"You mean you don't stage the software?" I asked him. "You don't test it?" "Why should we? Everything we do is live all the time, always new, minute … - Ellen Ullman

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.

The nerd flavor of masculinity has overwhelmed the macho kind in real-life power dynamics, and therefore in popular culture.

But now what? Is this a ticket to a new understanding of my life, or a bomb that's going to blow up everything?

Consider one more possibility: that you remain essentially the same person you were, neither new nor destroyed.