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Two incidents from The Jungle stay with me: The immigrant family gathering round as the father reads from the Sunday newspaper; the narrator expressing surprise that so many stories and colorful comics could be had for five or ten cents, (still a pretty good deal at three dollars) and, one unfortunate character cutting off thumb or index finger -- which then gets ground up in the ground beef.
I'm not sure that Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin's NetSlaves will be read in the high schools of the future to document the troubled existences and terrible working conditions of people in the then burgeoning Internet industry. But it is an interesting read.
Driven by how their experience in the working world of the Internet differed from the usual view of the Internet as a world of quick riches, authors Lessard and Baldwin went in search of the stories of people working behind the scenes in Internet and Web companies. They gathered their material from interviews with real people.
They quickly uncovered stories of long hours, low pay, stock options of dubious value, arbitrary management, supervisors that scream until the veins pop out of their head, and much spiritual disaffection.
This is the other side -- the authors might say "underside" -- of the Internet industry, for those whose sensibilities have been dulled by stories about the latest Internet WunderKind in the likes of Wired or The Industry Standard.
Though not a novel, NetSlaves still cannot be taken literally; names have been changed and some characters may be composites. In fact, I found myself trying to guess the obfuscation present in some of the choices of name: Cyber-America, I'm pretty sure, is America Online, for example.
And then there is giant Aggro software, from "up north in Washington," run by Royster G. Pfeiffer: "Aggro software wasn't just some two-bit start-up, it was the largest computer software company in the world, and the guiding, benign presence of Roy, as he preferred everyone to call him, pervaded every nook, cranny, and subdirectory of the vast campus."
NetSlaves has many entertaining moments, but these moments cannot be enjoyed without the feeling of nervousness at laughing at someone who has tripped upon a banana peel. Nobody loses a thumb, but several characters do end up moving back in with their parents.
In the chapter "Cab Drivers" (freelance HTML and Web page workers), for example: one episode details a New York online magazine trying desperately to scoop the O.J. Simpson verdict. Freelance web worker "Jane" has only to upload the correct folder marked Innocent or Guilty when her manager says go.
Jane clicks on "Innocent," only to be undone by a bug-ridden server program (called "PowerStager") that uploads the guilty verdict to the site, for a reputation-damaging 15 seconds. She later quits when the employer tries to make her the scapegoat of an inquest. All this at 25 dollars an hour.
The working conditions of these people's lives really are pretty terrible. But at least NetSlaves does have a few of what many computer books lack -- sex scenes.
With her back turned, she looked beautiful, and when she turned around to face him, Kellner suddenly realized that he had to have this woman....Despite the authors' depressing tone in portraying right-sized workers that cannot do other than to work as "Cyber-Cops" -- moderators eliminating smut from bulletin boards -- I found myself praying that most of these people really do have other choices."I've been thinking about getting into Web Design."
"Do you know PhotoShop?"
"Yes," she said, "I've got a site up,"
"Show me," he said, beckoning her over to the Quadra.
She was his before they had seen half of the JPEGs on her site.
Most aren't new arrivals to the United States, and as a group they are educated, speak English pretty well (or at least the techno-inflected version) and, most of all, their injuries are more spiritual than physical. Of course, even in a muckraking novel like The Jungle, damage to the human spirit is the important thing. But to wax overly philosophical would be to regard this book as more of a serious sociological study than it is. It's best -- as is pointed out in the "Introduction" -- to read NetSlaves as a comparison between the Internet dream and the Internet reality. For there are bad jobs and bad management in every industry, but in an industry so invested in the mythology that all 25-year olds become rich -- awakening to that truth is even more heartbreaking than usual.
-- Doug Nickerson (dougnickerson@yahoo.com)
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