Geek Sublime

James Gleick’s NYTBR review of Vikram Chandra’s Geek Sublime places the book in the context of CP Snow’s “two cultures.” As programmer-turned novelist, Chandra crosses the cultures, and his book aspires, Gleick says, “to look deeply, and with great subtlety, into the connections and tensions between the worlds – the cultures – of technology and art.”

And beyond the two cultures, Chandra tries to capture the mysticism of programming. He writes, “I work inside an orderly, simplified hallucination, a maya that is illusion and not-illusion — the code I write sets off other subterranean incantations which are completely illegible to me, but I can cause objects to move in the real world, and send messages to the other side of the planet.” 

One of Chandra’s themes is the contemporary
“gender” bias of computer programming, the masculinization of computing. Programming was not originally a macho enclave. Gleick summarizes: “The human ‘computers’ on the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos were women; so were the ‘Eniac girls’ coding for John von Neumann in the 1940s.”According to Chandra, it became masculinized “through male-oriented aptitude tests that led to an influx of what one analyst called ‘often egocentric, slightly neurotic’ programmers disproportionately equipped with beards and sandals.”

Chandra’s book is also a memoir, as he author traces the logic of computing back to his roots in ancient India: “Sometime around 500 B.C., the ancient scholar Panini analyzed the Sanskrit language at a level of complexity that has never been matched since, for any language. His grammar, the Ashtadhyayi, comprises some 4,000 rules meant to generate all the possible sentences of Sanskrit from roots of sound and meaning — phonemes and morphemes. The rules include definitions; headings; operational rules, including ‘replacement, affixation, augmentation and compounding’; and ‘metarules,’ which call other rules recursively. Sound familiar? Panini’s grammar of Sanskrit bears more than a family resemblance to a modern programming language.” His grammar, Chandra says, is “an algorithm, a machine that consumes phonemes and morphemes and produces words and sentences.” 

Gleick suggests that “Poetry and logic live in different places, after all. Poetry has patience. It reaches into a dark vastness,” but he finds Chandra’s claims about the power of computing convincing: “It acts and interacts with itself, with the world” and changes the world as it goes. According to Chandra, “We already filter experience through software – Facebook and Google offer us views of the world that we can manipulate, but which also, in turn, manipulate us. The embodied language of websites, apps and networks writes itself into us.”