Hello, world.

Facebook’s algorithms shaping the news. Self-driving vehicles roaming the roads. Revolution on Tweets and love on Tinder. We live in a world made of code–and coders are the ones who constructed it for us. From acclaimed tech writer Clive Thompson comes a brilliant anthropological reckoning with powerful tribe nowadays, computer programmers, in a book that interrogates who they are, the way they believe, what qualifies as greatness within their world, and what should about Coders: The Producing of a New Tribe as well as the Remaking from the World provide us pause. They will be the many quietly influential people on the planet, and Coders shines a light on their culture.

In pop culture and media, the people who create the code that guidelines the world are regularly portrayed in hackneyed, simplified conditions, as ciphers in hoodies. Thompson will go much deeper, dramatizing the mindset of the unseen architects of the tradition, discovering their passions and their ideals, as well as their messy background. In nuanced portraits, Coders requires us near some of the great programmers of our time, including the creators of Facebook’s Information Give food to, Instagram, Google’s cutting-edge AI, and more. Speaking to everyone from revered ’10X’ elites to neophytes, back-end technicians and front-end designers, Thompson explores the unique psychology of the vocation–which combines a love of reasoning, an obsession with performance, the pleasure of puzzle-solving, and a superhuman tolerance for mind-bending frustration.

On the way, Coders thoughtfully ponders the morality and politics of code, including its implications for civic life as well as the economy. Developers shape our everyday behavior: When they make something easy to do, we do even more of it. When they make it hard or impossible, we do less of it. Thompson wrestles using the major controversies of our era, from the ‘disruption’ fetish of Silicon Valley towards the struggle for addition by marginalized organizations.

In his accessible, erudite style, Thompson unpacks the surprising history of the field, you start with the 1st coders — brilliant and pioneering women, who, despite crafting a number of the earliest computers and coding languages, were later on written out of history. Coders introduces contemporary crypto-hackers fighting for your privacy, AI engineers building eerie brand-new forms of machine cognition, teenage young ladies losing sleep at 24/7 hackathons, and unemployed Kentucky coal-miners learning a new career.

At the same time, the reserve deftly illustrates how programming has turned into a marvelous new art form–a source of delight and creativity, not only danger. To obtain as near his subject as you can, Thompson accumulates the thread of his personal long-abandoned coding skills as he reckons, in his signature, highly personal design, with what outstanding programming looks like.

To understand the world today, we have to understand code and its own consequences. With Coders, Thompson provides definitive look into the heart of the machine.