peteg's blog - noise - books - 2014 05 09 Coupland Microserfs

Douglas Coupland: Microserfs

Fri, May 09, 2014./noise/books | Link

This one is much longer than Generation X. It has some good bits, but also enough meh bits to end up in a kind of neutral balanced Zen state; kind of like these Microsoft refugees. As with its predecessor I'd read it back around 2002 in Melbourne, and I didn't remember much of it; I don't remember much of it now, a day later. Many of the giblets served up by Coupland are mainstream geek tropes now, and so I have to wonder if he reflected the culture or lead it. For instance, he is quite specific about a Linux configuration that is quite familiar to me from 1996; was he prescient or lucky in picking Linux as the winner of the free-ish Unixoid wars? Ultimately this is less about Microsoft than about Valley geekdom when jwz bashed out the code that made him famous. It is probably more satisfying to just read what he has to say.