Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents

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Description

Ellen Ullman's humane, insightful, and beautifully written memoir is a cult classic exploring the ever-complicating intersections between people and technology. Writing from 1990s San Francisco, where she ran a programming business that served everyone from credit card companies to AIDS clinics, she describes the strange ecstasies of programming and the even stranger social dynamics of the emerging California tech world, where she crosses paths with the men and women of the emerging internet: sleeping with them, competing with them, trying to get them to debug her systems and decode her desires.

Equally evocative of the messiness of life and the artful efficiency of code, Close to the Machine is a deeply personal, prescient account of working at the forefront of computing.

Author Bio

Ellen Ullman's Close to the Machine, a memoir of her time as a software engineer during the early years of the internet revolution, became a cult classic and established her as a writer of considerable talent; with her second book, The Bug, she became an acclaimed novelist; By Blood, her second novel, is also published by Pushkin Press. She lives in San Francisco.