Work Pray Code
When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley
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Work Pray Code
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Narrated by:
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Jennifer Lim
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By:
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Carolyn Chen
About this listen
This audiobook narrated by Jennifer Lim explores how tech giants are reshaping spirituality to serve their religion of peak productivity.
Silicon Valley is known for its lavish perks, intense work culture, and spiritual gurus. Work Pray Code explores how tech companies are bringing religion into the workplace in ways that are replacing traditional places of worship, blurring the line between work and religion and transforming the very nature of spiritual experience in modern life.
Over the past forty years, highly skilled workers have been devoting more time and energy to their jobs than ever before. They are also leaving churches, synagogues, and temples in droves—but they have not abandoned religion. Carolyn Chen spent more than five years in Silicon Valley, conducting a wealth of in-depth interviews and gaining unprecedented access to the best and brightest of the tech world. The result is a penetrating account of how work now satisfies workers’ needs for belonging, identity, purpose, and transcendence that religion once met. Chen argues that tech firms are offering spiritual care such as Buddhist-inspired mindfulness practices to make their employees more productive, but that our religious traditions, communities, and public sphere are paying the price.
We all want our jobs to be meaningful and fulfilling. Work Pray Code reveals what can happen when work becomes religion, and when the workplace becomes the institution that shapes our souls.
©2022 Carolyn Chen (P)2022 Princeton University PressCritic Reviews
“Carolyn Chen walks boldly into the heart of Silicon Valley, the apex of America’s knowledge economy, to examine its culture, values, and practices. Work Pray Code is a terrific book, fascinating from start to finish, at turns inspiring and frightening. It establishes Chen as an essential interpreter of American society at large.” (Paul Spickard, University of California, Santa Barbara)
“Chen brilliantly illuminates how tech companies colonize employees’ lives as they increasingly provide everything needed for a fulfilling existence, with troubling implications for our fractured public sphere. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in religion, work, and democracy.” (Jaime Kucinskas, author of The Mindful Elite)
“Work Pray Code is an engaging book that takes the reader inside one of the industries that has profoundly shaped all of our lives. Through the tech workers she spent five years getting to know, Carolyn Chen gives us a matchless description of who they are, why they work so hard, what gives them meaning in life, and, for some, how their work has become a source of connection with the sacred.” (Robert Wuthnow, author of Why Religion Is Good for American Democracy)