Joining me for today's podcast is the programmer-turned-writer Ellen Ullman. I recently reread her 1995 book, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents, and found it as compelling today as it was then.
Ellen likes to say that programmers create systems in their own image and according to their own desires. They were among the first to experience the lifestyle that we all take for granted now: asynchronous, machine-mediated, always on. In this conversation we talked about how this way of life affects software, individuals, and society, both for better and worse.
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