Ben Tarnoff

The title is a trifle misleading. It sounds as if it's a manual for people who want to emulate the richest, most powerful tech bros in the world. How do they do it? And can I do it too?

Instead, it's much more valuable: interviews that document what it's really like to work in tech. In addition to an engineer and a data scientist there's an interview with a cook and a masseuse. A lot of people work in Silicon Valley who are not rich and powerful, and all of the interviewees (with the possible exception of a technical writer, who seems to have a fairly good opinion of the industry) have things to say that need saying. Most AI is hype. The monopolization of talent has hindered creativity and innovation. The people whose work makes lives pleasant for the technocracy are badly paid and have to commute from afar because not only can they not afford to live within two hours of work, they can't afford the places that they live in because they, too, are being taken over by gentrification. This is a nicely insightful collection of interviews that range from technical but accesible - a useful overview of what machine learning and AI really are compared to the hype, for example - to a glimpse into the lives of contract workers who cook or try to unknot the muscles of people who spend too many hours staring at screens.… (mais)

July 2nd of this year, I took a Lyft round-trip from San Jose to Big Sur and back.

My driver was an immigrant from Vietnam, had lived in the Santa Cruz area for nearly his whole adult life but had never been to the Bixby Canyon Bridge.

As I gazed out over the Pacific, I had the distinct thought come to me, "You can do anything you want."

(Yes, I was probably in the midst of some low-level mania.)

Apparently, that was the day I entered this book into my queue. It seems à propos: did you know that Mark Twain was suicidal and debt-ridden when he was 29/30? That one of his closest friends was an ex-Mo woman who worked in a library for half the rate of her male peers?

I'm pretty sure I first picked this up in Boulder, in 2016, when I thought that I would move there and work at their Shakespeare festival and write a thesis on Ina Coolbrith and hike every morning.

I was at an English conference, which has diverged from the great American literary tradition sharply, in that it's mostly arguing about semiotics, and I skipped it to go to Avery Brewing in Gun Barrel.

That was the weekend the Comey letter hit.

That was the beginning of the end.

The nineteenth century was a period where melancholy, decades-long despair, the reality that you might just be single and trapped forever and ever, were very much a part of the fabric of a possible life, not something to be medicated or dismissed or manifested.

In my home stretch of this book, lying on the igneous benches on the East Bench of my hometown bursting randomly into tears (yes I was probably low-key depressed which to paraphrase Joan Didion seems like a reasonable response to 2018), having a description of Salt Lake City engraved by Mark Twain feet away seemed like a small slice of hope.

I was feeling particularly self-pitying about my parents (one dead, one absent) tonight, and snapped at the crisis worker or robot or whatever dystopia we live in (I had a cortado in San Francisco served by a robot, Twain, come save us from our stupidity) and thought about the Stoics' "Open Door" and their stance that if you don't throw yourself from the Golden Gate well, don't complain, you're in the game.

Unlike Ina, being an ex-Mo who's unencumbered by relatives, I should view it as a blessing in disguise.

Maybe I could find a literary community in San Francisco, pitch a memoir, take up the torch of flowery poetry as a singer-songwriter, talk my way into a consular job in Germany and never look back.

I left Great Salt Lake a good deal confused as to what state of things existed there and sometimes even questioning in my own mind whether a state of things existed there at all or not, said Twain. Suicidal or no, he certainly was sane and the writer we need in our blinkered age.

Maybe, just maybe, I Can Do Whatever I Want.… (mais)