PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksPart reportage, part memoir, part meditation, the hybridity of Borderline Citizen... befits its subject ... Borderline Citizen makes not only for interesting historical reading, but an absorbing vantage on our contemporary crises of belonging ... These case studies reveal a necessary part of the angst of globalization: it is not that the nation has been invaded, but that its myth has begun to expire.
Corey Pein
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books\"Given Pein’s fluent, entertaining sarcasm, many readers won’t know how seriously to take his self-proclaimed quest to get rich and transform the world. But as he is tepidly welcomed into the first of several deceptively advertised Airbnb rentals by a couple of other recent arrivals from Bangalore and Norway, we’re reminded of how many do buy into the Silicon Valley fantasy ... Laborize is funny, but the last third of Live Work Work Work Die simply frightens. Pein steps away from his experiences among the grubs of the Valley to expose the astonishing views of many of its titans: their flirtation with (or outright embrace of) an updated eugenicist worldview that favors the tech industry’s white and East Asian composition; their intellectual admiration for certain \'neoreactionary\' thinkers’ call for the abolition of universities, nonprofits, and the federal government. I won’t name these thinkers, even if the author does; suffice it to say that one recurrent fantasy of Silicon Valley is replacing democracy with a technocracy of its own brightest minds. But in so many ways this has already begun.\
