MOON DUST

"This is a must-read."

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A humane, nuanced, humorous, insightful work."

Booklist (starred review)

"Smith has a great deal of fun while learning to code...however, much of his absorbing book asks serious questions."

Mail on Sunday

"With insight and wit Smith recounts his immersion in this sometimes strange fraternity."

Shelf Awareness

"An engaging plunge into the world of code and its transformative implications."

Kirkus

"Smith paints a fascinating—and, ultimately, unsettling—portrait of a technology into which most people have little insight."

MIT Technology Review

"Andrew Smith, who has written absorbingly about astronauts and the dotcom bubble here explores the "haunting alien logic" of computer code."

Times Literary Supplement

"Smith's odyssey leads to encounters that question the deepest mysteries of the human condition"

The Tablet, Book of the Year

"A searing philosophical take on the ravages of the digital age."

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A sophisticated analysis that would make Marshall McLuhan proud."

Shelf Awareness

"Dense, prickly and rewarding."

Times Literary Supplement

Soon on audiobook!

Devil in the Stack: A Code Odyssey

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.