Silicon Valley, Halt and Catch Fire, and How Microserfdom Ate the World (2015)

Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs is about the spiritual yearnings and time-frittering activities of youngish coders immersed in the drudgery of the software-development process, and how those activities become an expression of those yearnings. It was published 20 years ago this month, which as far as I’m aware makes it the earliest significant stab by a fiction writer at the Great North American Tech-Company/Start-up Novel. It predates Po Bronson’s The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, Dave Eggers’s The Circle, numerous other neuroman-à-clefs, score-settling pseudomemoirs and murder-dot-com whodunits, as well as tech-sector TV shows like Silicon Valley and Halt and Catch Fire, serials that pick up where the novels leave off. Coupland’s evocation of the inner lives of programmers turning entrepreneur in mid-’90s Redmond and Palo Alto should, in theory, enjoy the reputational equivalent of what marketers call first-mover advantage. But I’m not s ... Read full article.