My life is work right now, so I’ve been training my reading and writing habits in that direction in the hope it will be additive. So when a friend who works in tech suggested I pick up some Ellen Ullman, I snapped it up. Ullman was a programmer who wrote about her experience as a woman in tech in the 1990s, a diligent personal accounting of the early days of Silicon Valley that foreshadows so much of what people are worried about today. Through her first person account of life as a programmer, she consistently reminds the reader that computers are made of boxes and wires, with choices made by mortals (often imbued with dreams of immortality) written on chips and tape, and are limited to only know what we tell them. The Y2K essay was an especially welcome reminder in the era of “singularity” — we’ve been here before.