Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent

169 Pages·2014·7.48 MB·English

by  Douglas Coupland

PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA
Copyright © 2014 Douglas Coupland
Design © 2014 Visual Editions and magCulture
Photography © Olivia Arthur All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or
mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in
writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Published in 2014 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House of Canada
Limited, Toronto, and simultaneously in the United Kingdom by Visual Editions, London.
Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.
www.randomhouse.ca
Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.
Kitten Clone is the third book in the Writers in Residence series, which was founded by Alain de
Botton.
Library and Archives Canada
Cataloguing in Publication Coupland, Douglas, author
Kitten clone : inside Alcatel-
Lucent / Douglas Coupland.
ISBN 978-0-345-81411-1
eBook ISBN: 978-0-34581413-5
1. Technology–Social aspects.
2. Technology–Psychological aspects. 3. Internet–Social aspects.
4. Internet–Psychological aspects.
5. Alcatel–
Lucent (Firm). I. Title.
T14.5.C69 2014 303.48′3
C2013-908606-4
v3.1

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Fugue
Belfort, France,
1871
Past
Berkeley Heights,
New Jersey, USA
Holmdel Township,
New Jersey, USA
Present
Paris, France
Calais, France
Kanata, Ontario,
Canada
Future
Pudong,
Shanghai,
China
About the Authors
Introduction
You’re holding a book
about a company you’ve most likely
never heard of. This company has no Steve Jobs, nor does it have a CEO
who jet-skis with starlets. It’s only the 461st largest company on earth,
but were it to vanish tomorrow, our modern world would immediately
be the worse for its absence, with global communications severely
crippled until its competitors swooped in to fill the void. Your home and
office Internet would be slowed right down, if not stopped altogether. As
we always learn during basic power failures, we’d be reminded yet again
how utterly we depend on complex systems far beyond our reach or
influence …
I’d never heard of Alcatel-Lucent, and once its existence was pointed
out to me, it was still very, very hard to find–sort of like the cloud,
whose existence Alcatel-Lucent (or “Alca-Loo” as it’s known among
financiers) both helped to create and helps to continue. Alcatel-Lucent
played a crucial role in designing, building and maintaining the Internet.
This book records my exploration of Alca-Loo in four locations where its
presence is highly present–the United States, France, Canada and China.
This book also uses what I learned about Alca-Loo as a stepping stone
into larger meditation … about what data and speed and optical wiring
are doing to us as a species–about what the Internet is doing to us as it
relentlessly colonizes the planet and our brains, about how a totally
under-the-radar company has transformed our interior lives, and how far
the process will go before people step back and say, “You know, I really
don’t remember my pre-Internet brain at all.”
I could never have written this book had Alain de Botton not spent a
week at Heathrow Airport and then used his experiences there as a way
of musing on travel and the human soul in his book A Week at the
Airport. His decision to expand his project by asking other writers to
investigate other organizations made for a fascinating year. Thank you,
Alain.
This book has a “surly” feel to it. I wanted to mirror the way we look
for information on the Internet: its random links, its chance encounters,
and its happy coincidences. I trekked over three continents trying to
locate the core of something that largely has no core, which led me to
conclude that maybe it doesn’t need one. From its beginnings as a tiny
locomotive company in France’s Alsace region in 1871, Alca-Loo has
become a shapeless global beast. In it I discovered a company clearly
divided into past, present and future. Its research division, Bell Labs, was
both deeply funded and protected by the American government; it gave
us much of what defined the twentieth century: nearly all of our
communication, computer and satellite systems. Alcatel-Lucent is
justifiably proud of what Bell Labs has given mankind, yet at the same
time it lives in Bell Labs’ shadow, in a new Darwinian universe of
decreased fundamental research funding, amorphous transnational
leadership and crazy information technologies that logarithmically
morph everything they touch into something new, unprecedented and
challenging.
Of course, Alca-Loo’s offices operate entirely in the present, in the
moment-to-moment expediency required to deal with competitors, new
technologies, politicians and stockholders. And then there is the Alca-
Loo of the future: the Chinese government has mandated that by 2017
all Chinese citizens will get a minimum of 200 megs of data per second
of Internet speed, and Alca-Loo’s Shanghai branch is working on doing
that.
I would be surprised if Alcatel-Lucent is still called Alcatel-Lucent in a
decade. Such companies seem to always be shedding divisions, swapping
DNA with other companies, selling off their bits and pieces, and they’re
always changing names. So the book is a screen-snap of 2013, our all-
too-brief present—that may indicate new directions we might head
toward.
When I started researching this book, I thought that the Internet was a
metaphor for life; now I think life is a metaphor for the Internet. I’m not
trying to be cute. Just as it is impossible to point to a single spark within
the human brain that proves life, so it is impossible to disprove that the
Internet is a living thing. It is massive. It never sleeps. And more and
more, it’s talking about us behind our backs.
Douglas Coupland,
January 2014