Recommended Reads: A Booklist!

cyberlyra

Readings about Big Tech, companies, characters, products, and services. A good place to start for those who are looking to learn more about the reasons #why we #optout.

Please include the author and title, and 1-2 lines about what it's about. We'd love to hear what you appreciated about the book too!

Links to www.bookshop.org instead of Amazon if possible please.

puck

Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja
A book about information science and the ways in which search engines, in particular, are encoded with the biases of the societies, governments, companies, and people who create them and then abstract the outcomes to obscure that bias, painting the result with a brush of "objectivity." Umoja also challenges the idea that representation of marginalized people within government and corporate structure will magically solve the problem, but that clear structural solutions are required
Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil
Another book about the social impact of algorithms, this focuses more on the particular problem of how algorithms serve the obscure the origins of bias. It has a broader approach in terms of application than the above text, looking at loan approval, criminal sentencing, etc. and really hones in on the triple threat of opacity, lack of regulation, and how algorithms serve as a way for the human actors involved to completely dodge accountability
Data Conscience by Dr Brandeis Marshall
This book takes a longer look at the history of how data (big data in particular) has been used to encode bias and harm, pulling examples, for instance, from the turn of the 20th Century. This book also is skewed more toward an audience of software engineers, offering critique for folks looking to build tools and products utilizing algorithms, networks, and big data. There's also a ton of footnotes and references to other work, plenty of rabbit holes to go down
More Everything Forever by Adam Becker
A look at what has somewhat recently been called the TESCREAL bundle ( read the excellent paper by Timnit Gebru and Emile Torres), the overlapping ideologies of silicon valley's oligarchs that span Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. It has a decent mix of demonstrating how these ideologies are based more in fiction and obtuse misunderstandings of science and reality as well as how these ideologies serve as a pretext for these oligarchs to capture as much real-world power as possible while excusing the destruction they facilitate in their quest for power by calling back to their unhinged fantasies
The Sirens' Call by Chris Hayes
This book really hones in on the "attention economy," looking at how so much technology is now focused on monteizing attention and the negative impacts that has on the separation between public and private spaces, as well as how it has commodified and extraction our attention from us as human beings. It goes into how these products are designed explicitly to subvert and control very essential parts of how our minds work and compel behavior to the benefit of companies seeking profit from every stimulus

Chelsea

Currently reading Means of Control: how the hidden alliance of tech and government is creating a new American suveillance state by Byron Tau (2024)- will edit with review/ synopsis when I'm done. Have folks read Surveillance Capitalism?