The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff · 15 Jan 2019 · 918pp · 257,605 words
their content) that are not owned by the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Zuboff, Shoshana, 1951- author. Title: The age of surveillance capitalism : the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power / Shoshana Zuboff. Description: First edition. | New York : PublicAffairs, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references
…
It is about the darkening of the digital dream and its rapid mutation into a voracious and utterly novel commercial project that I call surveillance capitalism. III. What Is Surveillance Capitalism? Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Although some of these data are applied to product or
…
our societies, our democracies, and our emerging information civilization are examined in detail in the coming chapters. The evidence and reasoning employed here suggest that surveillance capitalism is a rogue force driven by novel economic imperatives that disregard social norms and nullify the elemental rights associated with individual autonomy that are essential
…
key battleground upon which the possibility of a human future at the new frontier of power will be contested. IV. The Unprecedented One explanation for surveillance capitalism’s many triumphs floats above them all: it is unprecedented. The unprecedented is necessarily unrecognizable. When we encounter something unprecedented, we automatically interpret it
…
society, and imposing a totalizing collectivist vision of life in the hive, with surveillance capitalists and their data priesthood in charge of oversight and control. Surveillance capitalism and its rapidly accumulating instrumentarian power exceed the historical norms of capitalist ambitions, claiming dominion over human, societal, and political territories that range far beyond
…
years of experience in high-technology corporations and startups, primarily in Silicon Valley. These interviews were conducted as I developed my “ground truth” understanding of surveillance capitalism and its material infrastructure. Early on I approached a small number of highly respected data scientists, senior software developers, and specialists in the “internet
…
predictions that were sometimes right; His lucky guesses were rewarded well. —W. H. AUDEN SONNETS FROM CHINA, VI I. Google: The Pioneer of Surveillance Capitalism Google is to surveillance capitalism what the Ford Motor Company and General Motors were to mass-production–based managerial capitalism. New economic logics and their commercial models are discovered
…
“Data extraction and analysis,” Varian writes, “is what everyone is talking about when they talk about big data.” “Data” are the raw material necessary for surveillance capitalism’s novel manufacturing processes. “Extraction” describes the social relations and material infrastructure with which the firm asserts authority over those raw materials to achieve economies
…
logic of accumulation that also introduces its own distinctive laws of motion. Here and in following chapters, we will examine these foundational dynamics, including surveillance capitalism’s idiosyncratic economic imperatives defined by extraction and prediction, its unique approach to economies of scale and scope in raw-material supply, its necessary construction
…
differences for capitalism in these two moments of originality at Ford and Google. Ford’s inventions revolutionized production. Google’s inventions revolutionized extraction and established surveillance capitalism’s first economic imperative: the extraction imperative. The extraction imperative meant that raw-material supplies must be procured at an ever-expanding scale. Industrial capitalism
…
fabric of Facebook’s online culture, where they could “invite” users into a “conversation.”88 VIII. Summarizing the Logic and Operations of Surveillance Capitalism With Google in the lead, surveillance capitalism rapidly became the default model of information capitalism on the web and, as we shall see in coming chapters, gradually drew competitors from
…
shareholder governance exercises control over an increasingly universal means of social connection along with the information concealed in its networks. CHAPTER FIVE THE ELABORATION OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM: KIDNAP, CORNER, COMPETE All words like Peace and Love, all sane affirmative speech, had been soiled, profaned, debased to a horrid mechanical screech. —W.
…
are threatened as the division of learning drifts into pathology and injustice at the hands of the unprecedented asymmetries of knowledge and power that surveillance capitalism has achieved. Surveillance capitalism’s command of the division of learning in society begins with what I call the problem of the two texts. The specific mechanisms of
…
predicting, regulating, or prohibiting the activities of surveillance capitalists will fall short. The primary frameworks through which our societies have sought to assert control over surveillance capitalism’s audacity are those of “privacy rights” and “monopoly.” Neither the pursuit of privacy regulations nor the imposition of constraints on traditional monopoly practices has
…
the prediction imperative insists on surplus culled from these new flows and surveillance capitalists fill the front seats of the classroom of digital omniscience. IV. Surveillance Capitalism’s Realpolitik Waning levels of government leadership and funding for “ubiquitous computing” leave the technology companies to lead in basic research and applications, each
…
conducive to a democracy. And fundamentally, information warfare is not conducive to democracy.85 This “warfare” and its structure of invasion and conquest represent surveillance capitalism’s standard operating procedures to which billions of innocents are subjected each day, as rendition operations violate all boundaries and modification operations claim dominion over
…
are for them and how profitable certain behaviors are for us. Although it is still possible to imagine automated behavioral modification without surveillance capitalism, it is not possible to imagine surveillance capitalism without the marriage of behavior modification and the technological means to automate its application. This marriage is essential to economies of action
…
therefore, it was espoused, could design highly effective plans.14 Varian deftly swaps out socialism’s “new man” and installs instead a market defined by surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives, expressed through a ubiquitous computational architecture, the machine intelligence capabilities to which data are continuously supplied, the analytics that discern patterns,
…
that keep us ignorant of its practices, and to insist on the conditions of lawlessness required for these operations. These declarations institutionalized surveillance capitalism as a market form. 3. Historical context: Surveillance capitalism found shelter in the neoliberal zeitgeist that equated government regulation of business with tyranny. This “paranoid style” favored self-management regimes
…
the latent needs of second-modernity individuals seeking resources for effective life in an increasingly hostile institutional environment. Once bitten, the apple was irresistible. As surveillance capitalism spread across the internet, the means of social participation become coextensive with the means of behavioral modification. The exploitation of second-modernity needs that enabled
…
computer mediation—devices, apps, connection—enters the scene in a relentless deluge of inevitabilist rhetoric, successfully distracting us from the highly intentional and historically contingent surveillance capitalism within. New institutional facts proliferate and stabilize the new practices. We fall into resignation and a sense of helplessness. 14. The ideology of human frailty
…
monitors, computes, and modifies human behavior. Big Other combines these functions of knowing and doing to achieve a pervasive and unprecedented means of behavioral modification. Surveillance capitalism’s economic logic is directed through Big Other’s vast capabilities to produce instrumentarian power, replacing the engineering of souls with the engineering of behavior
…
a full-blown instrumentarian society based on the pervasive outfitting and measurement of human behavior for the purposes of modification, control, and—in light of surveillance capitalism’s commercial dominance of the networked sphere—profit. Pentland insists that “social phenomena are really just aggregations of billions of small transactions between individuals.…”
…
tighten their grasp, and the system flourishes. Industrial capitalism depended upon the exploitation and control of nature, with catastrophic consequences that we only now recognize. Surveillance capitalism, I have suggested, depends instead upon the exploitation and control of human nature. The market reduces us to our behavior, transformed into another fictional
…
toward certainty and the promise of guaranteed outcomes. These operations mean that the supply and demand of behavioral futures markets are rendered in infinite detail. Surveillance capitalism thus replaces mystery with certainty as it substitutes rendition, behavioral modification, and prediction for the old “unsurveyable pattern.” This is a fundamental reversal of
…
-value movement and globalization went a long way toward destroying this centuries-old social contract between capitalism and its communities, substituting formal indifference for reciprocity. Surveillance capitalism goes further. It not only jettisons Smith, but it also formally rescinds any remaining reciprocities with its societies. First, surveillance capitalists no longer rely
…
a few examples—social relations are no longer founded on mutual exchange. In these and many other instances, products and services are merely hosts for surveillance capitalism’s parasitic operations. Second, by historical standards the large surveillance capitalists employ relatively few people compared to their unprecedented computational resources. This pattern, in
…
professional journalism on the internet. Both corporations inserted themselves between publishers and their populations, subjecting journalistic “content” to the same categories of equivalence that dominate surveillance capitalism’s other landscapes. In a formal sense, professional journalism is the precise opposite of radical indifference. The journalist’s job is to produce news and
…
as those forces learn to exploit the blind eye of radical indifference and escalate the perversion of learning in an open society. IV. What Is Surveillance Capitalism? Surveillance capitalism’s successful claims to freedom and knowledge, its structural independence from people, its collectivist ambitions, and the radical indifference that is necessitated, enabled, and
…
a special issue of the Journal of Information Technology devoted to the theme of “big data,” they enthusiastically embraced my first academic paper on surveillance capitalism, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” and helped speed its way to publication. Special thanks to the Senior Scholars of the International Conference
…
BusinessWeek.com and Fast Company. strategy+business magazine named Zuboff one of the eleven most original business thinkers in the world. Her 2015 article on surveillance capitalism, “Big Other,” received the Best Paper Award from the International Conference on Information Systems. For more information, see shoshanazuboff.com. @shoshanazuboff Praise for The
…
I. Human Natural Resources II. The Cry Freedom Strategy III. Shelter: The Neoliberal Legacy IV. Shelter: Surveillance Exceptionalism V. Fortifications CHAPTER FIVE The Elaboration of Surveillance Capitalism: Kidnap, Corner, Compete I. The Extraction Imperative II. Cornered III. The Dispossession Cycle Stage One: Incursion Stage Two: Habituation Stage Three: Adaptation Stage Four:
…
EIGHTEEN A Coup from Above I. Freedom and Knowledge II. After Reciprocity III. The New Collectivism and Its Masters of Radical Indifference IV. What Is Surveillance Capitalism? V. Surveillance Capitalism and Democracy VI. Be the Friction NOTES CHAPTER ONE 1. Martin Hilbert, “Technological Information Inequality as an Incessantly Moving Target: The Redistribution of Information
…
modernity; second modernity; third modernity Mohammed, Jahangir, 227 Monarchical Edict of 1513 (Requirimiento), 178 Monitor, 325 monopoly (antitrust): as category that falls short in contesting surveillance capitalism, 14, 23, 194, 344, 486; as means of cornering behavioral surplus supply routes, 132–138 moral life of civilization: shaped by practices of capitalism,
…
and industrial capitalism, 94, 345–346, 470, 515 Nazism, 355 neofeudalism, 44 neoliberalism: as shelter for rise of surveillance capitalism, 101, 107–112, 341; surveillance capitalism’s origins in, 504–505 neoliberal market economics, 37–41; helps surveillance capitalism flourish, 54; increase in inequalities under, 42–45; vs individualization, 18, 37. See also Friedman, Milton; Hayek
…
with social media, 462, 466–467; mental health consequences of, 463–465, 466–467; operating through privatized digital spaces, 456 social connection: dependent upon surveillance capitalism, 383, 455–456; surveillance capitalism offers, 383 “social credit” system, China’s, 388–394 social Darwinism, 106 social efficiency (Pentland), 429, 438 social graphs: Facebook’s, 92,
…
387–388; Microsoft patent for preempting human behavior, 412; and Pentland’s work on sociometrics, 425; use of social media, 173–174, 386, 388, 393 surveillance capital, 94 surveillance capitalism: awareness as threat to, 307–308; dressed up in rhetoric of empowerment, 10; emergence of, 52–55; expansion into offline world, 10, 19–20
…
Taínos (indigenous people), 12, 177–178, 193 targeted applications, 217, 250 Tea Act (1773), 503 TechCrunch, 317, 318, 458–459 technological “drift,” 226 technologies, surveillance capitalism confused with (“puppet master vs puppet”), 14–17, 238, 352, 376 technology addiction, hand-and-glove relationship of, 449–453 technology of human behavior, 369
Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
by Liz Pelly · 7 Jan 2025 · 293pp · 104,461 words
you have within the Spotify app is going to be recorded.” As a twenty-first-century social media user, familiar with the basic concepts of surveillance capitalism—what the author Shoshana Zuboff calls “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction
The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (And Who Benefits)
by Maximilian Kasy · 15 Jan 2025 · 209pp · 63,332 words
has motivated the Harvard Business School social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff to describe the way that the tech industry operates as a new form of capitalism: surveillance capitalism. Data in the public domain—created for public benefit by countless writers, researchers, coders, and artists—are a second source. Public domain data are available
…
. Oxford University Press, 1995. Wright, E. O. How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the Twenty-First Century. Verso, 2019. Zuboff, S. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile, 2019. Part IV: Regulating Algorithms Acemoglu, D., and D. Autor. “Skills, Tasks
…
, 26–27 stochastic gradient descent, 49 stock options, 126 stratified sampling, 198 supervised learning, 10, 29–36. See also deep learning; prediction; self-supervised learning surveillance capitalism, 85 survey responses, 136–38 Sweden, 158–60 Swedish Trade Union Confederation, 159 symbolic paradigm, 44 taste-based discrimination, 166–69 TD-Gammon, 61, 63
Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century
by W. David Marx · 18 Nov 2025 · 642pp · 142,332 words
. What once sounded paranoid—the idea that every online action could be tracked and weaponized—suddenly became undeniable. By 2018, Shoshana Zuboff coined the term surveillance capitalism to describe these practices, framing targeted advertising as an “assault on human autonomy” and a “coup from above.” In light of these new developments, the
…
TEXT “logical end of this”: Morozov, “Two Decades of the Web.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “assault on human autonomy”: Joanna Kavenna, “Shoshana Zuboff: ‘Surveillance Capitalism Is an Assault on Human Autonomy,’ ” Guardian, October 4, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/04/shoshana-zuboff
…
-surveillance-capitalism-assault-human-automomy-digital-privacy. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “catalysed awareness”: “AI and Problems of Scale,” Benedict Evans, April 29, 2024, https://www.
…
., 84 Sun Yitian, 252 Super Bowl, 46, 185, 241–42, 271 “Superthug” (song), 28 Supreme, 31, 130, 247, 249–50, 251 Surowiecki, James, 84–85 surveillance capitalism, 163 Survivor (TV series), 74–76, 180 Sweeney, Sydney, 215 Sweetie Pie (film), 44 Swifties, 172–73, 176, 178 Swift, Scott, 217–18 Swift, Taylor
The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity
by Tim Wu · 4 Nov 2025 · 246pp · 65,143 words
convincing people to click on ads. The most striking version of this theory comes from the work of Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. That book, published in 2019, draws on Zuboff’s experience as a graduate student working with B. F. Skinner, the most famous behavioral theorist of
…
(2013–2027),” Oberlo, accessed November 22, 2024, https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/google-ad-revenue. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Cecilia Rikap, Capitalism, Power and Innovation: Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism Uncovered (New York: Routledge, 2021). BACK TO
…
, 45, 85–87, 169 revenue, 8, 52–53, 85 vs. users, competing interests between, 45, 52–53, 67–68 aerospace industry, 35 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff), 87 AI. See artificial intelligence Akerlof, George, 16 Alcoa, 28 AlexNet, 93 allegiance to brand, 72, 100–102 Altman, Sam, 6, 94, 142–43
Money in the Metaverse: Digital Assets, Online Identities, Spatial Computing and Why Virtual Worlds Mean Real Business
by David G. W. Birch and Victoria Richardson · 28 Apr 2024 · 249pp · 74,201 words
now associated with the current web2 environment, and the immersive properties of the Metaverse could raise significant threats to human agency and human rights as ‘surveillance capitalism’ expands and authoritarian governments take advantage of these new technologies. We take both of these starting points very seriously, and in this book we will
Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
by Harsha Walia · 9 Feb 2021
like Amazon, Palantir, Elbit Systems, and European Dynamics. Migrants and refugees are at the forefront of becoming, as Shoshana Zuboff calls it, “the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation.”19 These physical, digital, and symbolic changes to border
…
Miller, Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2014), 42. 19.Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019), 10. 20.Reece Jones, Border Walls: Security and the
The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism
by Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias · 19 Aug 2019 · 458pp · 116,832 words
and Capitalism Why is it that so far we have talked simply of capitalism and not digital capitalism, informational capitalism, communicative capitalism, platform capitalism, or surveillance capitalism, to name some rival terms?131 The reason is straightforward. No convincing argument has yet been made that capitalism today is anything other than what
…
of information” is growing.132 Surveillance is certainly part of this, again as we have emphasized, but not sufficiently to brand today’s capitalism as surveillance capitalism. For, within the longer history of colonialism and capitalism, surveillance has often been the accompaniment to the direct appropriation of laboring bodies for value (think
…
Stop It. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 2011. Zuboff, Shoshana. “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization.” Journal of Information Technology 30, no. 1 (2015): 75–89. Zuboff, Shoshana. In the Age of the Smart
Four Battlegrounds
by Paul Scharre · 18 Jan 2023
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The U.S. government, by contrast, has taken a more laissez-faire approach to regulating technology, allowing the growth of “surveillance capitalism” in which big tech companies collect and store massive amounts of personal data. (Although political winds in Washington are starting to shift with a growing
…
in the United States. “The world is essentially being put forward two fairly bad proposals” for tech governance, she said. “One is the U.S. surveillance capitalism model, driven by big companies and essentially is about us all being herded into particular directions to spend money. Then the other is the Chinese
…
Emerging Technology, July 2020), https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/messier-than-oil-assessing-data-advantage-in-military-ai/. 21surveillance capitalism: Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, January 15, 2019), https://www.amazon.com/Age
…
-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Frontier/dp/1610395697. 22900 million internet users as of 2020: “Number of Internet Users in China from 2008 to 2020,” Statista, 2021, https://www.
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI
by Yuval Noah Harari · 9 Sep 2024 · 566pp · 169,013 words
they charge “bad drivers” and lower the premiums for “good drivers.”43 The American scholar Shoshana Zuboff has termed this ever-expanding commercial monitoring system “surveillance capitalism.”44 In addition to all these varieties of top-down surveillance, there are peer-to-peer systems in which individuals constantly monitor one another. For
…
Use,” Washington Post, April 25, 2023, www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/04/25/data-centers-drought-water-use/. 47. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2018); Mejias and Couldry, Data Grab; Brian Huseman (Amazon vice
…
/article/53vm7n/inside-stalkerware-surveillance-market-flexispy-retina-x. 42. Mejias and Couldry, Data Grab, 90–94. 43. Ibid., 156–58. 44. Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism. 45. Rafael Bravo, Sara Catalán, and José M. Pina, “Gamification in Tourism and Hospitality Review Platforms: How to R.A.M.P. Up Users’ Motivation
…
, doi.org/10.2307/1960864. CHAPTER 10: TOTALITARIANISM: ALL POWER TO THE ALGORITHMS? 1. See, for example, the otherwise excellent and insightful Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism; Fisher, Chaos Machine; Christian, Alignment Problem; D’Ignazio and Klein, Data Feminism; Costanza-Chock. Design Justice. Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and
…
, 2023, www.aspistrategist.org.au/examining-chinese-citizens-views-on-state-surveillance/; Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonized; Cain, Perfect Police State. 25. Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism; PHQ Team, “Survey: Americans Divided on Social Credit System,” PrivacyHQ, 2022, privacyhq.com/news/social-credit-how-do-i-stack-up/. 26. Lee, AI Superpowers
Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson · 15 May 2023 · 619pp · 177,548 words
The Smartphone Society
by Nicole Aschoff
Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology
by Anu Bradford · 25 Sep 2023 · 898pp · 236,779 words
Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World
by Bruce Schneier · 3 Sep 2018 · 448pp · 117,325 words
Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road
by Matthew B. Crawford · 8 Jun 2020 · 386pp · 113,709 words
Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future
by Ben Tarnoff · 13 Jun 2022 · 234pp · 67,589 words
Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US
by Rana Foroohar · 5 Nov 2019 · 380pp · 109,724 words
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein · 11 Sep 2023
The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire
by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson · 14 Apr 2020 · 491pp · 141,690 words
The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future
by Noreena Hertz · 13 May 2020 · 506pp · 133,134 words
Reset
by Ronald J. Deibert · 14 Aug 2020
Chokepoint Capitalism
by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow · 26 Sep 2022 · 396pp · 113,613 words
New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale · 14 May 2020 · 1,172pp · 114,305 words
Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
by Brett Scott · 4 Jul 2022 · 308pp · 85,850 words
Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom
by Grace Blakeley · 11 Mar 2024 · 371pp · 137,268 words
Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks
by Scott J. Shapiro · 523pp · 154,042 words
System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein · 6 Sep 2021
Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
by Douglas Rushkoff · 7 Sep 2022 · 205pp · 61,903 words
How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen · 1 Mar 2018 · 308pp · 85,880 words
The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us
by James Ball · 19 Aug 2020 · 268pp · 76,702 words
Platform Capitalism
by Nick Srnicek · 22 Dec 2016 · 116pp · 31,356 words
Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside
by Xiaowei Wang · 12 Oct 2020 · 196pp · 61,981 words
Artificial Whiteness
by Yarden Katz
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
by Cory Doctorow · 6 Oct 2025 · 313pp · 94,415 words
The Twittering Machine
by Richard Seymour · 20 Aug 2019 · 297pp · 83,651 words
To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov · 15 Nov 2013 · 606pp · 157,120 words
Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI
by Madhumita Murgia · 20 Mar 2024 · 336pp · 91,806 words
Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age
by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne · 9 Sep 2019 · 482pp · 121,173 words
The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines
by William Davidow and Michael Malone · 18 Feb 2020 · 304pp · 80,143 words
They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy
by Lawrence Lessig · 5 Nov 2019 · 404pp · 115,108 words
The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot
by Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy · 14 Apr 2020
Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again
by Johann Hari · 25 Jan 2022 · 390pp · 120,864 words
Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy
by Christopher Mims · 13 Sep 2021 · 385pp · 112,842 words
The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin · 14 Sep 2021 · 524pp · 130,909 words
The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt
by Sinan Aral · 14 Sep 2020 · 475pp · 134,707 words
The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity
by Amy Webb · 5 Mar 2019 · 340pp · 97,723 words
Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider · 10 Sep 2018 · 326pp · 91,559 words
Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet
by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider · 14 Aug 2017 · 237pp · 67,154 words
Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil · 25 Feb 2020 · 239pp · 80,319 words
How to Stand Up to a Dictator
by Maria Ressa · 19 Oct 2022
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
by Karen Hao · 19 May 2025 · 660pp · 179,531 words
Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children
by Susan Linn · 12 Sep 2022 · 415pp · 102,982 words
How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy)
by Benjamin Peters · 2 Jun 2016 · 518pp · 107,836 words
Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them
by Dan Bouk · 22 Aug 2022 · 424pp · 123,180 words
This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain
by William Davies · 28 Sep 2020 · 210pp · 65,833 words
Badvertising
by Andrew Simms · 314pp · 81,529 words
The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism
by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski · 5 Mar 2019 · 202pp · 62,901 words
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
by Vauhini Vara · 8 Apr 2025 · 301pp · 105,209 words
Permanent Record
by Edward Snowden · 16 Sep 2019 · 324pp · 106,699 words
Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car
by Anthony M. Townsend · 15 Jun 2020 · 362pp · 97,288 words
Infinite Detail
by Tim Maughan · 1 Apr 2019 · 303pp · 81,071 words
The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy
by Matthew Hindman · 24 Sep 2018
12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson · 15 Mar 2021 · 256pp · 73,068 words
Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants
by Maurice E. Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi · 14 May 2020 · 511pp · 132,682 words
Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business
by Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro · 30 Aug 2021 · 345pp · 92,063 words
The Numerati
by Stephen Baker · 11 Aug 2008 · 265pp · 74,000 words
The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett · 4 Apr 2018 · 170pp · 49,193 words
Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
by Brett Christophers · 17 Nov 2020 · 614pp · 168,545 words
Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
by Kyle Chayka · 15 Jan 2024 · 321pp · 105,480 words
The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource
by Chris Hayes · 28 Jan 2025 · 359pp · 100,761 words
The Long History of the Future: Why Tomorrow's Technology Still Isn't Here
by Nicole Kobie · 3 Jul 2024 · 348pp · 119,358 words
Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall Street
by Jackson Lears
The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians
by Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar · 14 Oct 2024 · 175pp · 46,192 words
Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance
by Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge · 29 Mar 2020 · 159pp · 42,401 words
Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie · 8 Oct 2019
The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World
by David Sax · 15 Jan 2022 · 282pp · 93,783 words
An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination
by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang · 12 Jul 2021 · 372pp · 100,947 words
Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics
by Peter Geoghegan · 2 Jan 2020 · 388pp · 111,099 words
Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence
by James Bridle · 6 Apr 2022 · 502pp · 132,062 words
Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation
by Kevin Roose · 9 Mar 2021 · 208pp · 57,602 words
Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control
by Stuart Russell · 7 Oct 2019 · 416pp · 112,268 words
People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent
by Joseph E. Stiglitz · 22 Apr 2019 · 462pp · 129,022 words
Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs
by Kerry Howley · 21 Mar 2023
Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News
by Eric Berkowitz · 3 May 2021 · 412pp · 115,048 words
The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans
by Eben Kirksey · 10 Nov 2020 · 599pp · 98,564 words
Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back
by Mark O'Connell · 13 Apr 2020 · 213pp · 70,742 words
AI in Museums: Reflections, Perspectives and Applications
by Sonja Thiel and Johannes C. Bernhardt · 31 Dec 2023 · 321pp · 113,564 words
Humankind: A Hopeful History
by Rutger Bregman · 1 Jun 2020 · 578pp · 131,346 words
The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future
by Orly Lobel · 17 Oct 2022 · 370pp · 112,809 words
How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World
by Dambisa Moyo · 3 May 2021 · 272pp · 76,154 words
The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge · 1 Sep 2020 · 134pp · 41,085 words
Facebook: The Inside Story
by Steven Levy · 25 Feb 2020 · 706pp · 202,591 words
Uncharted: How to Map the Future
by Margaret Heffernan · 20 Feb 2020 · 335pp · 97,468 words
Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy
by Andrew Yang · 15 Nov 2021
Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives
by Michael A. Heller and James Salzman · 2 Mar 2021 · 332pp · 100,245 words
Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals
by Oliver Bullough · 10 Mar 2022 · 257pp · 80,698 words
A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back
by Bruce Schneier · 7 Feb 2023 · 306pp · 82,909 words
Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business
by Ken Auletta · 4 Jun 2018 · 379pp · 109,223 words
Equality
by Darrin M. McMahon · 14 Nov 2023 · 534pp · 166,876 words
The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality
by Kathryn Paige Harden · 20 Sep 2021 · 375pp · 102,166 words
The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto
by Benjamin Wallace · 18 Mar 2025 · 431pp · 116,274 words
Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language
by Adam Aleksic · 15 Jul 2025 · 278pp · 71,701 words
Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City
by Richard Sennett · 9 Apr 2018
The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It
by Stuart Maconie · 5 Mar 2020 · 300pp · 106,520 words
Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart
by Nicholas Carr · 28 Jan 2025 · 231pp · 85,135 words
Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems
by Martin Kleppmann · 17 Apr 2017
Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now
by Vincent Ialenti · 22 Sep 2020 · 224pp · 69,593 words
Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno
by Nancy Jo Sales · 17 May 2021 · 445pp · 135,648 words
IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives
by Chris Stedman · 19 Oct 2020 · 307pp · 101,998 words
Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems
by Martin Kleppmann · 16 Mar 2017 · 1,237pp · 227,370 words
The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera · 10 Mar 2020 · 356pp · 106,161 words
Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
by J. Bradford Delong · 6 Apr 2020 · 593pp · 183,240 words
The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge · 2 Jun 2021 · 693pp · 169,849 words
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company
by William Dalrymple · 9 Sep 2019 · 812pp · 205,147 words
Greater: Britain After the Storm
by Penny Mordaunt and Chris Lewis · 19 May 2021 · 516pp · 116,875 words
Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
by Mark Bergen · 5 Sep 2022 · 642pp · 141,888 words