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Voices from the Valley

Tech Workers Talk About What They Do--and How They Do It

Edited by Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel

FSG Originals

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ISBN10: 0374538670
ISBN13: 9780374538675

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176 Pages

$17.00

CA$23.00

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In Voices from the Valley, the celebrated writers and Logic co-founders Moira Weigel and Ben Tarnoff take an unprecedented dive into the tech industry, conducting unfiltered, in-depth, anonymous interviews with tech workers at all levels, including a data scientist, a start-up founder, a cook who serves their lunch, and a PR wizard. In the process, Weigel and Tarnoff open the conversation about the tech industry at large, a conversation that has previously been dominated by the voices of CEOs. Deeply illuminating, revealing, and at times lurid, Voices from the Valley is a vital and comprehensive view of an industry that governs our lives.

FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much.

We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

Reviews

Praise for Voices from the Valley

"One of the many virtues of Voices from the Valley, Moira Weigel and Ben Tarnoff’s curiously unputdownable anthology of testimonies from tech workers, is the quality of attention in which it trains us . . . [stokes] curiosity and anger in equal measure . . . this collection shows just how much listening can do."—Leah Price, Public Books

"For decades, Silicon Valley has told its own stories on its own terms. Voices From the Valley quietly subverts these self-made mythologies, by giving tech workers—from a cafeteria contractor to a founder who failed up—a new platform to speak for themselves. Through seven straightforward, honest, insightful, anonymous accounts, readers are offered a glimpse of the business values, politics, motivations and mundanities animating one of the twenty-first century's most opaque and influential power centers. Timely and important, and an exciting new genre of tech narrative; hopefully the first of many such chronicles to come."—Anna Wiener, author of Uncanny Valley

"Voices from the Valley is in the fine tradition of Stud Terkel's Working. People working in technology, from a founder to a cook, speak directly to us. Ever more urgent in this digital age."—Ellen Ullman, author of Close to the Machine and Life in Code

“Tarnoff and Weigel use crisp, knowing interviews to address the labor and class ferment percolating beneath the tech industry’s sleek exterior . . . While indicting a business culture of privilege and profit-minded willful blindness, the interviews also showcase thoughtful and socially engaged—if wonky—personalities . . . Relevant augury for technology’s future during a tech-dependent, dysfunctional historical moment.”Kirkus Reviews

"Eye-opening . . . This insightful account does much to illuminate an industry often shrouded in secrecy."Publishers Weekly

Reviews from Goodreads

BOOK EXCERPTS

Read an Excerpt

Introduction: The Everyone Machine


This book is a tell-all about an open secret: platforms are made by people. For many people, it can be easy to miss.

There is the matter of word choice. “Platform” instead of “publisher.”...

About the author

Edited by Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel

Moira Weigel is the author of Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Nation, The New Republic, and n+1, among other publications, and she is a cofounder of Logic magazine. She received a fellowship to the Harvard Society of Fellows in 2016 and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Ben Tarnoff is the author of the books A Counterfeiter’s Paradise and The Bohemians and is a cofounder of Logic magazine. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New Republic, Jacobin, and Lapham’s Quarterly, among other publications. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

(c) Joni Sternbach

Read Articles by the Author at the Guardian

Website by Author - Logic