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© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 31, no. 3, 2001 “Frank Lloyd Oop”: Microserfs, Modern Migration, and the Architecture of the Nineties Graham Thompson I If the early development of the computing industry in America was marked by a preoccupation with hardware, as companies like UNIVAC, DEC, and IBM filled the nation’s corporate and government offices with mainframes, then a similar preoccupation has so far marked the response of cultural criticism to contemporary technology. For Michael Menser and Stanley Aronowitz, American technoculture is founded on the way that hardware permeates all sections of society: “The Amish have their wagons and farm equipment, the hippies their Volkswagen buses. The rap DJ has his or her turntable … the cyberpunk has a computer complete with modem” (10). Even in a recent article about the interaction between people and computers, Kevin J. Porter treats the computer, without exception, as a piece of machinery (43-83). Software – the medium through which human-computer interaction takes place – is nowhere to be found in either of these accounts. According to Paul Ceruzzi, however, a watershed has been reached in the relative economic significance of hardware and software. During the 1970s and 1980s, as personal computers started appearing on people’s desks at work and at home, the software market began to be fully exploited by companies like Microsoft. By the 1990s the development and marketing of software – a category of product, Ceruzzi reminds us, that “by definition, has no essence” – had started to overshadow the hardware that “was becoming in some cases a cheap mass-produced commodity ” (79). The cultural impact of living in a software age like this is precisely what concerns Douglas Coupland in Microserfs. And it is Abe, work colleague and housemate of the novel’s narrator Daniel Underwood, who pinpoints the particular spatial consequences of this change. One day Abe complains to Dan about the architecture of Canadian Review of American Studies 31 (2001) 120 the 1990s: “He said that because everyone’s so poor these days, the nineties will be a decade with no architectural legacy or style – everyone’s too poor to put up new buildings. He said that code is the architecture of the ’90s” (23). By code Abe means computer code. The occupants of the group house in which he lives write and test code in their jobs at Microsoft ; the software that is produced from this code has made Bill Gates the richest man in the world. And although Abe may not be poor – he is the “in-house multimillionaire” (5) thanks to his work as a coder – he has no desire to own, let alone build, his own property. He rents his room instead, just like the others, and in this regard is well-placed to draw attention to one striking fact: for people working in the software industry, and for an increasing number of the rest of us who live in a software age, the most important forms of architecture are migrating from the spaces that surround us – homes, workplaces, public buildings – to the code, invisible and mostly incomprehensible to us, inside our computers. I want to focus on this kind of migration here not only to redress the critical neglect of software but because of the opportunity it offers to refine another narrative of migration often told about the development of the computing industry in the last twenty five years. It is possible to guess the spirit of this other narrative when Bill Gates, in The Road Ahead, talks about computing as a journey that has led us to places we barely imagined and that one of the major forces for economic progress in the next millennium will be the Internet Gold Rush (1996: xii, 262).1 Not even the domesticated disguise of his casual chinos and open-neck shirt and sweater on the front cover of the book would seem to mask the fact that the words of the generation’s wealthiest businessman have evolved directly from a discourse about American history that is bound up with the frontier: its establishment, its breaching, and its displacement into the realms of technology. The metaphors of the road, the journey...

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