Clive Thompson
Today on the podcast we're taking a look into the still-young language of coding — and into the people who speak it and use it to build the digital world that is increasingly meshing with our daily lives. Clive Thompson has been walking the border between high technology and social change for years, in his writing for publications like Wired and the New York Times Magazine, and in his widely insightful 2013 book Smarter than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Now, in Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, Thompson draws on wide-ranging reporting, dozens of interviews, and his own experience trying to use code to solve the headaches of ordinary life. He explores the way in which programming has evolved from its infancy, feeding cards into machines, and created a world with its own deeply-held mores, and its own powerful effects on our culture, economy, and even our politics. Clive Thompson sat down with us in the studio for a talk about what he discovered — and about the breakthrough that might be the most significant piece of coding in history.