Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Live Work Work Work Die
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://coreypein.net/
CITY: Portland
STATE: OR
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
Also spends time in Washington, DC.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Investigative reporter. Willamette Week, Portland, OR, staff writer.
WRITINGS
Author of the “Magical Thinking” column for the Baffler; contributor to periodicals, including Salon, Slate, Foreign Policy, American Prospect, and the Columbia Journalism Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Corey Pein is an investigative reporter. He is the author of the “Magical Thinking” column for the Baffler. Pein worked as a staff writer for the Willamette Week and has also contributed articles to a range of periodicals, including Salon, Slate, Foreign Policy, American Prospect, and the Columbia Journalism Review.
Pein published his first book, Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley, in 2017. Basing himself in Silicon Valley, Pein looked into the underpinnings of the technology boom that began in the mid-2000s and the various individuals involved in the industry. Pein talked with everyone from hacker houses and startup conferences to corporate executives and came away with the devotion that they had to the prospect of technology leading major changes for the betterment of society. Despite the utopian discourse in the Valley, Pein points to the large number of failures in the industry, the posturing, insider culture, and misaligned incentives.
A Kirkus Reviews contributor reasoned that “Pein’s real achievement is his willingness to find out how Silicon Valley works.” The same reviewer called the book “a clearheaded reckoning with consequences of the tech industry’s disruptions and the ideology that undergirds it.” Booklist contributor Kathy Sexton observed that “Pein combines serious journalism with humor and his own antics for an entertaining and caustic mix.” Writing in Salon, Keith A. Spencer mentioned that “the fact that I don’t have many friends in tech isn’t really surprising: I hardly know how to communicate with them, and our income gap tends to mean we have little in common. Still, I have an admiration for those … who share my lefty politics yet can hobnob with the perky acolytes of tech without feeling physically ill.” Spencer continued: “Which is why Pein’s new book, Live Work Work Work Die … is all the more impressive: Pein, perhaps by virtue of being an outsider, is able to penetrate the techie nest in a way that locals can’t.” A Publishers Weekly contributor pointed out that Live Work Work Work Die “unmasks the shell game being run by venture capitalists in an industry that is not nearly as benign as it claims to be.” Writing on the Medium website, Zachary Houle confessed: “I was fascinated and creeped out by the book. Pein doesn’t have much that is flattering to say about Silicon Valley or tech in general, so that can also make the book a difficult read. If you’re looking for fair and balanced journalism, you’re not really going to find it here. Instead, this is a screed about a guy (the author) who seems forlorn that his attempts to create a startup for the sole purpose of making a whole lot of money doesn’t go as planned.” Houle reasoned that Live Work Work Work Die could “have been better if Pein was slightly more objective and didn’t institute a slash and burn policy. But … nobody is keeping tabs on tech generals who are out to supplant presidents and kings. To that end, the book is a must read for any young people interested in working in technology.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 1, 2018, Kathy Sexton, review of Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley, p. 6.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2018, review of Live Work Work Work Die.
Publishers Weekly, February 26, 2018, review of Live Work Work Work Die.
ONLINE
Baffler, https://thebaffler.com/ (June 2, 2018), author profile.
Corey Pein website, https://coreypein.net (June 2, 2018).
Medium, https://medium.com/ (May 6, 2018), review of Live Work Work Work Die.
Salon, https://www.salon.com/ (April 22, 2018), Keith A. Spencer, review of Live Work Work Work Die.
Corey Pein is a longtime investigative reporter and a regular contributor to The Baffler. A former staff writer for Willamette Week, he has also written for Slate, Salon, Foreign Policy, The American Prospect, and the Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Corey Pein is a regular contributor to The Baffler, where he writes a column and hosts the podcast "News from Nowhere." A longtime investigative reporter and former staff writer for the Willamette Week, he has also written for Slate, Salon, Foreign Policy, The American Prospect, and the Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications. He lives in Portland, Oregon.Corey is the author of Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley.
Corey Pein writes Magical Thinking for The Baffler. He is currently based in Washington, D.C., and Portland, Oregon, and has a book coming out in April 2018 titled Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley.
No bio
Pein, Corey: LIVE WORK WORK WORK DIE
Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Pein, Corey LIVE WORK WORK WORK DIE Metropolitan/Henry Holt (Adult Nonfiction) $17.00 4, 24 ISBN: 978-1-250-19378-0
An on-the-ground look at Silicon Valley and what its power means for the rest of the world.
To research his debut nonfiction book, investigative reporter Pein embedded in Silicon Valley to better understand the technology boom that has been underway since the mid-2000s. Alternating between his roles as a journalist and a would-be entrepreneur as it suits his purposes, he penetrates all manner of industry mainstays: hacker houses overcrowded with eager techies, corporate-sponsored meetups, competitions for startup pitches, and conferences celebrating and promoting the singularity. Seemingly everyone the author encounters in his reporting is confident that the future will be vastly different--and vastly better--than the present. Pein isn't the first to identify the near-religious faith in technology that is so common to the Silicon Valley crowd, but his deeply unsettling portrait of it is enough to trouble even the most committed tech booster. He presents a place that, far from being a utopia of creativity and efficiency, is a lightly disguised confidence game, where valuation is a meaningless concept, incentives are frequently misaligned, and 95 percent of entrepreneurs fail, often because they don't have the insider advantages that the veterans do. Pein identifies a "cutthroat libertarianism" at the core of the Silicon Valley worldview, which accounts for its indifference and, in some cases, hostility toward those people harmed by their practices: "Most people in the industry," he writes, "were convinced that their work was moral because it increased consumer choice and therefore freedom. New technologies were evidence of progress and therefore innately good." For all the social oddities he observes, cringeworthy encounters he experiences, and wit and outrage he levels at his subjects, Pein's real achievement is his willingness to find out how Silicon Valley works and not become distracted by all its shiny objects.
A clearheaded reckoning with consequences of the tech industry's disruptions and the ideology that undergirds it.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Pein, Corey: LIVE WORK WORK WORK DIE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248122/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b79c0b94. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527248122
Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
Kathy Sexton
Booklist. 114.13 (Mar. 1, 2018): p6.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley. By Corey Pein. Apr. 2018. 320p. Holt/Metropolitan, $28 (97816277948551.338.4.
Investigative reporter and Baffler contributor Pein's first book should terrify you. What starts out as an attempt to join the ranks of successful tech entrepreneurs (and write about it) turns into an expose of Silicon Valley, where investors put millions of dollars into "disruptive" technology, often with little else than a marketing plan for an undefined product. Pein moves to the West Coast, starts pitching his own ludicrous start-up idea, and begins to uncover the industry's dark underbelly, starting with the insane housing market, which lands him sleeping in a tent for $35 a night. But things take a much darker turn. Pein dedicates a good chunk of the book to a small but vocal faction bent on government destruction and dabbling in alt-right politics and even eugenics. Even scarier, they face little resistance from the larger tech world. Like Jon Ronson, Pein combines serious journalism with humor and his own antics for an entertaining and caustic mix. If Silicon Valley and Black Mirror had a book baby, it would be Live Work Work Work Die.--Kathy Sexton
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sexton, Kathy. "Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2018, p. 6. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532250750/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cc43d620. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532250750
“Live Work Work Work Die” paints a portrait of Silicon Valley hypocrisy
Author Corey Pein’s new book shines a light on the coder class and post-gentrified San Francisco
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Keith A. Spencer
April 22, 2018 10:30pm (UTC)
I have lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than a decade, and yet I know only a couple of people who work in the tech industry. That might sound perplexing to you — after all, isn’t San Francisco the capital of Silicon Valley? That's certainly true enough: From the billboards advertising obscure cloud computing “solutions” to the reclaimed-wood “co-working spaces” that line Market Street to the employee badges that dangle from tech workers like Tiffany bracelets, the Bay Area Brahmins make themselves conspicuous. Yet while this is an exceedingly tech-obsessed place to live, the Bay Area is also bifurcated — and the gulf between Silicon Valley and me is as vast as our salary differential.
As the tech industry expanded out from the peninsula like an untreated infection, it did not move as a rising tide; all boats were not lifted. Rather, some sunk completely, while the yachts commissioned additional rooms and bulkheads. The sunk included many of my family and friends; if you’ve not had the pain of watching a grandparent forced to abandon his or her homeland after 90 years of residency, it is not pleasant, to say the least. Only slightly less painful is the experience of watching a city die. Only recently have I finally come to terms with the fact that my freewheeling San Francisco of yesteryear is not only dead, but rolling in its grave. I used to joke that the charm of San Francisco was that it was the city that never wakes up. No longer — now, it's the city that can't look up from its smartphone.
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These experiences — of watching the culture sapped from my family’s ancestral home, and observing the echoes of San Francisco’s hippie-liberalism strangled by the overworked protestant culture of Silicon Valley — were enough to permanently sour my ability to interact with the screen-addled invaders. So the fact that I don’t have many friends in tech isn’t really surprising: I hardly know how to communicate with them, and our income gap tends to mean we have little in common. Still, I have an admiration for those, like Corey Pein, who share my lefty politics yet can hobnob with the perky acolytes of tech without feeling physically ill. Which is why Pein’s new book, “Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley,” is all the more impressive: Pein, perhaps by virtue of being an outsider, is able to penetrate the techie nest in a way that locals can’t.
Reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson’s “Hell’s Angels” in both style and conceit, “Live Work Work Work Die” is a combination of New Journalism and muckraking told with an anthropological eye. In the beginning, Pein sets out to Silicon Valley to observe the nerds up close and penetrate their inner sanctum. He is not shy about his ulterior motive — to strike it rich — and openly admits that he fits the bill as a “white techie colonizer.” But he is also, unlike just about everyone else in the industry, explicitly aware of the absurd and Orwellian techno-utopian fantasies that undergird tech culture.
Part cultural criticism and part hero's journey, Pein’s work is at its strongest when it engages with locals' quotidian struggles. In the most harrowing and outrageous chapter, the cash-strapped author finds affordable (I use that term loosely) housing in an over-capacity Airbnb apartment in the Excelsior District, called “Excelsior House.” To Pein, $1,000 a month seems like a decent deal; yet upon his arrival he finds the house ruled by a vicious landlord named Luna who has surveillance cameras set on the residents to monitor behavior and a list of rules that recall Dolores Umbridge's petty "educational decrees" that line the wall of Hogwarts. Pein’s new roommates include two people in cots in the living room and a family of three sharing a single bedroom, and the house is so crowded the wait for the bathroom can be hours. And about that bathroom: Pein describes it as "filthy," and notes that the only roll of toilet paper has "MIKE" written on it in Sharpie.
Pein's experience in Excelsior House is part of a familiar social pattern in the Bay Area, that of downwardly mobile housing. The upper classes now live in what was once middle-class housing, middle-class people live in housing that was once the realm of the working class, and working-class people have been reduced to slums, penury or homelessness. Pein muses over how his landlord, Luna, claims that the deplorable living conditions "serve a niche in the airbnb community." "It was the niche once known as ‘affordable housing,’ now 'Slums as a Service,'" Pein writes.
Contrast this with Airbnb's mission statement: "Belong anywhere." "For so long, people thought Airbnb was about renting houses. But really, we’re about home," the company explains. "You see, a house is just a space, but a home is where you belong. And what makes this global community so special is that for the very first time, you can belong anywhere. That is the idea at the core of our company: belonging." Tell that to the residents of Luna's micro-surveillance state.
The gap between Airbnb’s feel-good mission statement and the reality of its “Slums as a Service” offerings speak to a persistent theme in the book: the anti-humanism and anomie at the heart of Silicon Valley, which is particularly ironic given the industry’s aspirational marketing apparatus. It’s more than a few outliers: Facebook claims its goal is to connect people, but profits off making its users addicted to its “spyware as a service”; Uber claims its goal is to get you from A to B, but it has cultivated a massive network of exploited contract labor. Silicon Valley is a place that converts people to drones while convincing them it’s doing the opposite.
Alternately amusing and horrifying, the book’s denouement arrives when Pein ties together the techno-utopian mind-set with a burgeoning “tech fascist” movement, something that Pein previously detailed in his brilliant Baffler article “Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich.” Indeed, like any group of supremacists, those who believe that coders are innately superior will eventually find themselves browsing brown T-shirts on Amazon. Here's hoping we can debug the Valley before it's too late.
# # #
"Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley," by Corey Pein, will be released on April 24, 2018, from Metropolitan Books.
Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
Corey Pein. Metropolitan, $28 (320p) ISBN 978-1-62779-485-5
Journalist Pein travels to San Francisco to expose the seedy underbelly of Silicon Valley culture with its overworked and underpaid drones toiling in a gig-based economy, nightmarish Airbnb rentals, and false narrative of meritocracy. His hunt for affordable housing provokes a discussion of gentrification and exorbitant rents (Pein ends up paying $35/night to sleep in a tent in someone’s yard). For employment, he experiments with Fiverr, a directory platform where freelancers offer up their services at $5 per task, before attempting to sell his doomed start-up idea, an app for organizing labor unions. Along the way, Pein examines the unethical and often illegal practices of tech industry giants, from Yelp extorting cash from businesses in exchange for the removal of bad reviews to Groupon’s “dubious” accounting practices in the weeks leading up to its IPO. He also directs his ire at the tech press, referring to it as “an interchangeable assortment of sycophantic blogs, gee-whiz podcasts, and thinly veiled advertising supplements.” Pein’s analysis of this toxic culture culminates in a trip to Holland for a conference on technological singularity, the “physical and metaphysical merger of humanity and computers” believed by many to be in the near future, which, by this point in the book, will strike many readers as a terrifying prospect. Both entertaining and damning, Pein’s book unmasks the shell game being run by venture capitalists in an industry that is not nearly as benign as it claims to be. (Apr.)
DETAILS
Reviewed on: 02/26/2018
Release date: 04/24/2018
Paperback - 336 pages - 978-1-250-19378-0
Zachary HouleFollow
Book critic, Fiction author, Poet, Writer, Editor. Follow me on Twitter @zachary_houle.
May 6
Corey Pein
A Review of Corey Pein’s “Live Work Work Work Die”
If Tech Ruled the World …
“Live Work WOrk Work Die” Book Cover
Some people argue that Ottawa, Ontario, Canada is Silicon Valley North. Others argue that it’s Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Since I’m based in the former, let’s assume for the heck of it that I’m in the heart of the digital technology space in Canada. The stories I could tell you … . Let me regale you with a couple: I went for a job interview with a tech startup as a writer here in town a few years back, only to be told during the interview that a university graduate had popped up on the founders’ radar and was willing to work for free. “This is a no-brainer,” said one of the founders, referring to hiring the graduate, after having me sign an NDA and buying me a Starbucks coffee card as a means of paying me off for singing the NDA (and, I would assume, was meant to prevent me from complaining about them publicly). Why this firm couldn’t just tell me that over the phone they were looking at someone else and spare me from putting on a suit and jacket and coming down in person, other than to humiliate me, baffles me.
Then there was the time I showed up for another interview with another company — albeit a little early for the interview, so that made the interviewer particularly confrontational. When it came out that I took a cab, he said, “That’s a knock against you. That shows me that you are not tech savvy enough for this job. Why couldn’t you have used Uber?” Uh, maybe because I have a fundamental problem with ride sharing with someone who hasn’t received training and isn’t licensed by the local government, you know? There are plenty of good reasons not to use Uber. That job didn’t pan out — probably a blessing in disguise there.
So Ottawa is full of buffoon-like sharks, I’ll grant you that much, and journalist Corey Pein doesn’t paint a much more flattering picture of the real Silicon Valley in California in his new book, Live Work Work Work Die. Silicon Valley is a town, he writes, of hustlers who are toiling away at large tech companies where basic labour rights are being eroded away while each one is hoping to be the next unicorn billionaire with their own startup on the side. As Pein writes, a lot of these startups get funded without anything in the way of an idea or business plan — if you have the marketing savvy, you, too, can get venture capital funding. He doesn’t really explain why, despite that, 95 percent of all startups fail. Or maybe that was just me in my reading, because this is a very dense book. There are actually two or three books waiting to break out of Live Work Work Work Die, so there’s a lot of ground to cover in a scant 300 pages.
Pein is something of an “adversarial journalist” so he uncovers the not-so-pretty side of technology and tech journalism. I’m of two minds about this. As a former freelance journalist myself, I know that you have to be skeptical of the people you’re covering. But skepticism doesn’t mean you go to war with your sources. (In fact, many of the sources in this book were not told that Pein was a journalist and that their comments would be on the record. To that end, Pein employs pseudonyms for them, which makes me a tad uncomfortable because there’s no way to verify that Pein isn’t simply making this stuff up.) Still, I did find Pein’s chapter on tech journalism to be illuminating. If you’ve ever wondered why so many tech journalism pieces are puff pieces, well, it’s because tech journalists harbour a hope that they may get hired on eventually by one of the companies they cover at double the salary. (Though there are a ton of other reasons as well.)
This mirrors my own experience as a tech reporter for a large daily newspaper and a smaller biz magazine. When Nortel was floundering in the early 2000s, I had access to their office through a friend and could have run a piece on a “Day in the Life of the Company.” My editor at the daily newspaper shot it down, presumably because Nortel was still buying ad space there, or the editor might have feared some kind of libel suit or other repercussion. (It was nice that my editor was looking out for me, though, as it was pointed out by the paper time and time again that, as a freelancer, my libel protection was non-existent, meaning that the paper would not look out for me if I got sued. So nice of them to tell me!)
The chapter on working conditions is equally revealing. I didn’t know that the beer so flowed freely at no cost in Silicon Valley along with the catered meals — things the tech companies do to get their workers to work insane hours. I mean, I’ve worked at digital design agencies in the past which offer some of the things that, say, Google offers its employees, but the hours there — for me at least — were comparatively normal. (Maybe that’s why I didn’t last long at any of them?) I knew that things were pretty bad for Amazon employees, but I didn’t know before reading this book that the company keeps hired paramedics close by in case someone drops on the shop floor.
Pein also has a sharp pen for how tech companies, in being “disruptive”, have run afoul of just about every law on the books, but collude with legislators to smooth things over after the fact. The theme is to break laws first, and then suck up to lawmakers later. But the strangest bit is towards the end of the book, where Pein notes that many of tech’s biggest starts are essentially fascists in training and support some pretty questionable ideas and philosophies, including eugenics — making it clear that their bid for all things power-related must be watched with a critical eye. However, the final chapter on the Singularity — the period in the future where artificial intelligence supplants human intelligence — was a bit murky. I think I know where Pein was going with this — that all the things in tech are pointing towards complete domination of the human species, and the rest of us peons will be cubical slaves until we die — but I think the idea got whittled down too much. (The acknowledgement section notes that an earlier draft ran 600 pages or double the length of the current tome.)
Overall, I was fascinated and creeped out by the book. Pein doesn’t have much that is flattering to say about Silicon Valley or tech in general, so that can also make the book a difficult read. If you’re looking for fair and balanced journalism, you’re not really going to find it here. Instead, this is a screed about a guy (the author) who seems forlorn that his attempts to create a startup for the sole purpose of making a whole lot of money doesn’t go as planned. (Which is really the thrust of this volume.) The book might have been better if Pein was slightly more objective and didn’t institute a slash and burn policy. But maybe Live Work Work Work Die is what it is because it has to be — nobody is keeping tabs on tech generals who are out to supplant presidents and kings. To that end, the book is a must read for any young people interested in working in technology. As for me, even though my living these days is as a technical writer (for government), I don’t know if I’m going to be joining the real techie ranks anytime soon. This book shows that my experiences in job interviews are far from unique and echoes the notion that even Silicon Valley North has its share of dubious people to work for. If working for Shopify means I have to support or at least tolerate the neo-Nazis who run Breitbart, which this book would casually suggest is part of a much larger issue in the technology world, I want no part of that. Too bad I had to read a book to reach that conclusion.
Corey Pein’s Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley was published by Metropolitan Books / Harry Holt and Company on April 24, 2018.