RaveSalonThe Chapo book is a wry, satiric look at American political culture, interspersed with asides and factoids that layer over the larger narrative ... True to its title, the book is indeed a \'guide\' in the sense that it provides a greater vision of the United States today from the point of the view of a burgeoning left-populist movement largely coalescing online and vis-a-vis DSA. In that sense, the most important subsection is the illustrated guides to conservative and liberal archetypes: Even a casual reader with no Twitter account and no online presence could flip to the center of the book and scan these to get a sense of how disaffected millennial leftists (self included) see the world ... The book’s articulation of U.S. hegemony is more or less what you might find in a Chomsky book or Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, yet it is written in an argot that will be instantly recognizable to any millennial or GenXer who spends time online. This is more revolutionary than it sounds ... a lot of people out there might never read Chomsky or Zinn or Angela Davis—dense, depressing politics books just aren’t everyone’s thing—but would read this book because it’s accessible, funny, and in a language and a culture that they understand. Chapo Trap House are not merely critics, but are also helping to build a culture that is introducing many new people to leftist politics in an accessible way.
Corey Pein
RaveSalon\" ... Pein’s new book, Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley, is all the more impressive: Pein, perhaps by virtue of being an outsider, is able to penetrate the techie nest in a way that locals can’t ... Alternately amusing and horrifying, the book’s denouement arrives when Pein ties together the techno-utopian mind-set with a burgeoning \'tech fascist\' movement, something that Pein previously detailed in his brilliant Baffler article Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich. Indeed, like any group of supremacists, those who believe that coders are innately superior will eventually find themselves browsing brown T-shirts on Amazon. Here\'s hoping we can debug the Valley before it\'s too late.\
