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Writers in Residence
Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent
Douglas Coupland, one of the world's biggest cultural brains, takes an inside look at the global company that keeps us connected, and wonders what all that connectivity is doing to our brains and our sense of ourselves as humans.
The incomparable Douglas Coupland reports from inside the corporate offices and science labs of Alcatel-Lucent, a globally influential business whose work is largely unknown to consumers. "Were it to vanish tomorrow," he writes, "our modern world would grind to a halt. The Internet would implode--your Internet would implode." Although his examination of the company is playful and fascinating in its own right, Coupland's account is driven by his thoughtful reflections on the larger cultural and sociological significance of the transformative information technology Alcatel works on: fiber wire, microprocessors, the Internet and mobile technologies. And by a larger meditation about what the Internet is doing to us as it relentlessly colonizes the planet, and our brains.
Like Coupland's best work, Kitten Clone is a wildly entertaining yet penetrating encounter with the technological and cultural forces that surround us. And also a surprising and unique exploration of a possible future.
The incomparable Douglas Coupland reports from inside the corporate offices and science labs of Alcatel-Lucent, a globally influential business whose work is largely unknown to consumers. "Were it to vanish tomorrow," he writes, "our modern world would grind to a halt. The Internet would implode--your Internet would implode." Although his examination of the company is playful and fascinating in its own right, Coupland's account is driven by his thoughtful reflections on the larger cultural and sociological significance of the transformative information technology Alcatel works on: fiber wire, microprocessors, the Internet and mobile technologies. And by a larger meditation about what the Internet is doing to us as it relentlessly colonizes the planet, and our brains.
Like Coupland's best work, Kitten Clone is a wildly entertaining yet penetrating encounter with the technological and cultural forces that surround us. And also a surprising and unique exploration of a possible future.
176 pages, Paperback
First published July 15, 2014
10 people are currently reading
382 people want to read
About the author
Douglas Coupland
108 books4,686 followersDouglas Coupland is Canadian, born on a Canadian Air Force base near Baden-Baden, Germany, on December 30, 1961. In 1965 his family moved to Vancouver, Canada, where he continues to live and work. Coupland has studied art and design in Vancouver, Canada, Milan, Italy and Sapporo, Japan. His first novel, Generation X, was published in March of 1991. Since then he has published nine novels and several non-fiction books in 35 languages and most countries on earth. He has written and performed for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, England, and in 2001 resumed his practice as a visual artist, with exhibitions in spaces in North America, Europe and Asia. 2006 marks the premiere of the feature film Everything's Gone Green, his first story written specifically for the screen and not adapted from any previous work. A TV series (13 one-hour episodes) based on his novel, jPod premieres on the CBC in January, 2008.
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Retrieved 07:55, May 15, 2008, from http://www.coupland.com/coupland_bio....
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Retrieved 07:55, May 15, 2008, from http://www.coupland.com/coupland_bio....
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
February 16, 2015
Douglas Coupland’s tech-ennui fictions have never appealed to me, lounging on the bland pouffe of lit-fic, lacking in that prose razzle-dazzle so crucial to me, and satirising with sitcom-level humour (not of the Veep calibre). This extended essay (magazine article) explores a tedious net-peddling company, and the impact of the web on our psyches and lives (coming to no conclusions except: be worried), in an informative manner, with photos of the bland corporate surroundings suggesting a lurking darkness, written in a down-to-earth style that makes for pleasant and simple reading. No real intellectual substance here, and one longs to read what dear DFW might have done with such an assignment. This is (in the UK) part of Visual Editions Writers-in-Residence series, where high-profile writers tackle the complex matrices of our corporate dystopia in an amusing manner. A noble aim, except these “books” are like art magazines sold at £25 ($40) per unit, so seem quite steep for the casually curious.
November 18, 2014
“The year is 1871. You are French and you are about to fondle a kitten.” Douglas Coupland has a talent for opening lines that are both funny and contextual. Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent opens with a whimsical story about a Frenchman going to work for the engineering company that eventually contributes some “corporate DNA” to one of the largest telecommunications company on Earth. As the technical first sentence of this book (in its introduction) asserts, you probably haven’t heard of Alcatel-Lucent. I hadn’t. Yet they own Bell Labs and are reponsible for servicing and innovating massive swathes of that thing we call the Internet. (If you are reading these words, chances are you are using the Internet to do so, unless you’re a transhuman picking through the wreckage of a library of the post-apocalyptic future devoted to print archives of what was once called the World Wide Web.)
If you want to have a book written about the Internet’s physical presence and how this has changed us as a species, you really can’t do much better than Douglas Coupland. I know him best as a novelist, and one who writes about the current impact of technology on our lives. But he’s also a non-fiction writer. And a visual artist. And a designer. This versatility makes him particularly suited to a book like this, which is part interviews, part description, and part meditation on Alcatel-Lucent and the Internet they helped to build.
Before I talk about Coupland’s writing, let’s talk about the book itself. The Visual Editions version of Kitten Clone is gorgeous. This is one of those books where the physical object is itself a work of art. It’s 25x18.5 cm of high-quality, smooth paper. The photo with “Inside Alcatel-Lucent” written on it that you see in the cover image is a kind of tiny dustjacket (a dust-wrap?) that folds out from either side of the inside cover, so you can use it as a bookmark, or just set it aside entirely when reading.
Olivia Arthur’s photographs are a poignant companion to Coupland’s text. She is the photographer he has been waiting for his entire life: I would buy re-issues of his novels with her photographs accompanying the prose. The photos portray the complexity and detritus that accumulates in an organization as old and reborn as many times as Alcatel-Lucent. Seemingly disorganized forests of wire disappear into connectors on the wall. An unidentified employee crouches over something that looks like a microwave oven on a worktable. Someone standing in the Murray Hill anechoic chamber, which looks pretty sweet. Maybe my favourite photos are a pair, on recto and then the verso page respecitvely, of an older man in front of a chalkboard covered in equations. Essentially, what makes Arthur’s photography so powerful is how it reminds us of the inherent physical complexity of the Internet. We easily get used to the ephemeral and omnipresent nature of our net connection, and the smooth intangible qualities of software and apps; sometimes we forget the hundreds of thousands of kilometres of marine fibre-optic and all the infrastructure on land that actually makes the Internet work. And when we do remember, it’s tempting for us to imagine gleaming towers of ivory, gunmetal grey, and smooth black data centres full of racks of happy servers. Real life is much messier. Even more than Coupland’s prose, Arthur’s photographs attest to this.
As far as the book itself goes, I was actually hoping for a little more. Coupland visits a few different hubs of Alcatel-Lucent activity: Bell Labs in New Jersey; the headquarters in Paris, France; and offices and factories in China. He interviews some of the scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and businesspeople who are working to invent new technologies, improve existing ones, and make money off the Internet. Along the way he hammers out a couple of recurring points.
Firstly, and related to what I said above about Alcatel-Lucent, Coupland talks about how the people at “Alca-Loo”, as it is apparently called, have this perception of themselves as plumbers of the Internet. He feels they underestimate their importance or impact. At the very least, he feels we average people should be more aware of what Alca-Loo and companies like it do, and I would agree. Few people are aware of how fragile our global network actually is compared to how much we do with it. There is little doubt that we have come to depend on the Internet in an amazingly short time compared to other major inventions, such as printing, or even the steam engine. If all our Internet connections went down tomorrow, most of us might survive, but it wouldn’t be a pretty apocalypse….
The Internet has changed us as a species. I read Kitten Clone just prior to the start of Desert Bus for Hope 8, a livestreaming charity marathon. If you haven’t experienced Desert Bus, then you won’t understand—but you can check out its website, or maybe watch some archived footage, to see the incredible craziness and fun that these people have while raising money for children. The only analog equivalent would be a television donation drive done by telephone—but, as usual, the Internet has taken such an idea and transformed into a barely recognizable twenty-first century equivalent with cats, and GIFs, and an interactivity television and telephones couldn’t hope to provide.
The Internet has changed us as a species. This is Coupland’s second theme, and it might seem obvious, but it’s an idea that bears unpacking. His interviewees always stress that the demand for data, for bandwidth, for connectedness, came as a huge surprise to the engineers and designers of the Internet. The Web and related infrastructure took off in a way that the people who first built it couldn’t anticipate. That’s an interesting tidbit that isn’t immediately obvious even to people who acknowledge the Internet’s impact. Coupland mentions some of the tantalizing, cutting-edge science being done to advance the infrastructure of the Internet and computing.
So, finally, Coupland touches on the curious equilibrium that exists between pure research and the need to find applications for technology. He mentions how Bell Labs, back when it was owned by AT&T, operated as a government-sanctioned monopoly, because the rollout of a national telephone grid was “too valuable to be left to the free-market research and development system.”
Let me reiterate that for a moment, because I think it’s difficult for people my age, who are watching the net neutrality debates in American media, to understand the significance of the above. The US government, back in the day, protected AT&T from competition and funded pure research into telecommunications.
Nowadays the Republican party—who are, technically speaking, now “the government” are actively working to undermine any attempts to ensure that everyone in the country is connected to high-speed Internet.
What the hell happened, America?
There are many reasons to lament the rise of transnational corporations. Coupland mentions Alca-Loo’s patents often but doesn’t talk about the dark side of technology and software patents. Yet there is a palpable sense of relief in this book about the fact that, as a multinational headquartered in France, Alcatel-Lucent is somewhat cushioned from the craziness happening in American tech regulation right now. Both Coupland and Arthur manage to communicate the spontaneous miracle that is the Internet and how its incredibly rapid evolution is … well, fragile.
Coupland makes a few remarks I have to disagree with. As his introduction to meeting Bell Labs’ Chief Scientist, he says:
It’s nice to think that Coupland’s anecdotal Lady Scientist can obliterate sexism in tech, but as The Agenda recently discussed, it exists. The tech world is not gender-blind, and it’s wishful ignorance at best or outrightly disingenous at worst to suggest that it is.
Later, Coupland says that according to Shawn Brennan, a “customer support engineer” at the Kanata office:
Hahahahaha … I snorted when I read this passage, and I still can’t help but laugh derisively a little. I’m not even sure where to start dissecting the levels of wrongness here. The idea that the tech industry is a meritocracy is just another myth promoted by successful people within the industry who do not want to acknowledge the privilege and success that helped them. As with any other industry, women and people of colour face a larger barrier to success and funding. It’s dangerous to ignore this and promote myths like the meritocracy.
I’m disappointed that in an otherwise beautiful and meditative book Coupland falls back on his male privilege rather than more critically examining this aspect of the tech industry. Then again, Kitten Clone isn’t about the tech industry so much as it is specifically about Alcatel-Lucent, and maybe the expectation was that he would say nice things.
There are plenty of reasons for one to read or buy this book. As I’ve said a few times, it’s just really, really good looking. It is a perfect book for the coffee table, so even if you can’t read (how are you reading this?) you can still look at the photos and show it off to your friends. If, like me, you are interested in the workings of the Internet, this book has shares an inside look at aspects of a company that is heavily involved in the Internet. And it’s laced with Coupland’s characteristic bold yet heavy weirdness.
I enjoyed Kitten Clone, even if it didn’t deliver quite the jolt I was hoping for or the perspective I wanted to see. It’s descriptive rather than interrogative; it’s thoughtful but not necessarily full of fresh new insights. Above all else, it combines the visual and the verbal to help chronicle a point in time in the history of our species where we are changing our society at a global, rapid scale. And who knows where that will lead us?
If you want to have a book written about the Internet’s physical presence and how this has changed us as a species, you really can’t do much better than Douglas Coupland. I know him best as a novelist, and one who writes about the current impact of technology on our lives. But he’s also a non-fiction writer. And a visual artist. And a designer. This versatility makes him particularly suited to a book like this, which is part interviews, part description, and part meditation on Alcatel-Lucent and the Internet they helped to build.
Before I talk about Coupland’s writing, let’s talk about the book itself. The Visual Editions version of Kitten Clone is gorgeous. This is one of those books where the physical object is itself a work of art. It’s 25x18.5 cm of high-quality, smooth paper. The photo with “Inside Alcatel-Lucent” written on it that you see in the cover image is a kind of tiny dustjacket (a dust-wrap?) that folds out from either side of the inside cover, so you can use it as a bookmark, or just set it aside entirely when reading.
Olivia Arthur’s photographs are a poignant companion to Coupland’s text. She is the photographer he has been waiting for his entire life: I would buy re-issues of his novels with her photographs accompanying the prose. The photos portray the complexity and detritus that accumulates in an organization as old and reborn as many times as Alcatel-Lucent. Seemingly disorganized forests of wire disappear into connectors on the wall. An unidentified employee crouches over something that looks like a microwave oven on a worktable. Someone standing in the Murray Hill anechoic chamber, which looks pretty sweet. Maybe my favourite photos are a pair, on recto and then the verso page respecitvely, of an older man in front of a chalkboard covered in equations. Essentially, what makes Arthur’s photography so powerful is how it reminds us of the inherent physical complexity of the Internet. We easily get used to the ephemeral and omnipresent nature of our net connection, and the smooth intangible qualities of software and apps; sometimes we forget the hundreds of thousands of kilometres of marine fibre-optic and all the infrastructure on land that actually makes the Internet work. And when we do remember, it’s tempting for us to imagine gleaming towers of ivory, gunmetal grey, and smooth black data centres full of racks of happy servers. Real life is much messier. Even more than Coupland’s prose, Arthur’s photographs attest to this.
As far as the book itself goes, I was actually hoping for a little more. Coupland visits a few different hubs of Alcatel-Lucent activity: Bell Labs in New Jersey; the headquarters in Paris, France; and offices and factories in China. He interviews some of the scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and businesspeople who are working to invent new technologies, improve existing ones, and make money off the Internet. Along the way he hammers out a couple of recurring points.
Firstly, and related to what I said above about Alcatel-Lucent, Coupland talks about how the people at “Alca-Loo”, as it is apparently called, have this perception of themselves as plumbers of the Internet. He feels they underestimate their importance or impact. At the very least, he feels we average people should be more aware of what Alca-Loo and companies like it do, and I would agree. Few people are aware of how fragile our global network actually is compared to how much we do with it. There is little doubt that we have come to depend on the Internet in an amazingly short time compared to other major inventions, such as printing, or even the steam engine. If all our Internet connections went down tomorrow, most of us might survive, but it wouldn’t be a pretty apocalypse….
The Internet has changed us as a species. I read Kitten Clone just prior to the start of Desert Bus for Hope 8, a livestreaming charity marathon. If you haven’t experienced Desert Bus, then you won’t understand—but you can check out its website, or maybe watch some archived footage, to see the incredible craziness and fun that these people have while raising money for children. The only analog equivalent would be a television donation drive done by telephone—but, as usual, the Internet has taken such an idea and transformed into a barely recognizable twenty-first century equivalent with cats, and GIFs, and an interactivity television and telephones couldn’t hope to provide.
The Internet has changed us as a species. This is Coupland’s second theme, and it might seem obvious, but it’s an idea that bears unpacking. His interviewees always stress that the demand for data, for bandwidth, for connectedness, came as a huge surprise to the engineers and designers of the Internet. The Web and related infrastructure took off in a way that the people who first built it couldn’t anticipate. That’s an interesting tidbit that isn’t immediately obvious even to people who acknowledge the Internet’s impact. Coupland mentions some of the tantalizing, cutting-edge science being done to advance the infrastructure of the Internet and computing.
So, finally, Coupland touches on the curious equilibrium that exists between pure research and the need to find applications for technology. He mentions how Bell Labs, back when it was owned by AT&T, operated as a government-sanctioned monopoly, because the rollout of a national telephone grid was “too valuable to be left to the free-market research and development system.”
Let me reiterate that for a moment, because I think it’s difficult for people my age, who are watching the net neutrality debates in American media, to understand the significance of the above. The US government, back in the day, protected AT&T from competition and funded pure research into telecommunications.
Nowadays the Republican party—who are, technically speaking, now “the government” are actively working to undermine any attempts to ensure that everyone in the country is connected to high-speed Internet.
What the hell happened, America?
There are many reasons to lament the rise of transnational corporations. Coupland mentions Alca-Loo’s patents often but doesn’t talk about the dark side of technology and software patents. Yet there is a palpable sense of relief in this book about the fact that, as a multinational headquartered in France, Alcatel-Lucent is somewhat cushioned from the craziness happening in American tech regulation right now. Both Coupland and Arthur manage to communicate the spontaneous miracle that is the Internet and how its incredibly rapid evolution is … well, fragile.
Coupland makes a few remarks I have to disagree with. As his introduction to meeting Bell Labs’ Chief Scientist, he says:
Yes, that’s right: Alice… a woman. Does that shock you? A woman in such a position of high authority? Just kidding. The tech world’s not like that. It’s all about brains and is pretty much entirely gender-blind; if you can cut the mustard, you’re in. [Emphasis mine.]
It’s nice to think that Coupland’s anecdotal Lady Scientist can obliterate sexism in tech, but as The Agenda recently discussed, it exists. The tech world is not gender-blind, and it’s wishful ignorance at best or outrightly disingenous at worst to suggest that it is.
Later, Coupland says that according to Shawn Brennan, a “customer support engineer” at the Kanata office:
… whether someone is kept on is based purely on their contribution, reinforcing my perception that the tech universe is as close to a pure capitalist intellectual meritocracy as our species has ever created.
Hahahahaha … I snorted when I read this passage, and I still can’t help but laugh derisively a little. I’m not even sure where to start dissecting the levels of wrongness here. The idea that the tech industry is a meritocracy is just another myth promoted by successful people within the industry who do not want to acknowledge the privilege and success that helped them. As with any other industry, women and people of colour face a larger barrier to success and funding. It’s dangerous to ignore this and promote myths like the meritocracy.
I’m disappointed that in an otherwise beautiful and meditative book Coupland falls back on his male privilege rather than more critically examining this aspect of the tech industry. Then again, Kitten Clone isn’t about the tech industry so much as it is specifically about Alcatel-Lucent, and maybe the expectation was that he would say nice things.
There are plenty of reasons for one to read or buy this book. As I’ve said a few times, it’s just really, really good looking. It is a perfect book for the coffee table, so even if you can’t read (how are you reading this?) you can still look at the photos and show it off to your friends. If, like me, you are interested in the workings of the Internet, this book has shares an inside look at aspects of a company that is heavily involved in the Internet. And it’s laced with Coupland’s characteristic bold yet heavy weirdness.
I enjoyed Kitten Clone, even if it didn’t deliver quite the jolt I was hoping for or the perspective I wanted to see. It’s descriptive rather than interrogative; it’s thoughtful but not necessarily full of fresh new insights. Above all else, it combines the visual and the verbal to help chronicle a point in time in the history of our species where we are changing our society at a global, rapid scale. And who knows where that will lead us?
July 20, 2023
Fascinating look inside the telecommunications industry. Now owned by Nokia, ALU/Bell Labs developed the largest and most robust IP routers, optical fiber systems, and various other technologies that enable 5G and fixed networks. The author raises questions and prescient observations about the sociology of the Internet and how it's changing people's lives around the world.
December 17, 2014
I'm a huge Douglas Coupland fan. And I'm very interested in science and technology. So after finishing The Idea Factory, about the history of Bell Labs prior to AT&T getting broken up, I thought itd be interesting to read about Alcatel Lucent, which is what Bell Labs morphed into. I was wrong. This book was tedious. It also wasn't about Alcatel Lucent - its about Couplands wandering thoughts as he loses his focus whie talking to people who work for Alcatel Lucent. This book feels like sonething that results from putting off your term paper until the last minute, then pulling an all-nighter and hoping you manage to throw together sonething good enough to get a passing grade. This book is a failure - not interesting, not informative, not insightful, not worth your time.
October 6, 2015
Apparently, based on the success of his meditation on “air travel and the human soul” as recorded in A Week at the Airport, author Alain de Botton put out the call for renowned writers to research and philosophise about other organisations that surround us but escape our daily notice. Being eminently suited for the task, Douglas Coupland spent a year investigating the work being done at Alcatel-Lucent – which pretty much built and now maintains the Internet – and to this end, Coupland visited four of their offices around the globe; describing the past (New Jersey), the present (Paris/Ottawa), and the future (Shanghai) of the company. Overall, this is a bit of a self-indulgent project (not least of all for the fantasised kitten-related subthreads) and the product that's made out of the journey – Kitten Clone – is a glossy, photograph-filled art book that dangles a few idea without looking at them too closely or offering any conclusions.
I was intrigued in the beginning when Coupland mentioned the “10 000 Hour Theory” (demonstrated so well by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers): that “neurons that fire together, wire together”, and as we early adopters of the internet have now been using it for 10 000+ hours, we have literally rewired our brains. And while Coupland wonders what that might mean for humanity, the answer isn't to be found in the corporate offices or research labs that he visits; it's just something to think about. (Although I did like his musings on how people who read novels expect their lives to have a plotline while those who spend their time surfing the net don't expect everything to add up to something larger; as someone who both reads and surfs daily, I wonder at my own brain's wiring.)
While writing about the future of transportation, the following aside is something I also think about, and it is a fair example of Coupland's sense of humour throughout:
As a writer who is known for both capturing the zeitgeist and dabbling in futurism, Coupland repeatedly asks his interview subjects, “What's next?” And no one really knows – everyone at Alcatel-Lucent seems to be working on speed and broadband and marrying wireless to wi-fi, but the next big thing wasn't shared with us. It's interesting that everyone was surprised by how much bandwidth we all wanted – no one predicted that we'd be demanding to watch movies at the bus stop on our phones – and the real game changers (like apps and Facebook and Google) didn't come out of the big research facilities anyway: Alcatel-Lucent – though the inventors of the Internet and the Cloud, etc. – tend to think of themselves as the “plumbers” of the system now. Coupland assumes that the Internet will soon be seen as just another utility, and like those country folk who were forced to pay to hook up to municipal water when cities expanded to their fencelines, he sees a future of closed roads and backhoes and jacked up cable bills as we are all forced to retrofit our homes to a central fiber optic internet supply company. And in a “Generation X and Y” (for which he apologises in this book) manner, Coupland coins the following terms:
That actually happens to me a lot: when I first got a smart phone, I was always like, “Who sang that song? Oh, let me Google it.” But now, even though trivia is just a few swipes away, it just all seems so...trivial.
There isn't much more to Kitten Clone than that – it would have made an interesting magazine series, especially with the nice photos – and it doesn't take too long to read. At the end, there are ads for other titles in the series – looking at the IMF and life aboard a US Navy supercarrier – and I'd imagine they'd also be mildly interesting. This wasn't a waste of time, but for a look at a company I'd never heard of, I didn't learn very much; I could have spent that time surfing the net; especially as much of the real info Coupland shares with us is taken from Wikipedia and Alcatel-Lucent's own website.
I was intrigued in the beginning when Coupland mentioned the “10 000 Hour Theory” (demonstrated so well by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers): that “neurons that fire together, wire together”, and as we early adopters of the internet have now been using it for 10 000+ hours, we have literally rewired our brains. And while Coupland wonders what that might mean for humanity, the answer isn't to be found in the corporate offices or research labs that he visits; it's just something to think about. (Although I did like his musings on how people who read novels expect their lives to have a plotline while those who spend their time surfing the net don't expect everything to add up to something larger; as someone who both reads and surfs daily, I wonder at my own brain's wiring.)
While writing about the future of transportation, the following aside is something I also think about, and it is a fair example of Coupland's sense of humour throughout:
The one appalling thing about electric cars is that one plugs them into already overtaxed municipal power grids. Try mentioning this to a politician or manufacturer who wants to ride the green wave and you will quickly find yourself escorted out of the room. Mention this twice and you'll magically find yourself on the No Fly List. Mention this three times and your cold lifeless body will be found in a clump of brambles off the nearest motorway.
As a writer who is known for both capturing the zeitgeist and dabbling in futurism, Coupland repeatedly asks his interview subjects, “What's next?” And no one really knows – everyone at Alcatel-Lucent seems to be working on speed and broadband and marrying wireless to wi-fi, but the next big thing wasn't shared with us. It's interesting that everyone was surprised by how much bandwidth we all wanted – no one predicted that we'd be demanding to watch movies at the bus stop on our phones – and the real game changers (like apps and Facebook and Google) didn't come out of the big research facilities anyway: Alcatel-Lucent – though the inventors of the Internet and the Cloud, etc. – tend to think of themselves as the “plumbers” of the system now. Coupland assumes that the Internet will soon be seen as just another utility, and like those country folk who were forced to pay to hook up to municipal water when cities expanded to their fencelines, he sees a future of closed roads and backhoes and jacked up cable bills as we are all forced to retrofit our homes to a central fiber optic internet supply company. And in a “Generation X and Y” (for which he apologises in this book) manner, Coupland coins the following terms:
Omniscience Fatigue: Thanks to Google and Wikipedia, for the first time in the history of humanity, it's possible to find the answer to almost any question, and the net effect of this is that information became slightly boring.
That actually happens to me a lot: when I first got a smart phone, I was always like, “Who sang that song? Oh, let me Google it.” But now, even though trivia is just a few swipes away, it just all seems so...trivial.
Blank-Collar Workers: The new post-class class. They are a future global monoclass of citizenry adrift in a classless sea. Neither middle-class nor working-class – and certainly not rich – blank-collar workers are self-aware of their status as simply one unit among seven billion other units. Blank-collar workers rely on a grab-bag of skills to pay the rent and see themselves as having seventeen different careers before they suffer death from neglect in a government-run senior care facility in the year 2042.
There isn't much more to Kitten Clone than that – it would have made an interesting magazine series, especially with the nice photos – and it doesn't take too long to read. At the end, there are ads for other titles in the series – looking at the IMF and life aboard a US Navy supercarrier – and I'd imagine they'd also be mildly interesting. This wasn't a waste of time, but for a look at a company I'd never heard of, I didn't learn very much; I could have spent that time surfing the net; especially as much of the real info Coupland shares with us is taken from Wikipedia and Alcatel-Lucent's own website.
October 28, 2018
I read this whole book and learned almost nothing about Alcatel Lucent. This is not a book about that company; it’s a book wherein Douglas Coupland disparagingly describes his whirlwind tours through dumpy office buildings, while occasionally musing about technology and society.
October 22, 2021
The book is a mixed bag. It feels at times like an overly long magazine profile. Coupland travels to various Alcatel-Lucent offices and is given interviews with mostly random people during which he asks mostly random questions. He interweaves fantastical narratives about the history of the company, and an overwhelming amount of his reflections on technology, the internet, generations who grew up - or didn't - with the internet, speed, human nature, etc. Now the book is 7 years old, so it's possible that it might have felt fresher 7 years ago, but the commentary is generally bloated, not that interesting or original or funny, and then once in a while there's something clever, a glimpse of the brilliant Coupland's ability to see things and restate them back to us in a way that is catchy and telling. He describes the container of old cables that we all have in our garages as "toxic linguini" which will stick with me.
April 2, 2022
This author’s brain is one I truly admire as he sets his observations in amazing landscapes . Loved laughing out loud in some parts when he would reduce items to a spot in interpretation . Cannot wait to read more of his works !
The current Apple TV show “ Severance “ is filmed on the grounds of Bell Labs and by coincidence I found this book while our family is watching the show . It’s a great addition to the “ Severance “ universe as well as a very entertaining /observational about our relationship with the internet .
The current Apple TV show “ Severance “ is filmed on the grounds of Bell Labs and by coincidence I found this book while our family is watching the show . It’s a great addition to the “ Severance “ universe as well as a very entertaining /observational about our relationship with the internet .
December 15, 2020
Did I just read a biography about a tech company? I guess I did. Not my favorite Coupland book, but still pretty interesting. Has some insight into the future of the web, but even though it’s only six years old it felt older since social media has gone through so much change in the last 6 years.
September 29, 2017
Interesting but uneven. The "dream" bits especially didn't work for me.
March 9, 2018
This was one of the first Doug books since the early 2000s in which I saw some of the 90s-era Douglas that I fell in love with. An exploration of a local company!
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April 4, 2020Clasic Coupland!
December 17, 2021
Another late review, probably going to be ramble-y:
So I've held onto this book from 2014 and this entire time I thought it was a fiction book. Only when I was looking through the publication details did I notice I've been wrong these 7 years. Still, Coupland tackles a real life company's history/biography in such a fun, fictionalized way so it read like a satirical, super tongue-in-cheek interview. And all from the interviewer's mind, including their thoughts. I loved how these random thoughts would go from being incredibly fleeting and fast to fleshed out over a full page with the print getting tinier and tinier and tinier. Over all led to some fun googling, Bell Labs Holmdel being my fav, and genuine learning so that was cool and unexpected.
So I've held onto this book from 2014 and this entire time I thought it was a fiction book. Only when I was looking through the publication details did I notice I've been wrong these 7 years. Still, Coupland tackles a real life company's history/biography in such a fun, fictionalized way so it read like a satirical, super tongue-in-cheek interview. And all from the interviewer's mind, including their thoughts. I loved how these random thoughts would go from being incredibly fleeting and fast to fleshed out over a full page with the print getting tinier and tinier and tinier. Over all led to some fun googling, Bell Labs Holmdel being my fav, and genuine learning so that was cool and unexpected.
March 7, 2015
A good travel book transports the reader to someplace exotic, only to spur reflection on the reader’s current circumstances. For some types of introspection, however, escape to the French Riviera or the highlands of Papua New Guinea might not be ideal. To reflect on our society’s hyperconnected, technology-worshipping society, a tour through one of the places largely responsible for our communications infrastructure seems appropriate. And who better to guide us through but the cultural brain of Douglas Coupland?
Full review here: http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2015/...
Full review here: http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2015/...
March 13, 2015
If only this book hadn't been written by one of those "technology is awesome! What problems?" sort of people...Coupland tends to elide all the problems, like Alcatel-Lucent's sale of historically significant buildings, or massive layoffs, or what the workers in the Chinese factory actually earn.
So in case you're wondering what the company makes: networking equipment and optical fiber. I've just saved you from reading this book.
(Disclaimer: I worked for Lucent in 1998, but for the part of the company that was spun off into Avaya. There's an interesting story to be told about post-divestiture AT&T and its successors, but Coupland is not the man for that job.)
So in case you're wondering what the company makes: networking equipment and optical fiber. I've just saved you from reading this book.
(Disclaimer: I worked for Lucent in 1998, but for the part of the company that was spun off into Avaya. There's an interesting story to be told about post-divestiture AT&T and its successors, but Coupland is not the man for that job.)
July 16, 2015
I'm not sure anyone who doesn't work at Alcatel-Lucent will find this book interesting. The funny thing is I don't think many who do work there will want to read if either! Or, from discussions with others, have started but abandoned it.
That said, being a huge fan of the author helps appreciate the book. I enjoyed it. I can see why ALU employees would not like it but the book has my approval.
That said, being a huge fan of the author helps appreciate the book. I enjoyed it. I can see why ALU employees would not like it but the book has my approval.
July 20, 2015
Kitten Clone reads as if it were a slightly longer version of an article for Wired, but contains all the style and obsessions of Coupland's non-fiction (and fiction) writing such as the quieter affects of technology on culture. A very melancholy view of technology, backed up by the beautifuly sad photographs of the spaces he is visiting.
October 8, 2015
Coupland puts his usual sense of ambivalent intrigue into this viewing and discussion of Alcatel-Lucent, and more. From playing with kittens in Alsace Lorraine to checking out tech production in Pu-Jersey, Shanghai, Coupland keeps it interesting and makes the learning blend seamlessly with the musings.
August 15, 2016
As an employee of the Telecom industry I was quite intrigued to find a non technical book on the now former Alcatel-Lucent. I have never read one of Mr. Coupland's books but his dry humor and gray view of humanity made this a pleasant read. I enjoyed the story of Alphonse that he worked through the book as a chart of evolution in human communication.
March 23, 2016
This book felt a lot like Microserfs or JPod (earlier books by the same author), except this one is nonfiction.
If you liked Coupland's somewhat stream-of-consciousness style of writing in his earlier books, and you don't mind a bleak look at the future, then you'll like this book.
If you liked Coupland's somewhat stream-of-consciousness style of writing in his earlier books, and you don't mind a bleak look at the future, then you'll like this book.
January 27, 2015
B+ Kind of a bizarre company profile - def not the yawn type of profiles I see in Businesweek - this is a Doug type of company profile, pretty interesting overview of the awesome stuff Alcatel-Lucent actually does.
January 21, 2015
Excellent insight into the zeitgeist of the early 21st century.
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May 8, 2023A good Friday evening read, like a really long and interesting magazine article.
March 19, 2015
Only Douglas Coupland could make an overview of a French router manufacturer a fascinating read. Amazing.
March 29, 2015
It's Douglas Coupland. You either like/get what/how he writes or you don't; because Vancouver. Besides Alcatel-Lucent.
May 2, 2015
What is the opposite of the internet?
November 28, 2015
I love Douglas Coupland. I actually consider him one of my favourite authors. This book was a slog that I have resigned myself to possibly never finishing.
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