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The machine seemed to understand time and space, but it didn’t, not as we do. We are analog, fluid, swimming in a flowing sea of events, where one mo… - Ellen Ullman
" "The machine seemed to understand time and space, but it didn’t, not as we do. We are analog, fluid, swimming in a flowing sea of events, where one moment contains the next, is the next, since the notion of “moment” itself is the illusion. The machine — it — is digital, and digital is the decision to forget the idea of the infinitely moving wave, and just take snapshots, convincing yourself that if you take enough pictures, it won’t matter that you’ve left out the flowing, continuous aspect of things. You take the mimic for the thing mimicked and say, Good enough. But now I knew that between one pixel and the next — no matter how densely together you packed them — the world still existed, down to the finest grain of the stuff of the universe. And no matter how frequently that mouse located itself, sample after sample, snapshot after snapshot — here, now here, now here — something was always happening between the here’s. The mouse was still moving — was somewhere, but where? It couldn’t say. Time, invisible, was slipping through its digital now’s.
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About Ellen Ullman
Ellen Ullman is an American computer programmer and author. She has written novels as well as articles for various publications, including Harper's, Wired, the New York Times and Salon. Her essays and novels analyze the human side of the world of computer programming.
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Additional quotes by Ellen Ullman
To listen to Mr. Engelbart that day almost five years ago was to realize that the computer industry, when it started, was not simply about becoming a chief executive or retiring on stock options at 35. It was to remember that real innovation — the stuff that made computers so much more than "crummy factors of production" — comes from mysterious places, wild people, dreamers and tinkerers, and to remember all the skepticism they had to endure.
I peered over at Morty, whom I'd clearly never seen before. This round old man in his empty store, for whom I'd never felt anything but pity, had just told me off in ways he could not imagine. He put it all together: Brian's networks, the bank vice president's universe of transactions, the software I write, the systems I install, the sexy bouts of software writing — all that was suddenly and clearly related to the world's financial center now all emptied of people. It's the modems: computing as a kind of neutron bomb, making all the people disappear, leaving the buildings.
In my world, it would be so easy to forget the empty downtowns. The whole profession encouraged us: stay here, alone, home by this nifty color monitor. Just click. Everything you want — it's just a click away. Everything in my world made me want to forget how — as landlord, as programmer, as landlord/programmer helping to unpeople buildings like my very own — I was implicated in the fate of Morty and the bag shop.
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I had this idea we would have ordered some good champagne, launched toast after toast to our humanity, which after all had created everything: the opportunities for the bug, the bug itself, and its solution. I think now it might have changed us, softened our failures, made us feel we belonged to — had a true stake in — those lives full of code we had separately stumbled into. I like to think it would have reassured him, saved him: To know that at the heart of the problem was the ancient mystery of time. To discover that between the blinks of the machine’s shuttered eye — going on without pause or cease; simulated, imagined, but still not caught — was life.
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