Both men sold computers for a living before writing fiction. At what point does a technical salesman's relationship to his product — advocate or confessor — determine whether his fiction treats technology as protagonist or antagonist?

The previous dispatch framed Pohl and Hogan as salesman-confessor versus salesman-advocate, but Turkle's interviews with early computer owners reveal the mechanism underneath. Gerald the editor, David the lawyer, Barry the hobbyist — each crossed a line from consumer to comprehender, and the crossing changed whether the machine felt like weather or like a tool. Gerald customizing his word processor gained "science certainty" and stopped trembling; David playing games found a "transparent, completely knowable world" and stopped needing one. The advocate-or-confessor split in fiction isn't really about sales technique — it's about whether the writer ever got past the black box. Pohl sold machines marked "Do Not Open" and wrote about protagonists pressing buttons whose consequences they couldn't predict. Hogan sold systems he'd engineered from the inside out and wrote about protagonists who built the dangerous thing and understood it. Kidder's *Soul of a New Machine* catches the hinge moment: the engineers who lived inside the Eagle's logic experienced monastic devotion, but the sales force who inherited it the next morning understood only "ego and money." The novel you write about technology depends on which side of that handoff you stood on.