Corey Pein. (2018). Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley. Henry Holt and Co.

Corey Pein. 2018. Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley. Henry Holt and Co.

Corey Pein, Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley. Henry Holt and Co, 2018.

Corey Pein. Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley. Henry Holt and Co, 2018.

OverDrive Product Record

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1. • value: Workplace Culture
2. • value: Entrepreneurialism
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4. • value: Transhumanism
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7. • value: tech industry
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   • bioText:

     Corey Pein is a regular contributor to The Baffler, where he writes a column and hosts the podcast "News from Nowhere." A longtime investigative reporter and former staff writer for the Willamette Week, he has also written for Slate, Salon, Foreign Policy, The American Prospect, and the Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
     Corey is the author of Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley.

   • name: Corey Pein

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2018-04-24T00:00:00-04:00

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title

Live Work Work Work Die: a Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley

fullDescription

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
At the height of the startup 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. But to truly understand the delirious reality of the tech entrepreneurs, he knew he would have to inhabit that perspective—he would have to become an entrepreneur himself. Thus Pein begins his journey—skulking through gimmicky tech conferences, pitching his over-the-top business ideas to investors, and rooming with a succession of 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. 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.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Los Angeles Review of Books
   • content:
     "Brisk and entertaining . . . funny and engaging . . . equal parts memoir, ethnography, reportage, and jeremiad."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Willamette Week
   • content:
     "Live Work Work Work Die is equal parts hilarious and terrifying, filled with descriptions of squalid Airbnbs, chauvinistic brogrammers, dismal pitch competitions, and a whole lot of aspiring autocrats."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Daily Mail (UK)
   • content:
     "Pein is a fluent writer who knows not to over-egg the jokes and sometimes let the material speak for itself. And that material, both researched and experienced, is magnificent. Without the humour, the book would be utterly depressing, for it paints a picture that would make a saint blush, although not the CEOs of these companies."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Astra Taylor, author of The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
   • content:
     "All praise to Corey Pein for jumping headfirst into the cesspool of Silicon Valley and returning without having lost his mind or sold his soul. His reports from the front lines of the startup frenzy are hilarious and terrifying. While all eyes are glued on President Trump, a shortsighted and reactionary techno-oligarchy aims to amass a fortune at the cost of the common good. There's no app that can save us. But this book can at least wake us up to the dystopian future under construction."
5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     February 26, 2018
     Journalist Pein travels to San Francisco to expose the seedy underbelly of Silicon Valley culture with its overworked and underpaid drones toiling in a gig-based economy, nightmarish Airbnb rentals, and false narrative of meritocracy. His hunt for affordable housing provokes a discussion of gentrification and exorbitant rents (Pein ends up paying $35/night to sleep in a tent in someone’s yard). For employment, he experiments with Fiverr, a directory platform where freelancers offer up their services at $5 per task, before attempting to sell his doomed start-up idea, an app for organizing labor unions. Along the way, Pein examines the unethical and often illegal practices of tech industry giants, from Yelp extorting cash from businesses in exchange for the removal of bad reviews to Groupon’s “dubious” accounting practices in the weeks leading up to its IPO. He also directs his ire at the tech press, referring to it as “an interchangeable assortment of sycophantic blogs, gee-whiz podcasts, and thinly veiled advertising supplements.” Pein’s analysis of this toxic culture culminates in a trip to Holland for a conference on technological singularity, the “physical and metaphysical merger of humanity and computers” believed by many to be in the near future, which, by this point in the book, will strike many readers as a terrifying prospect. Both entertaining and damning, Pein’s book unmasks the shell game being run by venture capitalists in an industry that is not nearly as benign as it claims to be.

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     May 1, 2018
     

     Investigative reporter Pein recounts his firsthand experiences in the volatile, unpredictable world of Silicon Valley. In 2015, Pein flew to San Francisco and hoped to "have as authentic an entrepreneurial experience as possible without the phony pretense of going 'undercover.'" He takes readers through a journey involving finding a place a live and ending up in a location he called Hacker Condo and rooming with others interested in making it big in Silicon Valley. Pein moved to various other dwellings, most notably renting an Airbnb tent in someone's backyard. He recounts pitching ideas to investors, attending conferences such as DeveloperWeek, and participating in "Startup Weekend" to join in a competition of "startups conceived designed and pitched to a panel of judges." However, his quest for success was not to be, and he concludes that he did not gain "character or status," as it seemed to him "the only winning move in the startup game was not to play." VERDICT Pein's vivid account makes for fascinating reading about Silicon Valley and the tech industry and the often heartbreaking experiences of would-be entrepreneurs/techies struggling to achieve success.--Lucy Heckman, St. John's Univ. Lib., Queens, NY

     Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     March 1, 2018
     Investigative reporter and Baffler contributor Pein's first book should terrify you. What starts out as an attempt to join the ranks of successful tech entrepreneurs (and write about it) turns into an expos� of Silicon Valley, where investors put millions of dollars into disruptive technology, often with little else than a marketing plan for an undefined product. Pein moves to the West Coast, starts pitching his own ludicrous start-up idea, and begins to uncover the industry's dark underbelly, starting with the insane housing market, which lands him sleeping in a tent for $35 a night. But things take a much darker turn. Pein dedicates a good chunk of the book to a small but vocal faction bent on government destruction and dabbling in alt-right politics and even eugenics. Even scarier, they face little resistance from the larger tech world. Like Jon Ronson, Pein combines serious journalism with humor and his own antics for an entertaining and caustic mix. If Silicon Valley and Black Mirror had a book baby, it would be Live Work Work Work Die.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     February 15, 2018
     An on-the-ground look at Silicon Valley and what its power means for the rest of the world.To research his debut nonfiction book, investigative reporter Pein embedded in Silicon Valley to better understand the technology boom that has been underway since the mid-2000s. Alternating between his roles as a journalist and a would-be entrepreneur as it suits his purposes, he penetrates all manner of industry mainstays: hacker houses overcrowded with eager techies, corporate-sponsored meetups, competitions for startup pitches, and conferences celebrating and promoting the singularity. Seemingly everyone the author encounters in his reporting is confident that the future will be vastly different--and vastly better--than the present. Pein isn't the first to identify the near-religious faith in technology that is so common to the Silicon Valley crowd, but his deeply unsettling portrait of it is enough to trouble even the most committed tech booster. He presents a place that, far from being a utopia of creativity and efficiency, is a lightly disguised confidence game, where valuation is a meaningless concept, incentives are frequently misaligned, and 95 percent of entrepreneurs fail, often because they don't have the insider advantages that the veterans do. Pein identifies a "cutthroat libertarianism" at the core of the Silicon Valley worldview, which accounts for its indifference and, in some cases, hostility toward those people harmed by their practices: "Most people in the industry," he writes, "were convinced that their work was moral because it increased consumer choice and therefore freedom. New technologies were evidence of progress and therefore innately good." For all the social oddities he observes, cringeworthy encounters he experiences, and wit and outrage he levels at his subjects, Pein's real achievement is his willingness to find out how Silicon Valley works and not become distracted by all its shiny objects.A clearheaded reckoning with consequences of the tech industry's disruptions and the ideology that undergirds it.

     COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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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
At the height of the startup 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. But to truly understand the delirious reality of the tech entrepreneurs, he knew he would have to inhabit that perspective—he would have to become an entrepreneur himself. Thus Pein begins his journey—skulking through gimmicky tech conferences, pitching his over-the-top business ideas to investors, and rooming with a succession of 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...

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