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Book Cover for: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents (25th Anniversary Edition), Ellen Ullman

Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents (25th Anniversary Edition)

Ellen Ullman

Paperback
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When Ellen Ullman's memoir of her life as a software engineer was published in 1997, it was greeted as a revelatory meditation on the dawn of the digital era. Now, twenty-five years later, Close to the Machine is a true classic, a touchstone work that illuminates our time and our future life in technology.

It is the story of a woman whose life is spinning out of control. Technology becomes her unlikely lifeline. As she navigates this socially flawed and male-dominated world, Ullman shows us the struggle of translating the messiness of human thought into algorithms, and also discovers unexpected beauty in the logic of code.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Picador USA
  • Publish Date: Dec 6th, 2022
  • Pages: 224
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.25in - 5.47in - 0.60in - 0.43lb
  • EAN: 9781250884121
  • Categories: • Science & Technology• Technology Studies• History

About the Author

Wiener, Anna: - Anna Wiener is a contributing writer to The New Yorker. She is the author of the memoir Uncanny Valley, which was a New York Times bestseller and selected as one of the New York Times top ten books of 2020. She lives in San Francisco.
Ullman, Ellen: - Ellen Ullman wrote her first computer program in 1978. She went on to have a twenty-year career as a programmer and software engineer. Her essays and books have become landmark works describing the social, emotional, and personal effects of technology. She is the author of the novels: By Blood, a New York Times Notable Book; and The Bug, a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her memoir, Close to the Machine, about her life as a software engineer during the internet's first rise, became a cult classic. She is based in San Francisco.

Praise for this book

"Astonishing...Impossible to put down." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Close to the Machine may be the best---it's certainly the most human---book to have emerged thus far from the culture of Silicon Valley. Ullman is that rarity, a computer programmer with a poet's feeling for language." --Laura Miller, Salon

"Part memoir, part techie mantra, part observation on the ever-changing world of computer science...[Ullman is] a strong woman standing up to, and facing down, 'obsolescence' in two different, particularly unforgiving worlds---modern technology and modern society." --The New York Times Book Review

"Fascinating...Chock-full of delicately profound insights into work, money, love, and the search for a life that matters." --Newsweek

"Ullman comes with her tech bona fides intact (she is, after all, a seasoned software engineer). But she also comes with novel material....We see the seduction at the heart of programming: embedded in the hijinks and hieroglyphics are the esoteric mysteries of the human mind." --Wired

"This book is a little masterpiece....I have never read anything like it." --Andrei Codrescu

"For someone sitting so close to the machine, Ellen Ullman possesses a remarkably wide-angle perspective on the technology culture she inhabits." --The Village Voice