The best books about data that will blow your mind

Shortly after college, I was at a house party, and I headed into one of the hosts’ bedrooms to escape the ruckus. This book was sitting on their desk, and the cover looked intriguing, so I picked it up and started reading. I must have been there for an hour or more, reading story after story, while the party raged outside the door. 

Reading Borges felt like the discovery of the wellspring from whence everything else I loved had sprung. Here was fiction written in the earliest moments of the data revolution, fearlessly pursuing infinity and somehow capturing it so efficiently that it could be contained within a few pages of printed text.

Of course, “The Library of Babel” had been a touchstone in computer science and information science circles long before I discovered it, and it’s still the best shorthand way to express certain important concepts. It might be the single most insightful work of fiction about the internet, even though it was first published in 1941 (the same year that digital computing pioneer Alan Turing published The Applications of Probability to Cryptography).

Anyone with an interest in data science, statistics, information science, probability theory, or head-trippy speculative fictional narrative should have a copy of this book on their bedside table.

My friend Jesse Gilbert handed me his copy of Chaos in 1992 or 1993, shortly after he read it for a college class. “You have to read this book,” he insisted. “I need to talk about it with you.”

Chaos theory, which is the subject of Gleick’s nonfiction book, has become such a dominant trope in global fiction, the popular imagination, and meme culture that younger folks probably don’t realize how completely new this way of thinking was for most of us when the book was first published in 1987.

In the 1980s, science fiction and popular tech narratives were all about robots and spaceships, with a heavy dose of late-Cold War nuclear anxiety. Then Gleick published Chaos. Suddenly, it seemed like everyone was interested in fractals, parallel universes, and virtual worlds. The concepts of bounded infinities and multi-dimensional topographies opened up not just new types of narratives but a new kind of hope for a future in which we could escape the post-industrial prison of the 20th Century.

The dot-com internet boom was buoyed on this wave of (irrational?) optimism, and helped to fuel it. But I’m convinced that this new era in techno-social imagination was ushered in originally by Gleick’s book.

André Brock gives no fucks and takes none. As an academic, so many of the books I read—even the good ones—are couched in cautious language and speak from an imaginary non-place of dispassionate objectivity. Brock throws all that out the window and writes an impassioned, embodied, joyful, agitated, confusing, brilliant, opinionated, insightful, and ultimately, empirically supportable book, in his own unmistakable voice, about how and why Black people use the internet.

Though the book has many valuable findings and has already changed the practice of internet studies since its publication, the thing I love most about it is Brock’s own playfulness and his celebration of the social and political value of playfulness.

His key point is that data aren’t objective or neutral and that computing machines aren’t cold and calculating (even if that’s their job). Data and computers, he argues, are made by people and used by people, and the way we use these tools helps us express our identities and strengthen our communities — even when they’ve been designed to prevent us from doing so.

Full disclosure: Laura DeNardis is a good friend and former colleague of mine. But I was a fan before I was a friend, and thus far, The Internet In Everything is her crowning achievement, so I feel very comfortable listing it here as an absolute must-read.

When Laura told me she was going to write this book, my first thought was, “I wish I’d thought of that!” and my second thought, a nanosecond later, was, “Thank goodness I didn’t because she’ll do it a million times better.”

DeNardis is the reigning monarch of Internet Governance Studies, meaning she researches all the weird laws, policies, technologies, businesses, agencies, and practices that have built the internet and keep it ticking. You’d think the subject would be boring or impenetrable to us mere mortals, but her genius is in making it not only understandable but downright fascinating.

She understands the internet the way surgeons understand the human body or the way musicologists understand a song — from the inside out, with the ability to focus on every scale while never losing sight of the whole thing. And by the time you finish the book, you’ll feel like you do, too.

I’ve always been a big fan of books that explode the “great man” myth and lift the curtains to show all of the unsung heroes behind history’s greatest accomplishments. The sociologist Howard Becker’s classic Art Worlds did this for creative professions, and Kathy Kleiman’s Proving Ground does the same thing for digital computers.

The birth of modern computing is usually credited to the mathematician Alan Turing. But the actual work of programming the world’s first general purpose digital computer, named ENIAC, was undertaken by six remarkable women mathematicians (Kathleen McNulty, Jean Jennings Bartik, Frances Elizabeth Snyder, Frances Bilas Spence, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer and Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum) whose names were left out of the history books.

Author Kathy Kleiman has made it her life’s work to restore these trailblazers to their rightful place at the beginning of the data revolution that has radically changed global society over the past 80 years. In a global digital computing industry still plagued with sexism and credited to erstwhile “great men,” this book is a breath of fresh air and a welcome correction to the history books.