Cover art for Close to the Machine
Published
Pushkin, December 2025
ISBN
9781805331957
Format
Softcover, 208 pages
Dimensions
19.8cm × 12.9cm

Close to the Machine Technophilia and Its Discontents

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Due December 2, 2025.
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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.

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