Where others are obsessed by pixels and bits, Coupland’s subject is the ‘biomass’ squeezed between the silicon, the ‘carbon-based life forms’ that still sweat, flake away, love, grieve and fail. The novel takes the form of a diary: a young Microsoft programmer called Daniel leaves Bill Gates’ ‘campus’ and moves to Silicon Valley to form a multimedia company with a group of friends. One might suspect - from the author of Generation X - that this is just a case of trend-spotting, Coupland’s attempt to keep his finger on the pulse and count. But Microserfs is a much more unlikely and impressive feat. It begins to do for the modern information worker what Gogol’s Diary of a Madman did for the poor white collar clerks of Tsarist Russia. This is the bizarre, compelling ‘Diary of a Geek’.

The acuity of Coupland’s insights can be checked against a journalistic account of the same subject. Frank Moody’s I Sing the Body Electronic is the fruit of several years at Microsoft following the designers and developers working a children’s encyclopaedia - codenamed Sendak - a follow-up to the best-selling Encarta CD-ROM. The narrative follows the story of project management and mismanagement, overvaulting ambitions and missed deadlines. It reveals the deliberate, pressurized ‘chaos’ that has made Microsoft the most successful corporation of the last decade, and its founder, Bill Gates, the richest man in the US.

Read in close succession, real and fictitious people and incidents merge and overlap. Both books capture the strange disconnected hothouse of Microsoft’s Redmond HQ in which employees seem to spend their entire waking hours working, checking ‘Winquote’ for the latest share price and awaiting the next ‘vesting party’ where lucky stock holders cash in and leave. But money hardly seems to be the main motivation. By far the most vivid character in Moody’s book - the programmer Kevin Gammill - is straight from the pages of Coupland, playing loud grunge music, living on a diet of adrenalin and aspartame. He spends weeks locked in a dark room, looking for an errant bug some disaffected programmer has hidden in a piece of software - ‘Slayer sucks like a vacuum’. Though Gammill has earned enough stock options to retire, this just seems to drive him to spend longer at his PC, engaged in some endless quest to translate himself into binary, mortally afraid of becoming ‘non-linear’ or ‘random’. Behind Gammill floats the bespectacled prototype of Bill, the one-point-oh nerd, the original master Geek.

If Moody often reads like fiction and Coupland as journalism, it is a tribute to both books. But while I Sing the Body Electronic is an essential guide for anyone involved or interested in the new forms of production, Microserfs is indispensable to everyone involved in modern life.

The novel is more than just as study of geekonomics and geekology. The title refers to the more profound theme of how, at the micro level, we are all slaves to the information that bombards us, the codes, bugs and logic bombs that are daily soft wired into our brains. Daniel proposes calling his startup company ‘Interiority’ and as the group set about rendering the whole world in a kind of virtual lego, the hero finds his unconscious filled with Ikea furniture, Gap clothes, snatches of Bewitched, Star Trekand Roadrunner cartoons. Over the course of the book Coupland fleshes out the theory, first posited by Richard Dawkins, that cultural artefacts may use our minds in the same way genes use our bodies. The book is a hymm to the ‘meme’, the catch songs, TV programmes, brand names and slogans that colonise in our inner lives.

This is not an entirely new thought, but no one has yet applied it with such rich amusing detail to the new industries of the information revolution. And whereas a cultural critic would problably dwell on the subject with Orwellian gloom, Coupland’s is a wiser, saner view of a two-way process. Whether it is in a brilliantly dramatised ‘Venture Capital’ meeting, or the story of two bodybuilders who become Marxists (for a month), or the executive who falls in love with a she-slash-he entity on the Net, Coupland shows his characters absorbing and subverting the codes that try to swamp them. Often, he combines an essayist’s flair for ideas with a dramatist’s gift for people and situations.

Microserfs is ultimately a book of coding and forgetting and is sustained by the deeper more painful memories almost overwritten by the buzz and flux. For Daniel, this is primarily the memory of his younger brother who died at the age of 12. The boy is only mentioned a couple of times in the diary, but his absence informs everything, right down to the Daniel’s secret computer password - HELLOJED.

If, as a character in the book suggests, code is the architecture of the nineties, then Coupland shows it can be made into startling monuments, sometimes into moving epitaphs. Obsessed by the fact they are obsessed with work, his characters constantly wonder if they should ‘get a life’. But they soon return from their forays into the real world to back to their computers to transform themselves into digits to avoid decay and death. This symbiosis between Geek and Machine is not some new digital barbarism, but a version of the old transaction, made by poets and scholars, between the life than could ‘get’ now and the more prolonged versions they can communicate in paint, stone or text.

Coupland only rams his theme home in the last section of the book when Daniel’s mother suffers a stroke and can only overcome her aphasia by typing messages into a PC, and it is a rare moment of awkwardness. On the whole, Microserfs is a tough and raucous celebration of our ability to reinvent and remember ourselves. And it paints a vivid picture of the new geek priesthood, sitting like monks in the VDU lit cells, embellishing the margins with their strange hieroglyphs, keeping our culture alive.

Published in New Statesmen and Society November 1995