When fiction hits lull, novelist turns to technology
Indian novelist Vikram Chandra was 12 years old when he wrote his first work of published fiction - a sci-fi story that appeared in the student magazine of his boarding school in India. "Until then, reading stories and telling them mainly to myself had been a reliable, profound pleasure and a desperately needed comfort," Chandra writes in , his fourth book and first work of nonfiction. "The shock of seeing my secret life made public, in print, thrilled my awkward, nerdy soul." As he wrote his way into adulthood, Chandra stumbled upon the world of computers as a postgraduate student in America. He taught himself enough computer programming to get lucrative part-time jobs, which led to his enduring interest in writing software, an aesthetic he compares in his latest book to painting as a fine art. Chandra, who teaches creative writing at the University of California in Berkeley, spoke with about how information technology is transforming our lives.
I really don't think of myself as a nonfiction writer. In fact, I have shied away from nonfiction. I have only written one other sustained piece of nonfiction, which was published first in [newspaper] and then in the in the late 1990s - an essay about the politics of writing in English in India. But you sometimes hit a point in writing fiction that's kind of a lull, a pause - your characters have reached a situation in which you don't quite know what's going to happen next. Generally, when that happens, I read a lot and watch movies and listen to music. And then, eventually, I'll find the solution to what's going to happen next. But this time I decided to focus on something I've been thinking about for years - computers and literary beauty. Because I had been reading literary theory, especially pre-modern Indian literary theory, I decided to write an essay - a kind of ethnography of programmers - for people who are not in IT. I thought of it as a glossy magazine kind of essay - 20 to 40 pages long. And I thought I would be done with it in a couple of weeks, which is how long it usually takes me to find an answer to whatever my fictional question is. But when I started writing, [the subject] just grew and grew. Three year later I realised I had a book.
It's true the space and time of our lives are much more permeable to outside influences. There are cameras everywhere and you have the sense that everything that happens in the world is instantly on your phone. In the early 1990s, when I got a letter I felt comfortable answering it within a week, even two weeks. And now … if you don't reply to an email within a couple of days you're being rude. We're caught up in the cycle of trying to keep up with all the communication, especially now that social media has become an instrument of social self-promotion.
I guess we're going to need training in how to maintain our mental hygiene. Just as we watch what we eat and how much we exercise, we're going to have to watch our electronic connectivity as well. It's interesting that there's a new trend now of people switching off their electronic devices for an "electronic holiday". Technology is transforming our outside world, obviously. But I'm interested in how technology is influencing our personal views of how we see ourselves and our bodies. It's a profound transformation. Our sense of self is being performed more than ever in the public. Our Facebook personas are creations that we curate, for example, by putting up pictures of ourselves or saying what we read today. We're making up a public self that is connected to us but is not completely us. On another level, what's interesting but also scary is how people constantly measure themselves: how many steps have I walked today, the calories I've eaten? As we become more profoundly "interneted", our clothes are going to start talking to each other, which is this whole idea of "the internet of things". The dark side is that people are going to market the information. The privacy issues are huge. The technological self, both in the body and in spirit, is new and nobody quite understands yet what we're doing to ourselves.
The hacker dream of the 1970s and '80s that we were going to be liberated by the coming technology has come true in some senses. But the paranoia-based sci-fi prediction of our future, where we're always watched by the powers that be - the state and big corporations - has also come true. We are being reduced to a world in which everyone in a sense is a temporary worker. Corporations no longer have an obligation to provide employees health insurance. Even in academia there's a trend away from permanent jobs. It's intensely frightening.
