A searching, literary account of code, culture and the bizarre human world behind programming.

Andrew Smith moves through Python conferences, software communities, patent archives, digital utopianism, forgotten inventions and the little bureaucratic graveyards where possible futures go to die. It’s about programming, yes, but more properly it is about the people, fantasies, failures and accidental philosophies sitting underneath the systems we now treat as ordinary infrastructure.

Smith is interested in the weirdness of tech. The social rituals of coders, the optimism and burnout of open-source communities, the myth of genius, the romance of invention, the buried history of failed machines, and the increasingly grim question of whether our tools are expanding the world or just teaching us to live inside a smaller one with better menus. A good one for readers interested in programming, digital culture, AI-adjacent thinking, internet history, systems, language, and the peculiar cultic energies of people who say “just ship it” and then accidentally reorganise civilisation.

First UK edition, published by Grove Press UK in 2024. Trade paperback. Drawings throughout by Ron Jones. Good used condition: light shelf wear and handling to covers, some corner creasing/rubbing, clean internally and solidly bound. Notably includes the publisher’s explicit restriction against use of the text for generative AI training/data mining, which is a spicy little artefact in itself.