Andrew's first programming language was Python, whose comunity he fell in love with over the course of making the book. In July 2023 he was invited to deliver a keynote speech to the EuroPython conference in Prague, Czechia. He also gave an emotional world premier preview reading from Devil in the Stack.
Watch the keynote hereComing soon!
Arriving August 20, 2024 from Grove Atlantic
From internationally-bestselling author and journalist Andrew Smith, an immersive, alarming, sharp-eyed journey into the bizarre world of computer code, told through his sometimes painful, often amusing attempt to become a coder himself
Throughout history, technological revolutions have been driven by the invention of machines. But today, the power of the technology transforming our world lies in an intangible and impenetrable cosmos of software: algorithmic code. So symbiotic has our relationship with this code become that we barely notice it anymore. We can’t see it, are not even sure how to think about it, and yet we do almost nothing that doesn’t depend on it. In a world increasingly governed by technologies that so few can comprehend, who controls the future?
Devil in the Stack follows Andrew Smith on his extraordinary trip into the world of coding, taking us back through the earliest history of logic, machine-learning, and computers, from George Boole to Ada Lovelace to Alan Turing and up to the present moment, behind the scenes into the lives—and minds—of the new gatekeepers of the 21st century: those who write code. Smith embarks on a quest to understand this sect in what he believes to be the only way possible, by learning to code himself. He travels to Magdeburg, Germany to have his brain scanned by a team of scientists studying the effects of coding on the human brain. He attends a global coding conference in Ohio, where he meets the Buddha-like creator of the Python programming language. Smith brings in experts, writers, and young coders who discuss the problematic place of race and gender in technology—and more specifically in code and algorithms.
Expansive and effervescent, Devil in the Stack delivers a portrait of code as both a vivid culture and an impending threat. How do we control a technology that most people can’t understand? And are we programming ourselves out of existence? Perhaps most terrifying of all: is there something about the way we compute—the way code works—that is innately at odds with the way humans have evolved? By turns revelatory, unsettling, and joyously funny, Devil in the Stack is an essential book for our times, of vital interest to anyone hoping to participate in the future-defining technological debates to come.