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

by Ellen Ullman, Anna Wiener (Introduction)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250884121
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	12/06/2022
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 5.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

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.

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction Anna Wiener xi

0 Space Is Numeric 1

1 Transactions 17

2 Sushi 39

3 Real Estate 53

4 Software and Suburbia 65

5 New, Old, and Middle Age 95

6 Virtuality 123

7 Money 149

8 The Passionate Engineer 175

9 Driving 185

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher