📚Book Review: Live Work Work Work Die, by Corey Pein👎

Funny at first, then just an opinion piece about how bad tech is for our society. No real analysis just cherry-picked stories. I know or have lived through most of the stories that Mr. Pein repeats and there is more to the story than what he presents.

However, there were some great quotes and Pein is a good writer and has many clever digs and quotes:

“Billionaireship is easily the most desirable career of the twenty-first-century, with numerous advantages over fast-growing occupations like serfdom…You may scoff now, but you’ll definitely wish you’d taken the time to become a billionaire when the robots have taken over your profession and you can’t afford financing for the new fuel-efficient car you need to make your tiresome hours driving for Uber pencil out.”

“Seat of disruptive innovation and home to the heroes of high tech, the Valley calls out like an alluring siren to ambitious, skilled, and forward-thinking people from all over. Its singular approach to wealth creation — let’s call it “the Silicon Valley way” — was endorsed by former president Barack Obama himself. In a State of the Union address, he pledged to support “every risk-taker and entrepreneur who aspires to become the next Steve Jobs.” Really, shouldn’t we all be in the top one percent?”

Simone was bone-tired. I didn’t blame her. She was the model of a twenty-first-century microentrepreneur, which is to say she was a grossly exploited worker. She lived in Oakland but woke up early to drive to central San Francisco, where she picked up two shifts as a public school bus driver. She drove for Lyft on her lunch break and again after work until bedtime. Both employers classified Simone as a part-time independent contractor, and neither seemed at all concerned about her level of fatigue behind the wheel.

• Amazon link: Live Work Work Work Die

J. Scott Christianson is a technologist and an Associate Teaching Professor of management at the Trulaske College of Business, where his interests are focused on the impact of technology on society. You can connect with him on his website, LinkedIn, Twitter, or by following his newsletter, The Free-Range Technologist.