What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorHere 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
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
Cathy O'Neil · 272 pages
A former Wall Street quant sounds an alarm on the mathematical models that pervade modern life — and threaten to rip apart our social fabric We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should l
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
Neil Postman · 222 pages
With characteristic wit and candor, Neil Postman, our most astute and engaging cultural critic, launches a trenchant--and harrowing--warning against the tyranny of machines over man in the late twentieth century. We live in a time when physical well-being is determined by CAT scan results. Facts need the substantiation of statistical study. The human mind needs "deprogramming" while computers c
Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything
James Gleick · 325 pages
"In Faster, James Gleick explores nothing less than the human condition at the turn of the millennium. He shines a light of enterprising and analytical reporting - as well as sly wit - on the newest paradoxes of time. His journey takes us through the bunkers and trenches of a war we barely knew we were fighting: to the atomic clocks of the Directorate of Time, to the waiting rooms that focus our
Modern Romance
Aziz Ansari, Eric Klinenberg · 288 pages
From NYU Wagner: At some point, every one of us embarks on a journey to find love. We meet people, date, get into and out of relationships, all with the hope of finding someone with whom we share a deep connection. This seems standard now, but it’s wildly different from what people did even just decades ago. Single people today have more romantic options than at any point in human history. Wit
Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Douglas Rushkoff · 296 pages
"An award-winning author explores how the world works in our age of "continuous now". Back in the 1970s, futurism was all the rage. But looking forward is becoming a thing of the past. According to Douglas Rushkoff, "presentism" is the new ethos of a society that's always on, in real time, updating live. Guided by neither history nor long term goals, we navigate a sea of media that blend the past
Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI
Madhumita Murgia · 320 pages
The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything
Matthew L. Ball · 352 pages
The Formula: How Algorithms Solve all our Problems … and Create More
Luke Dormehl · 296 pages
In The Formula, Luke Dormehl takes readers inside the world of numbers, asking how we came to believe in the all-conquering power of algorithms; introducing the mathematicians, artificial intelligence experts and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are shaping this brave new world, and ultimately asking how we survive in an era where numbers can sometimes seem to create as many problems as they solve
Enshittification
Cory Doctorow
The author of “The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI” describes how decisions by tech leaders made services worse.
24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
Jonathan Crary · 144 pages
24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep explores some of the ruinous consequences of the expanding non-stop processes of twenty-first-century capitalism. The marketplace now operates through every hour of the clock, pushing us into constant activity and eroding forms of community and political expression, damaging the fabric of everyday life. Jonathan Crary examines how this interminable non-t
The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
Jamie Bartlett
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
Sherry Turkle · 400 pages
Technology has become the architect of our intimacies. Online, we fall prey to the illusion of companionship, gathering thousands of Twitter and Facebook friends and confusing tweets and wall posts with authentic communication. In "Alone Together," MIT technology and society professor Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives. It's a nuanced
Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)
Christian Rudder · 302 pages
An irreverent, provocative, and visually fascinating look at what our online lives reveal about who we really are--and how this deluge of data will transform the science of human behavior. Big Data is used to spy on us, hire and fire us, and sell us things we don't need. In Dataclysm, Christian Rudder puts this flood of information to an entirely different use: understanding human nature. Drawing
The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity
Tim Wu · 224 pages
Everything Is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails
Duncan J. Watts · 335 pages
Discusses how the concept of common sense is inadequate in an increasingly complex world and draws on multiple disciplines to offer insight into the sources of such topics as popularity, economics, and self-deception.
Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives
John Palfrey, Urs Gasser
One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
Herbert Marcuse · 282 pages
Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
Michael Lewis · 320 pages
Argues that post-crisis Wall Street continues to be controlled by large banks and explains how a small, diverse group of Wall Street men have banded together to reform the financial markets.
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
The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30)
Mark Bauerlein · 264 pages
This shocking, lively exposure of the intellectual vacuity of today's under thirty set reveals the disturbing and, ultimately, incontrovertible truth: cyberculture is turning us into a nation of know-nothings.Can a nation continue to enjoy political and economic predominance if its citizens refuse to grow up?For decades, concern has been brewing about the dumbed-down popular culture available to y
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
Thomas L. Friedman · 600 pages
When scholars write the history of the world twenty years from now, what will they say was the most crucial development at the dawn of the 21st century--the attacks of 9/11, or the convergence of technology and events that allowed India, China, and so many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes