Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The never-more-necessary return of one of our most vital and eloquent voices on technology and culture, from the author of the seminal Close to the Machine
When Ellen Ullman moved to San Francisco and became a computer programmer in the late 1970s, she was joining an idealistic, exclusive, and almost exclusively male cadre that had dreams and aspirations to change the world. In 1997 she wrote the now classic and still definitive account of life as a coder at the birth of what would be a sweeping technological, cultural, and financial revolution.
The intervening twenty years has seen, among other things, the rise of the Internet, the ubiquity of once unimaginably powerful computers, and the thorough transformation of our economy and society as Ullman s clique of socially awkward West Coast geeks became our new elite, elevated for and insulated by a technical mastery that few could achieve.
In Life in Code, her first book of nonfiction since Close to the Machine, Ullman unlocks and explains and does not always celebrate how we got to now, as only she can, with a fluency and expertise that s unusual in someone with her humanistic worldview, and with the sharp insight and personal storytelling that are uniquely her own. Life in Code is an essential text toward our understanding of the last twenty years and the next twenty.
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Synopsis
Named one of the best books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review, GQ, Slate, San Francisco Chronicle, Bookforum, and Kirkus
The never-more-necessary return of one of our most vital and eloquent voices on technology and culture, the author of the seminal Close to the Machine
The last twenty years have brought us the rise of the internet, the development of artificial intelligence, the ubiquity of once unimaginably powerful computers, and the thorough transformation of our economy and society. Through it all, Ellen Ullman lived and worked inside that rising culture of technology, and in Life in Code she tells the continuing story of the changes it wrought with a unique, expert perspective.
When Ellen Ullman moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s and went on to become a computer programmer, she was joining a small, idealistic, and almost exclusively male cadre that aspired to genuinely change the world. In 1997 Ullman wrote Close to the Machine, the now classic and still definitive account of life as a coder at the birth of what would be a sweeping technological, cultural, and financial revolution.
Twenty years later, the story Ullman recounts is neither one of unbridled triumph nor a nostalgic denial of progress. It is necessarily the story of digital technology's loss of innocence as it entered the cultural mainstream, and it is a personal reckoning with all that has changed, and so much that hasn't. Life in Code is an essential text toward our understanding of the last twenty years--and the next twenty.