Reading List

I like to keep track of the books that I read, and list ones that I find especially thought-provoking and relevant here. Though I used Goodreads for many years, I’ve recently switched over to Bookworm Reads.

2023

• The Equality Machine by Orly Lobel
• Chip War by Chris Miller
• The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian
• Human Compatible by Stuart Russell
• The Information by James Gleick
• The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar
• God Human Animal Machine by Meghan O’Gieblyn

2022

• Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing by Christopher Bail
• Lurking: How A Person Became A User by Joanne McNeil
• Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside by Xiaowei Wang
• The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age by Danielle Keats Citron

2021

• If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore
• Ghost Work by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri
• Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation by Andrew Marantz
• Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection by Ethan Zuckerman
• Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin
• Shadow Network: Media, Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right by Anne Nelson
• Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age by Cory Doctorow
• This is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth
• This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev

2020

• Tools and Weapons: The Promise and Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith
• The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth by Samuel Woolley
• Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin
• The Perfect Weapon: How the Cyber Arms Race Set the World Afire by David E. Sanger
• Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media by Sarah T. Roberts
• The Cult of the Constitution by Mary Anne Franks
• Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do about It by Richard Stengel
• The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser
• Making Sense of the Alt-Right by George Hawley

2019

• Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet by David Kaye
• Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg
• Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn
• LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media by P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking
• Merchants of Truth: The Business of Facts and The Future of News by Jill Abramson
• Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher
• The Internet of Garbage by Sarah Jeong

2018

• The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball by Noam Cohen
• Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling
• Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
• Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang
• Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble
• God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State by Lawrence Wright