Reading Wednesday

[sabotabby]

Just finished: Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein. No, I don't know why I'm so obsessed with "Silicon Valley techbros are Nazi assholes" narratives  but look, I am, and this is a solid entry into that genre. Particularly of interest was the chapter on the world that these shitheels actually want to see, which is of course their horrifying microcosm writ large. My un-favourite was the idea of "cloud nations," which is the only thing I can think of that's stupider than drawing arbitrary lines and erecting flags on bits of land, where people compete to belong and become citizens. Just gross. Pein is wry and clever in his evisceration of the culture. At one point, his clever idea for a startup is an app called Laborize, which will give companies an advantage by...unionizing their competition. Venture capitalists don't seem very interested in this for some reason and at one point he talks to a Teamster who says, "you know that's illegal, right?" and he points out that it didn't stop Uber or AirBnB. Anyway, worth a read if you like this sort of thing.

Currently reading: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. I'd never heard of this one but A., who has consistently excellent taste in books, recommended it to me. It's an epic length tome about four sad boys in New York City and at first I assumed it was going to be one of those quirky novels about people who manage to pay rent despite working in the arts but at about 100 pages in, it goes on a dark turn and there's 50 pages or so describing, in detail, self-harm, suicidal ideation, trauma, and chronic pain and anyway. This is going to be a wild ride. Really well-written, disturbing af.