CODERS

The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

By Clive Thompson

Code seems cold and objective, the raw logic of the internet, and Silicon Valley likes it that way.

Programmers hunker down in low-slung Palo Alto office parks having signed a nondisclosure agreement at the door. The work is opaque, confoundingly mathematical. The nation’s media capital is 3,000 miles away.

When algorithms are implicated in a scandal — say, a new tool to decide jail sentences gives black people longer ones, or a web search for information about vaccines offers up noxious conspiracy theories — the playbook is simple: Blame the code, some off-kilter machine learning, an out-of-control A.I. spasm. Certainly no human hand was involved.

Of course, this is a farce. Human hands are all over all of it.

In his new book, “Coders,” the longtime Wired magazine writer Clive Thompson works to describe those humans and exactly what their hands do. With an anthropologist’s eye, he outlines their different personality traits, their history and cultural touchstones. He explores how they live, what motivates them and what they fight about. By breaking down what the actual work of coding looks like — often pretty simple, rote, done in teams rather than by loner geniuses — he removes the mystery and brings it into the legible world for the rest of us to debate. Human beings and their foibles are the reason the internet is how it is — for better and often, as this book shows, for worse.