A review by lindy_b
Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

2.0

After reading excerpts of Live Work Work Work Die posted online a couple months ago, I wasn't sure whether or expect a humor-filled memoir or ethnographically-inclined journalism, but I thought it'd be interesting either way. What I did get was a half-baked mess that doesn't dive any deeper than Vice on any given Tuesday. Pein admits in the introduction that he went into the project with nothing so much as resembling a plan and that he had to split the difference between memoir and journalism out of (mostly financial) necessity. Pein may have "Journ[ied] into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley" but I could have written 90% of this book sitting in my living room in the Midwest. Everyone who has ever wandered into a Reddit thread knows the Bay Area rental market is functionally nonexistent, that Silicon Valley hates labor unions, and that venture capitalists are enamored with eugenics.

I don't know if Pein is just incredibly out of his depth or he's contained here by the scope and imagined audience of this book. It's probably some of both, but passages like the following make me lean towards the former at times:

But the next pitch beat them all. The presenter had a thick, indeterminate accent. His app would help arrange marriages between would-be migrants and citizens in their country of choice. He called it 'Greender, the Tinder for green cards,' which got a big laugh, either because no one knew such marriage arrangements would be illegal or because everyone did. (167)

Bro, the reason they're laughing is that, said with most varieties of heavy accent, 'Greender' and 'Grindr' sound phonetically alike!