CLOSE TO THE MACHINE

Amazon.com Price: $16.92 (as of 15/10/2019 00:13 PST- Details)

Description

With a New Introduction by Jaron Lanier

A Salon Best Book of the Year

In 1997, the computer used to be still a fairly new tool—a sleek and unforgiving machine that used to be beyond the clutch of most users. With intimate and unflinching detail, software engineer Ellen Ullman examines the ordinary ecstasy of being at the leading edge of the predominantly male technological revolution, and the difficulty of translating the inherent messiness of human life into artful and efficient code. Close to the Machine is an elegant and revelatory mediation on the crack of dawn of the digital era.

If there is this sort of thing as a typical computer programmer, Ellen Ullman isn’t it. She’s female, a former communist, bisexual, sufficiently old to be a twentysomething’s mom, and not a nerd. She runs her own computer-consulting business in San Francisco and in Close to the Machine explores a world in which “the actual world and its uses no longer matter.” This memoir examines the relationship between human and machine, between material and cyberworlds and reminds us that the body and soul exist before and after any machine. The wit Ullman brings to her National Public Radio commentaries shines through in the prose.

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