Live Work Work Work Die

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. Determined to cut through the clichés of big tech--the relentless optimism, the incessant repetition of vacuous buzzwords--Pein decided that he would need to take an approach as unorthodox as the companies he would soon be covering. To truly understand the...
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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. Determined to cut through the clichés of big tech--the relentless optimism, the incessant repetition of vacuous buzzwords--Pein decided that he would need to take an approach as unorthodox as the companies he would soon be covering. To truly understand the delirious reality of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, he knew, he would have to inhabit that perspective--he would have to become an entrepreneur. Thus he begins his journey--skulking through gimmicky tech conferences, pitching his over-the-top business ideas to investors, and interviewing a cast of outrageous characters: cyborgs and con artists, Teamsters and transhumanists, jittery hackers and 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 self-image that the tech tycoons have crafted--as benevolent creators of wealth and opportunity--to reveal 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.