Douglas Coupland - Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent

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.

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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: 978-0-345-81413-5

1. TechnologySocial aspects.
2. TechnologyPsychological aspects. 3. InternetSocial aspects.
4. InternetPsychological aspects.
5. Alcatel
Lucent (Firm). I. Title.

T14.5.C69 2014 303.483
C2013-908606-4

v3.1

Youre holding a book about a company youve most likely never heard of. This company has no Steve Jobs, nor does it have a CEO who jet-skis with starlets. Its 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, wed be reminded yet again how utterly we depend on complex systems far beyond our reach or influence

Id never heard of Alcatel-Lucent, and once its existence was pointed out to me, it was still very, very hard to findsort of like the cloud, whose existence Alcatel-Lucent (or Alca-Loo as its 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 presentthe 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 speciesabout 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 dont 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 doesnt need one. From its beginnings as a tiny locomotive company in Frances 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-Loos 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-Loos 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 theyre always changing names. So the book is a screen-snap of 2013, our all-too-brief presentthat 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. Im 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, its talking about us behind our backs.

Douglas Coupland,

January 2014

The year is 1871. You are French and you are about to fondle a kitten.