Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet

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

The Googlization of Everything

Siva Vaidhyanathan

The Internet Is Not the Answer

Andrew Keen · 273 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.

You Are Not a Gadget

Jaron Lanier · 224 pages

A computer-age visionary argues that the Internet has failed to live up to its early promises, sharing cautionary perspectives on the Web 2.0 design concept while optimistically evaluating the Internet as a positive cultural vehicle.

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything

Matthew L. Ball · 352 pages

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

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

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

Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age

William Powers · 272 pages

"A soulful polemic that challenges the sacred dogma of the digital age--that the more we connect with others, the happier we are--arguing that as our electronic connectedness grows, we are pulled away from the relationships and experiences that give life texture, depth, and meaning"--

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

Evgeny Morozov · 432 pages

Argues that technology is changing the way we understand human society and discusses how the disciplines of politics, culture, public debate, morality, and humanism will be affected when responsibility for them is delegated to technology.

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

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

Yochai Benkler · 528 pages

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

Tim Wu · 224 pages

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.

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

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

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

Michael Harris · 243 pages

"Only one generation in history (ours) will experience life both with and without the Internet. For everyone who follows us, online life will simply be the air they breathe. Today, we revel in ubiquitous information and constant connection, rarely stopping to consider the implications for our logged-on lives. Michael Harris chronicles this massive shift, exploring what we've gained--and lost--in t

Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become

Peter Morville · 196 pages

Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music

Greg Kot · 265 pages

"Ripped" tells the story of how the laptop generation created a new grassroots music industry, with the fans and bands rather than the corporations in charge. In this new world, bands aren't just musicmakers but self-contained multimedia businesses; and fans aren't just consumers but distributors and even collaborators.

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

Viral Loop

Adam L. Penenberg · 274 pages

From Google to Facebook, the author delves into how a "viral loop," a situation where using a product means needing to share it with others, can make an online business a success.

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

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