as it is) don't come down to anything so simple. (Or, well, I think Ullman leaves this question open, but the implication is that one of Ethan's mistakes is believing that such sacralized emergent phenomena as "life" and "love" and "family" can be boiled down to a set of deterministic statements.) Three, totally out of grad-student land here... man, I LOVE Ethan. Poor sweet bastard. He's basically an amalgam of everyone I know, with the neurosis meter turned up to eleven.

Here are some comments from Mark Bernstein (founder of Eastgate Systems), writing in the new media journal Tekka (subscription only):

"But when it comes to her characters, Ullman is brutal. The narrator, a failed PhD linguist who, we are told, will grow to become a wealthy, world-travelling QA consultant, is drawn with a modicum of sympathy. One minor character, the sexy German night sysadmin, is described with imagination and some flair -- but, since she has nothing much to do, she hardly helps. The developers are all physically unattractive, uncommunicative, and irresponsible. The programmers aren't very nice to the testers: naturally, they cannot end well."

"Ethan's faults and limitations are pasted on; the story would unfold in much the same way if you replaced Ethan with Sam Spade. Ullman's hero quite possibly has Asperger's Syndrome. His colleagues and managers don't know this -- it's the 80s and Asperger's didn't make it into the DSM until 1994. But the better angels of their nature should have known better, even then, and Ullman surely should know better now. Writing with sympathy about mental affliction is commendable, but punishing characters because they suffer from torments which you have contrived to inflict upon them seems merely mean."

hey jess

i completely get what you're saying and i can understand the fascination with Ethan (I'm not sure when i stopped liking him so much, maybe when i got pissed at him for calling Marsha instead of Berta....because i knew that the outcome could not be a good one...)

anyway, could you clarify what you mean by "the point?" i wasn't trying to find *the* point in my ramblings, just trying to articulate some thoughts and feed the blog as it were. and i agree with you that there is A LOT going on in this story (both narrative and theoretical). I certainly don't mean to try and boil it down to a simple treatise on the self and who/what is really *in control* of a life.

I also didn't mean to imply that Berta had simply *figured out* how Ethan *worked*, just that she was closer to understanding him on a deeper level than she had been able to previously, before she learned to code, before their late night meetings and bug sessions in the board room, before her visit to his house and before he told her about his *simulation*. I think that she had to have some sort of personal understanding of Ethan to know that he would never think to check the code in a subroutine as simple as the inregion one. (of course, i have no damn idea what i'm talking about here in a technical sense, so bear with me....)

of course, it could have been based on her general conceptions of programmers as a *group*, but if so, why didn't she think to look at the inregion subroutine before?

and it's hard to communicate sarcasm in a blog post, but there was certainly some there when I wrote that it was "just a bug,after all". as usual, you've done a much better job of articulating the issue than I could have, but I am right with you on your point about the bug being imbued with meaning beyond its actual machine function. I really like your metaphor of a poltergeist because it gets right to the heart of the creepiness of the bug. I found myself wondering why i had such an impending sense of doom everytime i read about an error in a few simple lines of programming code. on one level, it doesn't seem practical, but on so many other levels, it makes complete and total sense.

I'm thinking a lot about that particular issue because I keep coming back to my response to Dibbell's "A Rape In Cyberspace". What makes something that doesn't *live* in the biological sense of the word (code, a bug, a virtual rape conducted through language and computer hardware...)*live* in an emotional/affective sense? i find myself wanting to ascribe *reality* to it based on the *victims* emotional response. And i certainly think that the Jester is more *real* than just a few simple lines of code by virtue of the chain of events it sets off in people's *real* lives.

i agree with you that the book is also about all of the things you mentioned: machine time vs human time, human/machine interaction and mediation, computer programming/linguistics. my failure to talk about those specific issues in my post doesn't mean i don't recognize them as issues in the story.

Yeah, I think I misunderstood your original post... when you said the lessons were too simplified, I didn't realize that you were confining discussion to only the issues surrounding posthumanity and embodiment. Which are issues that I'm kind of avoiding thinking about right now after taking a mental beating from Hayles. :>

One thing about checking "inregion"... I think it was more an effect of knowing programmers in general that Berta realized it hadn't been looked at. It's sort of like checking the arithmetics of a physicist... no matter how much you know if them personally, you assume that any advanced physicist will rely on his or her arithmetic and probably not bother to check simple addition, and it takes a person who really doesn't intuitively understand the physics (and therefore needs to look more closely) to find a careless arithmetic error.

Then again, some of Ethan's most salient character points are the things he shares in common with most programmers (although he's usually on the more-insane end of the spectrum). And that's some of what Berta learns in her programming lessons that allows her to get closer to Ethan... the feeling of closeness to the computer, the sense of intuitive understanding that sometimes makes you prey to errors. I'd be inclined to say, though, that what she learns about Ethan personally -- his life, his simulation -- helps her more in understanding his suicide than in understanding the subsequently deflated UI-1017.

Good discussion, y'all. Hope it continues in class on Wednesday.

Speaking of narrative, I think Ullman's is a doggone good one. Never thought I'd be avidly reading into the night to see what would happen to *computer programmers*.

I think I was most intrigued by the zen references in the text. In the end, it was this zen-mind empty mind that allowed Berta to figure out the bug; that is, she stopped thinking as a human, *narratively*, and started thinking like a machine, then the answer appeared.

I'm intrigued with this conflation of the human with narrative (and how this argues with Hayles), and machine-mind with zen. I think in both cases the conflation is somewhat simplistic (not to mention Ullman's--or Harry's--understanding of zen. Stepping out of expectation-mind is only one aspect of zen), but pregnant with possibility.

This raises an interesting question for me: does Berta "figure out" Ethan by thinking of him as a machine, or is the process of discovery the opposite, one of empathy?

This takes it back to zen. Zen is often invoked re: computer technology and especially the web, and yet central to the practice of zen is cultivating empathy. This seems to imply an understanding that is opposite to Berta's reverting (converting?) to machine-mind to figure out the bug. Or is thinking like a machine to figure out a machine a form of empathy?

I do know that I care more about the Jester, and the machines in the text, because they appear in a *narrative*, rather than pure code.