I’ve posted a long string of essays here about life fifty or more years ago on the Waschke Homestead and I intend to write many more. But today, I will tell you a little about a book project I’ve started this fall. My new project only mentions the homestead in passing. Instead, I’m writing about what I’ve done during the fifty years after I left the homestead for college in Chicago. As everyone who visits my other website, Marv Waschke on Computing, probably knows, I’ve been a software engineer and architect for many years. My last book, Personal Cybersecurity, is no New York Times best seller, but it has been selling steadily.
Writing Personal Cybersecurity forced me to think hard about the state of computing today. I was reminded how different the current economic, social, and political roles of computing are from what I thought I was working to build for many years. I was one among many engineers who built the tangle of hardware, software, networks, and algorithms that are computing today. We did not set out to build the platform for fraud, disinformation, surveillance, and cyberwarfare that characterizes today’s Internet.
I began to think about trying to explain what happened, how a bunch of well-intentioned geeks created a monster. At the same time, I have been burrowing into my past on the Waschke Homestead and ruminating over the milieu of a kid raised on a homestead farm in a remote corner of the country. In the midst of these reveries, the Fortune 500 software company where I worked until I retired to write a few years ago, CA Technologies, was acquired for 19 billion dollars by the computer chip maker, Broadcom, and ceased to exist. So many changes. So hard to understand.
I wrote a proposal for a non-fiction book that would be rather different from my previous efforts at writing technical books on computing: a book on what changed in computing, how the changes took place, and why.
Recently, I had a chance to talk over my proposal with my friend Jim Lynch, who is a New York Times best-selling fiction author. (His latest book is Before the Wind.) We sat in the cabin of his sail boat moored in Olympia Washington under overcast and dark December sky and talked over my proposal, my mystery in progress, and I offered him some hints on hacker ways for a new book he is working on.
Jim did not think much of my proposal. He characterized it as a polemic and probably not interesting to the number of readers publishing success requires. But he also pointed out that it would be more interesting as a memoir.
In the weeks since we talked, I have realized how right Jim was. I don’t have an ideological structure for the causes for our misbegotten Internet child and a polemic without a robust structure is a rambling bore. But I do know what happened to me and my colleagues from the beginnings of the personal computer and the world of distributed cloud computing of today. I can bring it to life on the page. My readers can come to their own conclusions. And I get a chance to write about the time the feds marched the CEO of CA out the door and into prison.
The sum is that I am now in the spot I like best. I have two projects to work on. Half the day, I’m a serious non-fiction author and researcher. The other half, I write entertaining lies that I hope are decent fiction.
By the way, I know from site metrics that close to two hundred visitors have read the Vine Maple Studio for over half an hour so far in December. I enjoy conversing on line in comments on other sites and I invite some of you who are interested enough to read for a while to introduce yourself in a comment. I would love to say hello and engage in civil conversation. Comment on anything—even posts from years back if they interest you. If you are not selling snake oil or larcenous search optimization schemes, I will reply.
If you are selling snake oil or larceny, move on. There’s nothing here.