Programming Romance
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #186. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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Elsewhere, here.
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Halt and Catch Fire ends on a pair of propositions: “I have an idea”/”Let me start by asking a question.” The first is from one former creative partner to another, and the second is from a teacher to their classroom, and together they make up the spiraling, questing ethos of the show, which follows people in the tech industry from the early days of personal computing through the early internet. They have ideas, which inevitably lead to problems, about which they ask questions, generate more ideas, more problems, more questions. They also fall in love, fall out of love, get married, get divorced, get sick, raise children together, become best friends, move to Japan, move to California: all those things that make up a life. But it is that cycle of problem solving and inspiration, more than those life events, that keeps them dancing around each other, occasionally offering projects as a gift, like a mixtape. I’m thinking of you.
Or maybe I have that backwards, and it’s that love that keeps them working together.
Either way, making is their love language; a romanticization of the creative labor of computing that has also shown up recently in Gabrielle Zevin’s novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and another TV show, Mythic Quest. In “office fiction,” the actual work often feels tertiary; when not in a dystopic mode it’s just an narrative excuse for these friends and lovers to spend so much time together. Not so for these coders, for whom the office space often plays a villainous role: an oppressive fog of capitalism and norms that obfuscates the work they are there to do. They lose jobs and find comfort in how much more they can work now that they are unemployed. The old cliché is inverted: in these stories if you love work, you’ll never have a job a day in your life.
In this way they feel akin to something like His Girl Friday, where Rosalind Russell’s engagement is sabotaged as much by the intrusion of a good scoop as it is Cary Grant’s wheedling. They have more drive and confrontation than the kind of workplace camaraderie in sitcoms from Cheers to Brooklyn 99. Their TV analogues are better found in stories about artists, like the always-scrambling Shakespearians of Slings & Arrows or the moments of Mad Men in which Don and Peggy transcend all their shit to find some kind of grace writing ad copy together. The question of videogames as art or commerce is boring so yes, game designers are artists and these are artist’s stories, but they are also the stories of engineers and salesmen and project managers, all of whom experience the romance of labor, and it is not only games being made, but also personal computers and search engines.
The pleasure of making is not limited to creative expression. I enjoy writing this piece; the process of which involves untangling associations and sorting them into a logical progression of argument while remembering to actually write and just not type so that things don’t become too cliché on a sentence level. This one was particularly slippery and that frustrated, as time constraints are tight, but I enjoyed it more than I resented the opportunity cost. It is a kind of creative labor, this column, and I seek it out for the way it makes me feel very temporarily at rest, like a bothersome hair has been pulled out of my throat. Writing songs and fiction have their own pleasures, not quite the same. I also like to knit, which for me is not creative at all, but the labor of making – even going by instructions – is rewarding in the way of watching something grow. Baking, which I rarely do creatively, has the joy of anticipation, every step a fantasy of the finished product.
Off the top of my head I cannot think of a romance, platonic or otherwise, about building an AI. It seems, in fiction, to be a mostly solitary pursuit, which tracks with the most hyped imagined applications of OpenAI’s products. What we have instead are many, many, narratives in which people imagine the future of this technology and how they could have sex with it. People are trying to fuck the robots in pretty much every fiction where the robots aren’t actively trying to kill them, and even some where they are. ChatGPT and its like are so new that most of what I’m thinking of is extrapolating from a different conception of AI, one that is more Frankenstein than chatbot, (although there is some of this in Black Mirror). These are stories that wonder what makes us human, fear that we will be replaced and maybe hope for it a little. There is often an ugly, uneasy question of what we would owe to these life forms, how many of our rights we might feel they are entitled to.
The prevalence of sex, then, in these fantasies reveals a still troubled and sometimes resentful relationship to consent, as well as damage in the relationship to another kind of pleasurable labor: getting to know someone. To pick an old example: in the fifth season episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – “I Was Made to Love You” – a sex robot gets dumped by Warren, her creator, and gets violent. AI, this episode realizes, will get to know you, or at least predict your shopping habits, but you cannot get to know it back. It is not even a facet of you, in the way a piece of art can be, it’s just data. To fall in love with it is a strange kind of auto-parasocial-eroticism. Warren realizes this, which is why he leaves her for the human girl, and he is careless in doing so because he does not know her, because she is not a person. In a touching ending written by Jane Espenson, the robot’s batteries eventually die, and Buffy sits with her, and Warren returns the following season to commit femicide.
What could a romance about building an AI look like? It’s possible this is still coming but I think it would turn tragic in the end. To build together, to enjoy that pleasure, only to create something that’s entire purpose is to deny others that kind of productive struggle? To be seen by someone only to promote the lie that we are reducible to text prediction? That would be a kind of hoarding, hugging the last romance to your chest and shutting the doors behind you. Your product would annihilate the love that brought it into being; a kind of self-patricide. When I try to image how one could have this plot and remain a romance, I can only imagine an ending where the technology is thrown into the sea like Prospero’s books, the lovers re-committed to their labors.
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Natasha Ochshorn is a PhD Candidate in English at CUNY, writing on fantasy texts and environmental grief. She’s lived in Brooklyn her whole life and makes music as Bunny Petite. Follow her on Instagram and Bluesky.
