The Programmer (Corrected Edition)

The Programmer (Corrected Edition)

Bruce Jackson

Revised and reissued with a new postscript by the author.

The first cybercrime novel….

A lost classic of 1970s literary fiction, now reissued in this corrected edition, The Programmer is a sharp, darkly comic exploration of bureaucracy, technology, and the slow grind of modern life. Bruce Jackson’s novel remains startlingly relevant—a biting satire on power, control, and the systems that entrap us.

Eddie Argo is a city programmer drowning in red tape, overdue bills, and the quiet suffocation of routine. Trapped between a job that bleeds him dry and a home life that feels equally stifling, Eddie begins to see patterns—both in the rigid logic of code and the absurd inefficiencies of the world around him. When a minor grievance with city hall snowballs into a surreal bureaucratic nightmare, Eddie is forced to confront the creeping sense that his entire existence is a program written by someone else—one that he’s desperate to rewrite.

With wry humor and piercing insight, The Programmer captures the quiet desperation of the working world and the eerie prescience of an age ruled by data and systems. More than a novel about a man lost in the machinery of life, it’s a novel about all of us—about what happens when the programs we live by no longer make sense.

“A brilliant, overlooked novel about work, power, and the soul-crushing absurdity of bureaucracy.” —Geoffrey Gatza

Bruce Jackson was Buffalo sysop (Nickle City node) in the pre-industrial, pre-AOL, pre-academic packet messaging world of FidoNet in the mid-1980s. He is the author of two books on public domain software published when PC operating systems were simple and accessible enough for users to write and share such programs: Rainbow Freeware (1986) and A User’s Guide: Freeware, Shareware, and Public Domain Software (1988).

He is also a teacher, writer, photographer and documentary filmmaker. He is currently SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Professor of American Culture at University at Buffalo. He is an associate member of the New York experimental theater company, The Wooster Group.

The French government has honored him twice for his documentary and criminal justice work: Chevalier, L’ordre national des Arts et des Lettres, France (2002) and Chevalier, L’ordre national du Mérite, France (2012). His field-recorded album Wake Up, Dead Man was nominated for a Grammy (1974).

His documentary films (all in collaboration with Diane Christian) have been broadcast on American, French and German public television, and exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art and other venues. His photographic work has been profiled in Aperture and exhibited at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Center for Documentary Studies, Bibliothèque national de France, George Eastman House, and other galleries.

His written work has appeared in Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Times, The Nation, The New Yorker and scores of other print and digital academic and general interest publications. He is the author or editor of about fifty books and monographs published by academic, trade and small presses, some of the most recent of which are: The Life and Death of Buffalo’s Great Northern Grain Elevator: 1897-2023 (SUNY Press, 2024), Ephemera 1995-2022: On people, politics, art, justice, torture and war (BlazeVOX, 2023), Folklore Matters: Incursions in the Field 1965-2021 (SUNY Press, 2024), The Story is True. Expanded edition (SUNY Press, 2022), Ways of the Hand: A Photographer’s Memoir (SUNY Press, 2022), and Changing Tense: Thirty memento mori (BlazeVOX, 2021).