Douglas Coupland | Vox

Secrets of a Chinese Router Factory

2019-03-06T10:03:28-05:00

This is the second of a two-part excerpt from “Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent,” by Douglas Coupland, published by Visual Editions on September 25.

Internationally known as the prescient author of “Generation X,” “Microserfs” and “J-Pod,” Coupland reports with the eye of an artist and the ear of a novelist from inside Alcatel-Lucent — one of the largest global telecommunications companies in the world — visiting its faceless corporate offices and wire-laden science labs in suburban New Jersey, France, Canada and China. “Kitten Clone” is insightful about the effect “Alca-Loo’s” information technology has on the Internet, its future and our possible future within it.

ASB’s router factory, one of several in China, is located just across Ning Qiao Road from the main compound of three early-1980s office towers. Along the street, I see stylish, upwardly mobile young people, very few bikes, and very few cars. We could easily be driving through an Italian suburb, with a bit of light industry thrown in.

It’s hard for me to believe I’m finally about to visit a Chinese factory. I’ve wanted to do this for decades. In my head I’m expecting a humongous prison with a bogus Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet attached, surrounded by fields of bok choy protected with barbed-wire fencing. Inside the factory? Lava. Whips. Charcoal. Manacles. Framed oversized photos of Patricia Nixon. What do I find instead? A long, low, pale yellow warehouse, where I meet the charming Emanuele Cavallaro, 52, VP of global manufacturing, who hands me a pair of anti-static shoe guards to ward against sparks that might damage fragile electronic wares.

Cavallaro’s office overlooks a very pleasant open-plan “Mad Men”-esque office space with a pistachio-green colour scheme. As he and I prepare to enter the factory proper, we discuss China’s manufacturing capacity. Cavallaro tells me his theory that China is now where Germany was in 1955. “Technologically, China’s leaped ahead 20 years in only five.”

Then he opens the factory doors and …

… and it’s among the most spotless places I’ve ever been. Dust-proofed, zero humidity and a pleasant 66 degrees Fahrenheit, 365 days a year. The space is vast, and inside it small groups of staff in pale blue jumpsuits minister to the shiny objects that pop out of one quiet robotic machine to be placed in another robotic machine. The entire place reeks of Japanese-level quality control, and wordlessly showcases China’s determination to stop being the Old China and quickly become the New China.

Cavallaro shows me the 7950 Extensible Routing System switching modules being created through what is called surface-mount technology. They’ll offer five times the density of existing alternatives while consuming only one-third the electricity.

With support for up to eighty 100GE ports in a single track, the 7950 XRS shatters current density norms and paves the way for scaling the service provider cloud infrastructure. (Those last two sentences were culled directly from the Alca-Loo website.) Regardless, these 7950 XRS units progress in front of my eyes from tiny individual components to an ever more complex solid-state finished product packed in boxes, ready for shipping. Everywhere I look, plasma TVs spray out statistics and oscilloscopic data confirming that everything is okay. If only the real world could be so easily monitored.

The factory is also quiet. Cavallaro and I can easily hear each other’s voices. I mention my worries about sustainability, and wonder if there’s anything China can do to bubble-proof itself.

He says, “Growth at six or seven percent is creating a lot of social issues, and it obviously cannot be maintained indefinitely. The government’s now trying to create internal consumption within China so as to diversify and stabilize the economy against foreign dependency.”

(The thing about China is that the language of industrial pep-speak is so relentless that it infects even the most banal conversations. Can I get you a drink? No, I’m already enbevulated, but thank you for your most generous kindness.)

I can’t help but wonder why this router factory is located in Shanghai and not in, say … Michigan. Let me rephrase that: I understand very well why it’s located in Shanghai, but not why there isn’t also one located in Michigan, where 10 million primates needing 2,500 calories a day are sitting on top of a cold rock in the middle of the North American continent, and they’ve got nothing to do all day except go online and watch porn, TED videos, and BitTorrented movies, and then maybe go turn a trick or score some Oxy out by the interstate, behind the closed Denny’s covered in weathered plywood. Is North America to become what China is now ceasing to be, a place where you might as well work for 30 cents an hour making baubles because there’s absolutely nothing else to do except shop from your jail cell?

Earlier, Paul Ross and I were discussing the French being French and the Norwegians being Norwegians. What about Michiganders being Michiganders? When I look at Detroit or Flint or Lansing, I am forced to ponder the meaning of being alive: We wake up, we do something, we go to sleep, and we repeat it about 22,000 more times, and then we die. In Michigan, a North American feels a sense of losing one’s coherent view of the world. In Shanghai, one senses calm hands holding the reins, even if the cart is going 10 thousand miles per hour. China skipped much of what the 20th century held for the rest of the planet, and now careens futureward. One wonders when China will start opening factories in the United States. It feels inevitable. The United States is ruled by politicians. China is ruled by economists.

I’m in a funk as Cavallaro and I leave the factory floor. I say goodbye to him and cross Ningqiao Road back to Alca-Loo’s corporate campus, where I’m to meet with Peter Xu, head of Pacific Rim Hardware Sales. He exudes the energy, optimism, and drive of the nation’s under-40s. His Western first name alone is a telltale sign of China’s quickly morphing society. I ask him what changes he’s noticed during his decade or so within China’s tech and business worlds. He pauses and thoughtfully replies, “Meetings. So many meetings.”

Ahhh … meetings. Those spiritual cattle-slaughter facilities where so many of our cherished dreams go to die hideous protracted deaths.

“China is now having to service the things that it makes, and with this service sector there’s a huge new upwardly mobile meritocracy — and this is important, that China start spending money within China if our economy is to stabilize and diversify. We have to start buying the things we make.” This seems to be one of today’s themes.

Xu’s office is filled with trophies and boxes of swag (“Here, have a handful of free pens”), and the space has the vibe of belonging to someone on the way up. He travels a lot on business, often within China, and what irks him most about his job is the places he has to stay while traveling: The countless 200-renminbi-a-night (about $30) hotels catering to China’s mobile working class, 200 renminbi being the amount China has decided is to be spent per night on business hotels. Xu is a smart guy — he searches Hotels.com like anyone else — and he knows what’s possible. Even a Motel 6 with a broken water heater and a freeway off-ramp to lullaby him to sleep would be better than most 200-renminbi-a-night Chinese business hotels.

There’s a framed photo of his 7-year-old son on his shelf. I ask Xu what’s the main difference between himself at the age of 7, and his son at that age. “Oh, that’s easy,” Xu says, smiling, “He believes the Internet is the real world.”

My final meeting is with Yangqio Chen and his assistant, Julia. Chen is VP of the local communist party, but is also president of ASB, roles that seem contradictory at first. But the West is run by politicians, while China is run by economists, which is why phrases such as “market communism” are no longer oxymorons.

Both Chen and Julia speak English perfectly. Chen wears a beautifully made blue suit, while Julia is in a stylish dress and jacket from the school of Chanel. The two are both ideologues and proud of the strides China has made. Says Chen, “After the political reforms of 1949, it took a great deal of time for well over a billion people to stabilize, but we did finally reach the point where men and women became equal, where regional politics were homogenized, and where everyone had something to eat and something to do. So instead of being a mess, we were unified. If you want to see how unified we are now, look at China, then look at India.”

I ask about the methods used to get China from the 1949 revolution to now. Chen says, “We looked and saw that we had to grow three things: Transportation, energy and telecommunications. The central government could either do it alone or they could open up — and so they decided to open up. That’s how ASB was born, through our initial partnering with ITT.”

Julia offers, “In 1980 a phone in your house took a year’s salary. Soon, every person in China will have a mobile phone and access to broadband.”

Chen adds, “We in China were able to jump over many generations of technology. By the 1990s, our landlines had caught up to those of the rest of the world. And then we started going mobile as part of a Five-Year Plan. The next stage is for everything to merge: No difference between local and long-distance, and 4G-PDX optical broadband to every home in the country. We call this project ‘Broadband China.’”

Chen continues, “Broadband is a new form of infrastructure. Penetration creates much more social potential in all areas of society, and we believe the changes are more positive than negative.”

My frozen February bus trip to the silent, underlit time-stands-still New Jersey Bell Labs suddenly feels like it happened a thousand years ago. The locus of the future is China; it simply can’t be denied. Chen and Julia are radiant, and Chen’s last comment does, in part, answer my question as to whether the Chinese have discussed the political and social implications of giving high speed to the masses. I don’t know what their conclusions were, but their implementation can only transform our entire species, either directly or indirectly.

Oh, for a glass of mummified tap water to take me out of the present! I try to focus on mental pictures of the future, but I’m no longer sure what I’m seeing or feeling. It isn’t dread. It isn’t fear. The future actually feels like that awkward moment between when a practical joke has been played on you and the moment you realize that it’s a practical joke.

After leaving Chen’s office, I experience time sickness, as though I really have wormholed into the future. A few hours later, I’m at dinner in a glass tower above the Bund, a trillion dollars worth of real estate and LED lighting that blows Tokyo into the weeds. The steaks are from Argentina and cost $100 apiece. There are 30 different kinds of single-malt Scotch. The restaurant’s air is cool and fragrant, but the air outside the window is boiling and muggy and has that slightly damaged feeling, like when you see a big car with a large dent in it that makes you wince and say, “Ow.”

I’ve now spent months immersed in technology, and I have to ask myself what we, as a species, are learning about ourselves from all of this brave new reality that we didn’t know before?

Laphroaig? Why yes, thank you.

A few things come to mind. Humans are more curious than I might have given them credit for. Humans also like being connected to others far more than I might have guessed back in 1992. We’re good at finding the information we need when we really need it, and we have a better sense of humour than I might ever have guessed. And all of us have a deep need to be heard. On the other hand, I also think anonymity is the food of monsters, and the Internet allows people to indulge the worst sides of themselves with almost no fear of consequences.

Ice? Yes, please. (I inspect it to make sure it’s very clear.)

As I sip my drink, I look out the windows toward the power plants that are burning the coal from British Columbia that fuels the air conditioners and elevators and routers and switching devices and laptops and mainframes and hard drives and cell rechargers of Shanghai. The sky is chalky white from particulates, but the glowing skyscraper walls make the sky look like pink watery milk.

I wonder about religion. The Internet indeed generates and connects tribes and communities, but the people who are a part of these communities are also people who have, in turn, been modified and rewired by the Internet, and they can tell when something is being withheld from them. This gives me hope for the human spirit — but then I think of all the idiotic noisy groups spawned by the Internet, and my heart goes into despair mode. Ultimately, will the Internet favour individuals over the group (the cat scenario), or will it favour groups over the individual (the dog scenario)? The vote is still out on that one.

Of course we are now addicted to data speed. Take away even a fraction of the speed we currently use to keep our system going, and society will collapse. Or, fail to maintain our information infrastructure’s capacity and our societies will crumble. So much of what defines us and our various communities is made possible by unglamorous glass threads and electric switches purposefully located in the most boring, low-profile places possible.

I wonder if Alcatel-Lucent willfully fosters its own low profile. It is largely a company of good-natured scientists who are quite competitive among themselves and who like simplifying complex problems and then solving them and then moving on to the next problem. They are creating platform technology: Whatever you do with that platform is your business. All of the scientists I spoke with were almost endearingly surprised even to be asked the question of how people will use what they invent.

The bill? Yes, please.

It arrives at the table, and it’s shockingly high.

I catch my reflection in the glass, but it throws me off guard and, for a brief second I see myself the way others perhaps see me. I then think back two decades, and I think of how different I was back then in the ways I looked at the world and communicated with others. The essential “me” is still here … it just relates to the universe much more differently. What will the world look like when a doodad the size of a grape contains every piece of information humanity has ever created, and essentially costs nothing to make? What will the world look like when anywhere becomes everywhere becomes everything becomes anything?

We’re almost there.

I remember Peter Xu’s comment that his 7-year-old son believes the Internet is the real world. Right now, half of humanity — the younger half — believes the Internet is reality. And the other half ?

We simply haven’t yet reached the point where we, too, accept that the Internet is the real world. But we will.

Douglas Coupland is a Canadian writer, designer and visual artist. His first novel was the international bestseller “Generation X,” which was followed by many more works of fiction and nonfiction. He also writes a weekly column for the Financial Times Magazine. Reach him @DougCoupland.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

“Market Communism” and China’s Need for (Mobile) Speed

2019-03-06T10:34:49-05:00

This is part one of a two-part excerpt from “Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent,” by Douglas Coupland, published by Visual Editions on September 25.

Growing up, whenever I thought of what the future might look like, the image that always came to mind was of a jet ramp you’d walk into at a Chinese airport after a long flight on a cheap airline. No windows, and the air would be hot, muggy, infused with smell of farts and engines, and there’d be backlit advertisements for obscure banking services and unidentifiable, scary-looking foods — huge tureens filled with things like cooked baby birds and donkey ears — genetic smoothies to be consumed only at one’s peril. On the ground, instead of litter, there’d be items people had abandoned: Frayed luggage, dead phone cards, ice cream turned to cheese in the heat, oil-soiled garments. The ramp would go on and on, and there’d never be an airline terminal, just this endless heat and claustrophobia and sense of environmental depletion.

I actually do find a bit of that in China on every trip, mostly when I stray a hundred yards or so off the metropolitan showcase arteries. But what I find on a larger scale this time as I land in Shanghai is an overpowering sense of damaged brilliance: The morning white light off the shimmering East China Sea turning the sky into a massive magnifying lens made of burning coal and vaporized cash.

Through this lens are apartment buildings that seem to continue uninterrupted as they recede over the earth’s curvature, and sky-scrapers shaped like Transformers, emerging like gods from the mists below them, quietly overseeing traffic jams that can linger for months. These towers will make magnificent ruins.

At their feet also exists a different type of Chinese byway: Empty roads in tranquil economic development zones, seamlessly paved, lovingly landscaped and tweezed, connecting to homes for foreigners and the local oligarchy. This would be Shanghai’s Pudong neighbourhood — or, as the expats there call it, “Pu Jersey” — on the south shore of the Huangpu River.

Shortly after I check in to my hotel in Pudong, I elevator downstairs to meet my tour guide. The mezzanine is a consumer fantasia mall entirely devoid of any customers. Its three silent floors are filled with surprisingly well-branded boutiques — Lego, Moleskine and Muji — as well as ones selling the finest French and Chilean wines. When I do see people, it’s near the hotel’s entrance: Expats with laptops savouring that most delectable of all luxuries in China, Wi-Fi connected to a Hong Kong server, bypassing the Great Firewall of China, allowing users to access Google, Twitter and Facebook.

Were these data parasites to be using a Chinese server, and were they to ask Google a question, their request would take a strangely long time to process. Instead of 0.25 seconds, 10 seconds might pass; that is, if an answer were to come at all. I’ve been told there are buildings the size of airports here, filled with bureaucrats who personally inspect all Google searches. Over the next few days I ask most people I meet, locals and foreigners, whether this is true. Nobody knows for sure, but there’s just enough hesitation in people’s eyes to make me think this isn’t just an urban legend, because where I come from Google searches simply never take 10 or more seconds.

I wonder what it must be like to scrutinize all of the things people search for on Google. You’d end up knowing all of humanity’s limits and extremes. Which makes me wonder what’s going to happen when the Internet finally does become sentient. Will this newly born super-entity, The Singularity, be our chummy new best friend, or will it blink its metaphorical eyes, take one look at us all, and say, “You know what? I’ve got better things to do than service all you idiots. I’m outta here,” then promptly pull the plug on itself?

I’m in Shanghai because Alcatel-Lucent has a large research and manufacturing footprint in China. Shanghai is where the company makes the routing and switching equipment that moves the data through its optical fibre pathways. It also is the home of New Jersey’s Bell Labs’ cousin: Alcatel-Lucent Shanghai Bell (called ASB).

I arrive at the Chinese branch after a five-minute drive down a beautifully landscaped road created in the early 1980s, when this section of Pudong was selected to become an industrial development zone. ASB is a showcase of China’s move out of isolation and into the larger world. In the 1990s, foreign revenues were five percent of sales. This year they were 50 percent. Alcatel-Lucent is one of four big players in this industry in China, along with Nokia Siemens, and China’s Huawei and ZTE. Globally, one would add to this list Juniper, Ericsson and Cisco.

There really aren’t that many firms who make the complicated routers and switching equipment needed to handle the data flow required by our current society, and the forecast numbers for China are humbling. There are 1.3 billion people (three Americas’ worth), and 600 million of them currently have mobile phones.

By 2015, the government wants everyone in large cities to have 100 megabits per second of data speed, people in secondary cities to have 20 Mbps, and all other citizens to have 4 Mbps — the speed available to the average current user in, say, Cleveland or Atlanta. It’s a badly kept secret that the ideological bulldozer known as the next Five-Year Plan, slated to begin shortly, aims to give every Chinese citizen 100 Mbps. Yes, you read that correctly: It aims to give every Chinese citizen 100 megabits per second.

Who knows what lies in wait for the Internet’s next Great Leap Forward. Who knows what this speed will do to a society. Can we know? Can we predict? One might look to Google for the answer, Google being the only entity on earth that has its shit together as much as China, but even Google doesn’t know what will happen when you give such large numbers of people a large amount of speed. To this end, Google is currently wiring Kansas City to give all residents one gig per second of data because they’re curious to find out. If they’ve already learned something from the experiment, they haven’t shared.

This insane race for speed is actually the single weirdest thing I’m noticing about China and its drive to a near future where Wi-Fi and wireless merge, a bold and bright place where even a rice farmer can sit in a remote mountain cave and watch Anne Hathaway in HD starring in “The Devil Wears Prada,” and pause here and there to make sure he doesn’t miss any Anna Wintour references: A complete lack of McLuhanesque inquiry into whether this is actually such a hot idea, and what the societal fallout might be. A return to warlord feudality? A perpetual shopping mall? Shotgun-wielding hyperlibertarianism? This sort of reflection is nonexistent, or perhaps it has already been discussed high up the food chain and it was decided best not to share the results of the conversation with the public. All China knows now is: SPEED = GOOD.

Yet again I find myself at a seven-story, early-1980s building whose style is defined by missing light bulbs and benign neglect. I’m getting a déjà vu within a déjà vu, the same sense of creeping recognition I get when I fly too much, land in too many airports, and realize that being able to go anywhere you want, whether online or in a plane, can actually feel the same as going nowhere. I’m taken to a first-floor display centre demonstrating the home of tomorrow, which I’m told by two well-rehearsed and confident male tour guides will offer “a converged IT experience … interactivity driving the delivery of the right message to the right people.” In my mind I revert to elementary school and put on my highly worthy field-trip face.

The rooms in the house of tomorrow are quite well designed — like display suites in a premium condominium development. The furniture is far better than what most people have anywhere on earth these days, yet it shares one thing in common with most things everywhere: It was all made in China. Noting this, of course, triggers that butterfly-in-the-stomach feeling we all get when we wonder when China is going to — well, let’s just say it — economically crash and burn. Because it has to happen sometime. Maybe it will plateau and never crash, but that’s not mathematically possible, so … The worry about some sort of bursting bubble is as palpable in the air as the smell of braziered meats and low-sulfur coal. There is a saying: Every time you look at a product and see the words “Made in China,” somewhere in the American Midwest, a job dies.

In China, with its in-your-face sense of the power of sheer numbers, you quickly realize how plausibly secondary the United States and Europe are becoming on the global scene. A sales executive I spoke with in an airport lounge a few weeks back told me that in U.S. high schools, teachers show you a map of the world and tell you to locate France. If you even point to Europe, then you get your high-school diploma. In China, you have to identify all the arrondissements of Paris and give a highly technical analysis of the paper fibres used in the map, as well as an analysis of the toxicity of the inks used to print it in order to graduate.

The home of tomorrow’s TV is displaying the finale of “American Idol,” which I’d actually like to sit and watch (“And the winner of ‘American Idol’ is …”). I start to tune out while my guides rattle on about how high-speed data will transform citizens living within a future based on “market communism.” This future largely has to do with Chinese advertisers targeting the right Chinese consumers, which is kind of … depressing. One would hope China might do something different with targeted data other than nurture shopping — possibly something gruesome and eye-opening, but different nonetheless.

Seated on a comfy leather sofa, watching the end of “Idol,” I muse upon the seven billion people on earth, and how almost everybody these days voraciously devours every unbundled fragment of our creative past, either by watching it as a YouTube clip or by sticking it in a plastic envelope for sale on eBay, and how we seem to be consuming far more culture than we create. I’m wondering if everything before 2001 will be considered the Age of Content, and the time thereafter the Age of Devouring.

I look at the display home’s cupboards and wonder if one of them contains a box full of adaptor cables, battery packs and spare power cords. Probably not. But this reminds me of why I’m actually here: Alcatel-Lucent and the wiring of the planet. It dawns on me that Alca-Loo’s main job is to untangle the world’s electrical cords, and to do so as quickly and quietly as possible, the same way you might point out an overflowing toilet to a plumber while saying, “Just make it all go away. Here. I’ll throw money at it. Just make it work again!”

I head up to the third floor to meet Luoning Gui, senior VP of research and innovation, and head of Bell Labs China. Gui began as an engineer. His English is flawless, and he discusses a recent trip to Holland to negotiate a deal with a telecom there. During the course of his negotiations, he found himself thinking, “You know, there’s an awful lot of work here in Shanghai just for one country. We add one Holland’s worth of customers a month onto China.”

I ask Gui what surprises him most about the new China versus the old China, and he says, “Golf. I never thought I’d see a golf course in China. And now it’s a huge thing. BMW is having a Masters Tournament in Shanghai this October.”

This isn’t an answer I might have expected, but that’s why we ask questions. As sustainability is on my mind, I ask him if the present pace of Chinese development is sustainable. He smiles and says, “My daughter is nine, and she asked me, ‘Can you fold a piece of paper over 50 times? No. It would be 1,200 miles thick.’” He pauses.

So there’s my answer — I think.

The Chinese recognition of the need to be green is a strong recurring theme during my time here. Everyone knows the air is disgusting and the water is life-threatening. People at all levels of society realize that greening needs to be done and that it’s inevitable. The only problem is that it’s difficult, expensive and unprofitable to implement, which is why it doesn’t happen very much anywhere, let alone in China.

Gui and I discuss the work done by ASB’s research facility, which is a patent-generating machine: 5,981 patents since 2002 from just over 100 researchers, who are encouraged to share data and projects with other Bell Labs across the planet. Of that number, 1,824 were made in China, the rest being secondary filings from inventions originating in the United States and Europe. With some pride, Gui says, “In the past, ideas and technologies were a one-way street into China, but the number of patents generated by Shanghai now equals those from New Jersey.”

In Mervin Kelly’s long 1947 hallways, geographic proximity enforced cross-pollination; now, that hallway is the Internet and Lufthansa, British Airways, Air Canada and Cathay Pacific, and the cross-pollination comes from interdepartmental spreadsheets specifying which Bell Labs employee is researching what.

When asked about the amount of basic research done in China, Gui says, “Any project development time that might go beyond two years is iffy. We are an industrial research lab, and we can feel the breath of our competitors on our necks.”

Gui’s seeming casualness about the absence of basic or fundamental research is unusual in the industry, and may be a brave face put on for a nosy visitor. With so much competition, most companies are running as fast as they can just to stay in the same place, let alone go forward. But without some fundamental new way of manipulating the 144 universe that might be discovered with pure research, new technological developments will hit the wall. And this might be a good thing.

As I’ve said, haven’t we all wanted to take a year or two off to digest the technologies we already have?

Before I leave Dr. Gui’s office, I comment on the number of young people in the Shanghai branch. He explains that when creating research teams, the company likes to mix young staff with old, “to break patterns.”

When you were born in Chinese history is pivotal in determining your sensibility. If the Western world had the whole Generation X and Y experience, mainland China has what it calls “born in the ’80s” or the “post-’80s.” These are 240 million adults born after the government’s implementation of the one-child policy. As a group, their upbringing has been so different from that of their parents that, within China, one generation looks on the other more as another species than as a different generation. Everything about the post-’80s’ existence is different from those born in the Mao Zedong era: Liberalized politics, a higher quality of education, nonexistent sibling relationships (and the Napoleonic sense of entitlement that comes from that), but mostly technology — computers, the Internet and mobile phones. If one ever needs proof that technology rewires the human brain, simply speak to anyone in China older than 50.

I ask Dr. Gui how his paper-folding daughter is different from him and his generation, and he tells me, “My daughter challenges everything I say. She’s of the newest generation, and her school is ultra-democratic. It used to be that the teachers selected which students would receive awards. Now the students elect the winners.”

Once again, not the answer I might have expected.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.