This summer I reread Close to the Machine by Ellen Ullman, and I don’t know if it’s strange or perfectly reasonable that this is the case, but: Ullman’s 15-year-old memoir is still the best rendering of our new relationship with code that anyone has produced. It is in no way historical; it could have been written yesterday. In fact, I think it fits our world better than it does the world of 1997. Back then, the accelerating dot-com boom was, for most people, strange and remote. Today, who hasn’t at some point copied and pasted a fragment of JavaScript? If we don’t all have a relationship with code, we have, most of us, at least flirted with it.
“I don’t mean to sound techno-utopian — I’m decidedly not — but the simple fact is that everything we cherish today was, at some point, a strange and challenging invention. Printed books are no exception. So I think it’s really important that people who have strong beliefs about books, about attention, about life itself, ought to be out there inventing things, and embedding those beliefs in their inventions.”
- Robin Sloan interviewed by Hope Mills
The Millions: What would you say to other writers following in your footsteps — whether that’s experimenting with an online audience or working on making something that lasts?
Robin Sloan: Two things.
The first: learn a bit of programming. …
The second thing is going to sound like it contradicts the first, but it doesn’t really: focus on the text. …
For me, the iPhone had become a toxic compulsion. It had completed its invasion and occupation of my interstitial time — all those minutes riding the train, waiting in line, that used to be such fertile territory for daydreaming and storymaking.
