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Live Work Work Work Die
- A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
- Narrated by: Corey Pein
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
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Summary
A scathing, sardonic exploration of Silicon Valley tech culture, laying bare the greed, hubris, and retrograde politics of an industry that aspires to radically transform society for its own benefit. This enlightening audiobook is a must-listen for anyone interested or involved in the tech industry.
At the height of the start-up boom, journalist Corey Pein set out for Silicon Valley with little more than a smartphone and his wits. His goal: to learn how such an overhyped industry could possibly sustain itself as long as it has. Determined to cut through the clichés of big tech - the relentless optimism, the mandatory enthusiasm, and the earnest, incessant repetition of vacuous buzzwords - Pein decided that he would need to take an approach as unorthodox as the companies he would soon be covering. To truly understand the delirious reality of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, he knew, he would have to inhabit that perspective - he would have to become an entrepreneur.
Thus he begins his journey - skulking through gimmicky tech conferences, pitching his over-the-top business ideas to investors, and interviewing a cast of outrageous characters: cyborgs and con artists, Teamsters and transhumanists, jittery hackers and naive upstart programmers whose entire lives are managed by their employers - who work endlessly and obediently, never thinking to question their place in the system.
In showing us this frantic world, Pein challenges the positive, feel-good self-image that the tech tycoons have crafted - as nerdy and benevolent creators of wealth and opportunity - revealing their self-justifying views and their insidious visions for the future. Indeed, as Pein shows, Silicon Valley is awash in disreputable ideas: Google executive and futurist Raymond Kurzweil has a side business peddling dietary supplements and has for years pushed the outlandish notion that human beings are destined to merge with computers and live forever in some kind of digital cosmic hive mind. Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist affiliated with PayPal and Facebook, is now an important advisor to President Trump and has subsidized a prolific blogger known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug who writes approvingly of ideas like eugenics and dictatorship. And Moldbug is not alone. There is, in fact, a small but influential - and growing - group of techies with similarly absurd and extremist beliefs who call themselves the "neoreactionary" vanguard of a "Dark Enlightenment."
Vivid and incisive, Live Work Work Work Die is a troubling portrait of a self-obsessed industry bent on imposing its disturbing visions on the rest of us.
What listeners say about Live Work Work Work Die
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- Louis-S
- 30-04-18
Tech fantasy exposed as a scam
A very timely book in view of the recent revelations about Facebook.
If you enjoy the HBO comedy Silicon Valley this book will really click.
I really enjoyed.
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- Mael Dujardin
- 02-04-21
interesting, funny
nothing terribly new but an interesting, scathing and sardonic romp into the contradictions of silicon valley
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- Stew Dean
- 19-02-19
Hack Hacking Hackers
A sardonic look at Silicon Valley. This comes across as the standard hack approach of adversarial journalism. There is a step beyond this where you comment on the madness but get to understand more behind it. It also claims to be honest, yet at times if doesn't feel like it's being at all honest - it feels more like a novel in places and there's too much of the writer in the way. Maybe this was an attempt to get all 'fear and loathing' but doesn't ring true in many places. It's too tidy, to cut and dry. It's dubious. I'm not saying Silicon Valley isn't messed up - but I'm left wanting to know why and some of the stories of those caught up in it more. Good subject - just needs better journalism.
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- Flink
- 18-05-18
A strong start that peters out
I found this book after listening to an extract of the Guardian newspapers Long Reads. Here was someone who went to Silicon Valley and gave it a real go... at least that's how it initially came across. The author's time subletting was amusing and eye opening. Frankly, all the first- hand accounts were pretty interesting at first. But, it quickly becomes apparent that the author wasn't actually trying to create a startup. instead he was just slumming it in order to write this book with a bit more credibility, I guess? He seemed to be there just to mock entrepreneurs. Not everyone is a crook, or charlatan! And, after a while even the thinly-veiled attempt at business is dropped in favour of over-long, boring stretches of things the author has researched about the business world and business history. That wouldn't be a bad thing necessarily, in better hands. But, this is dry stuff here and not what was initially promised, in my opinion.
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