Exploding Helicopters #3 Douglas Coupland - MicroserfsPublication date: 1996Publisher: FlamingoPrice then: £6.99Price now: a copy of The Cider House Rules by John IrvingPurchased from: swapped via Read It Swap It From the synopsis: “The job may be super cool, the pay may be astronomical, but they’re going nowhere, and however hard they work, however many shares they earn, they’re never going to be as rich as Bill.” Amazing true fact: I have never come across anyone who doesn’t like Douglas Coupland. I’m about half a generation too young to fit into the ‘demographic’ that he apparently became a ‘spokesman’ for when he bottled their ‘slacker zeitgeist’ with Generation X, but I completely related to it for many reasons, not least the fact that I hate the word ‘zeitgeist’ and reject the idea of people as ‘demographics’. It’s a book I read and loved, but then I sat in my bedroom for a week worrying about whether or not my job could be classed as a McJob and whether or not I should ignore my family and move to a squat in Palm Springs. Coupland gets you like that. With Microserfs, a book essentially about some misfit nerds who are working on a web start-up in the early 90s, I read it as an amusing little set of anecdotes which kept me smiling for 300+ pages, but then an hour after I’d finished it I was still thinking about how the geeks will inherit the earth, and about how friendships will surpass all obstacles, and about the basic human instinct to form familial groups and how that changes as we get older. He’s like that, is Douglas Coupland. “Susan said that the BIG issue nowadays is that on TV and in magazines, the images we see, while they appear surreal, ‘really aren’t surrealistic, because they’re just random, and there’s no subconsciousness underneath to generate the images’…To this end, I’m creating a file of random words that pop into my head, and am feeding these words into a desktop file labelled SUBCONSCIOUS.” “She said, ‘I don’t believe human beings store memory in our brains exclusively - there simply aren’t enough storage slots or interconnective possibilities. And so if not in the brain, then where? I concluded that another viewpoint on memory was to see our bodies as ‘peripheral memory storage devices’.” “Todd called me a cryptofascist today.In honor of this,I’m formatting this particular paragraphflush right.” “He had another Wallbanger - ‘You know, pal - maybe I should de-wire myself. De-wiring would reconnect me to the world of natural time - sunsets and rainbows and crashing waves and Smurfs.’”
Exploding Helicopters #3


Douglas Coupland - Microserfs
Publication date: 1996
Publisher: Flamingo
Price then: £6.99
Price now: a copy of The Cider House Rules by John Irving
Purchased from: swapped via Read It Swap It

From the synopsis: “The job may be super cool, the pay may be astronomical, but they’re going nowhere, and however hard they work, however many shares they earn, they’re never going to be as rich as Bill.”

Amazing true fact: I have never come across anyone who doesn’t like Douglas Coupland. I’m about half a generation too young to fit into the ‘demographic’ that he apparently became a ‘spokesman’ for when he bottled their ‘slacker zeitgeist’ with Generation X, but I completely related to it for many reasons, not least the fact that I hate the word ‘zeitgeist’ and reject the idea of people as ‘demographics’. It’s a book I read and loved, but then I sat in my bedroom for a week worrying about whether or not my job could be classed as a McJob and whether or not I should ignore my family and move to a squat in Palm Springs. Coupland gets you like that.

With Microserfs, a book essentially about some misfit nerds who are working on a web start-up in the early 90s, I read it as an amusing little set of anecdotes which kept me smiling for 300+ pages, but then an hour after I’d finished it I was still thinking about how the geeks will inherit the earth, and about how friendships will surpass all obstacles, and about the basic human instinct to form familial groups and how that changes as we get older. He’s like that, is Douglas Coupland.

“Susan said that the BIG issue nowadays is that on TV and in magazines, the images we see, while they appear surreal, ‘really aren’t surrealistic, because they’re just random, and there’s no subconsciousness underneath to generate the images’…
To this end, I’m creating a file of random words that pop into my head, and am feeding these words into a desktop file labelled SUBCONSCIOUS.”

“She said, ‘I don’t believe human beings store memory in our brains exclusively - there simply aren’t enough storage slots or interconnective possibilities. And so if not in the brain, then where? I concluded that another viewpoint on memory was to see our bodies as ‘peripheral memory storage devices’.”

“Todd called me a cryptofascist today.
In honor of this,
I’m formatting this particular paragraph
flush right.”


“He had another Wallbanger - ‘You know, pal - maybe I should de-wire myself. De-wiring would reconnect me to the world of natural time - sunsets and rainbows and crashing waves and Smurfs.’”