Coders
Clive Thompson
04 April 2019
9781529019025Synopsis
'Masterful . . . [Thompson] illuminates both the fascinating coders and the bewildering technological forces that are transforming the world in which we live.' David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z
Facebook’s algorithms shaping the news. Uber’s cars flocking the streets. Revolution on Twitter and romance on Tinder. We live in a world constructed of computer code. Coders – software programmers – are the people who built it for us. And yet their worlds and minds are little known to outsiders.
In Coders, Wired columnist Clive Thompson presents a brilliantly original anthropological reckoning with the most influential tribe in today’s world, interrogating who they are, how they think, what they value, what qualifies as greatness in their world, and what should give us pause.
One of the most prominent journalists writing on technology today, Clive Thompson takes us into the minds of coders, the most quietly influential people on the planet, in a journey into the heart of the machine – and the men and women who made it.
Fascinating. Thompson is an excellent writer and his subjects are themselves gripping... Many books have covered this territory, but Coders is bang up to date in a fast-moving world... Perhaps [coders will] give it to loved ones, with a note attached: “Read this, that’s me!”Nature
Clive Thompson is more than a gifted reporter and writer. He is a brilliant social anthropologist. And, in this masterful book, he illuminates both the fascinating coders and the bewildering technological forces that are transforming the world in which we live.David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z
With an anthropologist’s eye, [Thompson] outlines [coders’] different personality traits, their history and cultural touchstones. He explores how they live, what motivates them and what they fight about. By breaking down what the actual world of coding looks like . . . he removes the mystery and brings it into the legible world for the rest of us to debate. Human beings and their foibles are the reason the internet is how it is – for better and often, as this book shows, for worse.New York Times
