The Internet Is Not the Answer

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything

Matthew L. Ball · 352 pages

Enshittification

Cory Doctorow

The author of “The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI” describes how decisions by tech leaders made services worse.

The Googlization of Everything

Siva Vaidhyanathan

Next: The Future Just Happened

Michael Lewis · 248 pages

In Liar's Poker the barbarians seized control of the bond markets. In The New New Thing some guys from Silicon Valley redefined the American economy. Now, with his knowing eye and wicked pen, Michael Lewis reveals how much the Internet boom has encouraged great changes in the way we live, work, and think. He finds that we are in the midst of one of the greatest status revolutions in the history of

Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet

Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Muller-Maguhn, Jeremie Zimmermann · 186 pages

Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

Douglas Rushkoff · 152 pages

"The debate over whether the Net is good or bad for us fills the airwaves and the blogosphere. But for all the heat of claim and counter-claim, the argument is essentially beside the point: it’s here; it’s everywhere. The real question is, do we direct technology, or do we let ourselves be directed by it and those who have mastered it? “Choose the former,” writes Rushkoff, “and you gain access to

The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

Tim Wu · 224 pages

Free: The Future of a Radical Price

Chris Anderson

The New York Times bestselling author heralds the future of business in Free.In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving thi

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

Yochai Benkler · 528 pages

Who Owns the Future?

Jaron Lanier · 411 pages

Jaron Lanier is the father of virtual reality and one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers. Who Owns the Future? is his visionary reckoning with the most urgent economic and social trend of our age: the poisonous concentration of money and power in our digital networks. Lanier has predicted how technology will transform our humanity for decades, and his insight has never been more urgently ne

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room

David Weinberger · 231 pages

We used to know how to know. We got our answers from books or experts. We'd nail down the facts and move on. But in the Internet age, knowledge has moved onto networks. There's more knowledge than ever, of course, but it's different. Topics have no boundaries, and nobody agrees on anything. Yet this is the greatest time in history to be a knowledge seeker, if you know how. In Too Big to Know, Inte

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Nicholas Carr · 300 pages

Examines the influences computer-delivered information may have on human cognition using Marshall McLuhan as the hook, the history of communication as the trajectory, and brain science as the tool.

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better

Clive Thompson

" It's undeniable-technology is changing the way we think. But is it for the better? Amid a chorus of doomsayers, Clive Thompson delivers a resounding "yes." The Internet age has produced a radical new style of human intelligence, worthy of both celebration and analysis. We learn more and retain it longer, write and think with global audiences, and even gain an ESP-like awareness of the world arou

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia

Andrew Lih · 246 pages

“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.” --Jimmy Wales With more than 2,000,000 individual articles on everything from Aa! (a Japanese pop group) to Zzyzx, California, written by an army of volunteer contributors, Wikipedia is the #8 site on the World Wide Web. Created (and corrected) by anyone

The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World

David Kirkpatrick · 378 pages

In little more than half a decade, Facebook has gone from a dorm-room novelty to a company with 500 million users. It is one of the fastest growing companies in history, an essential part of the social life not only of teenagers but hundreds of millions of adults worldwide. As Facebook spreads around the globe, it creates surprising effectseven becoming instrumental in political protests from Colo

Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age is Revolutionizing Life, Business, and Society

Jeff Jarvis · 267 pages

Argues that the growth of social networking and increased openness online is beneficial in the digital age and can lead to increased collaboration and changes in the way people organize, govern, teach, and learn.

The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

John Battelle · 323 pages

How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture• The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek Bestseller• Finalist for the Goldman Sachs/FT Business Book of the Year AwardWhat does the world want? According to John Battelle, a company that answers that question—in all its shades of meaning—can unlock the most intractable riddles of business and arguably of human cul

The Net Delusion: How Not To Liberate The World

Evgeny Morozov · 440 pages

In this spirited book, journalist and social commentator Evgeny Morozov shows that by falling for the supposedly democratizing nature of the Internet, Western do-gooders may have missed how it also entrenches dictators, threatens dissidents, and makes it harder—not easier—to promote democracy. / from the : official website

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy

Stephen Richard Witt · 304 pages

This book is a riveting story of obsession, music, crime, and money, featuring visionaries and criminals, moguls and tech-savvy teenagers. It's about the greatest pirate in history, the most powerful executive in the music business, a revolutionary invention and an illegal website four times the size of the iTunes Music Store. Journalist Stephen Witt traces the secret history of digital music pira

The Industries of the Future

Alec J. Ross · 304 pages

"Leading innovation expert Alec Ross explains what's next for the world, mapping out the advances and stumbling blocks that will emerge in the next ten years--for businesses, governments, and the global community--and how we can navigate them. While Alec Ross was working as Hillary Clinton's Senior Advisor on Innovation, he traveled to forty-one countries. He visited some of the toughest places in

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

Clay Shirky · 334 pages

An examination of how the rapid spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and social effects--for good and for ill. Our age's new technologies of social networking are evolving, and evolving us, into new groups doing new things in new ways, and old and new groups alike doing the old

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

Nancy Jo Sales · 410 pages

erudite descriptions of very young ladies ( 9 thru 18 ) who use social medias .

Bit Rot

Douglas Coupland · 424 pages

"Bit Rot, a new collection from Douglas Coupland that explores the different ways 20th-century notions of the future are being shredded, is a gem of the digital age. Reading Bit Rot feels a lot like bingeing on Netflix ... you can't stop with just one. 'Bit rot' is a term used in digital archiving to describe the way digital files can spontaneously and quickly decompose. As Coupland writes, 'Bit r

So You've Been Publicly Shamed

Jon Ronson · 313 pages

"From the internationally bestselling author of The Psychopath Test, a captivating and brilliant exploration of one of our world's most overlooked forces. For the past three years, Jon Ronson has been immersing himself in the world of modern-day public shaming-meeting famous shamees, shamers, and bystanders who have been impacted. This is the perfect time for a modern-day Scarlet Letter-a radicall