Top shelf picks: Best Business Books 2019
Tech & Innovation
Understanding coders has never been more important. One of the distinctive developments of the past 20 years is that coders are now the people running companies, the people in charge of making really important decisions that shape our politics, our economy, and much of our everyday lives. Those decisions have been enormously lucrative, but have also led to an enormous amount of skepticism about the value of the work that coders do. Although there are surely people in Silicon Valley who still see technology as the way to a brighter, freer, more connected future, the double-edged nature of technology, and of the Internet specifically, should be obvious. The importance of Clive Thompson’s Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World (Penguin Press, 2019), the year’s best book on technology and innovation, is that it helps us understand, in a deep sense, the world coders inhabit. It’s a world in which efficiency is often seen as a paramount goal. And it’s a world in which the issues that matter most have been practical ones — did these lines of code accomplish the task they’re supposed to accomplish? Coding, as Thompson describes it, can encourage a certain narrowness of vision, a limited perspective on how the world works and what matters. And what Silicon Valley needs now is a wider range of perspectives that can inform the decisions about what it chooses to build and, just as important, what it chooses not to build.
Adapted from “Speaking of code,” by James Surowiecki
Published at Tue, 05 Nov 2019 06:00:00 +0000
