The best books about Silicon Valley’s impact on everyday life

Lewis has a great reporter’s gift for seeking out great real-life stories you maybe didn’t know existed.

Moneyball takes us through a year at the Oakland A’s baseball team, and its manager’s experiment in applying statistical analysis to assess player value. I’m currently writing a book about sport and modernity, so for me this is always the book to start with.

There’s nothing narrow, though, about Lewis’s focus, and his message about the world’s drift toward quantification is even more relevant today. To say this is just ‘a book about baseball’ is like saying The Odyssey is just a book about travel.

A physics professor at MIT, Tegmark made his name with a (for me) fairly impenetrable book about mathematics and cosmology.

This, his second and much more accessible book, is a tour around the other side of his work, exploring the theories and implications of AI (Tegmark is a co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, devoted to looking at these questions).

Both an exploration of AI’s benefits and a stark warning about its dangers, Life 3.0 also reads as a star-studded memoir of a scientific life. Such is Tegmark’s curiosity and enthusiasm that he makes AI’s possible conquering of humanity feel like another great intellectual adventure (which it probably is).

Levy is the great Silicon Valley insider-reporter, a tech fan who gets close to the action while remaining clear-sighted and critical about his subjects: inevitably, his weighty book about Mark Zuckerberg’s rise and subsequent travails was indispensable for my own work.

Like the film and its topic, Levy’s book is partly inspiring, frequently troubling, but overall offers an insightful vision of how and why Facebook defined and shaped the first part of the new century. It’s also a reminder of how, if anything, The Social Network was overly nice in its depiction of Facebook’s founder.

As suggested by my recommendation of Levy’s Facebook, I’m a sucker for a big book about tech entrepreneurs, especially when the subject is as prickly and culturally relevant as Steve Jobs (the book also inspired Aaron Sorkin’s post-Social Network screenplay for 2015’s Steve Jobs, another great Silicon Valley film).

While I’m not an Apple fanboy, I am a fan of Pixar, the other company for which Jobs was CEO. Isaacson’s biography in turn offers a fast-paced history of the way computers and computing, via Apple’s designs and Pixar’s films, stopped being objects only for offices and science fiction, and became part of our everyday landscape.

Like him or not, we’re all partly living in Steve Jobs’ world.

How did Hush Puppies become cool again? This is just one of the questions answered in Gladwell’s first and possibly still most influential book.

Gladwell is essentially a detective of cultural phenomena, which is probably why his writing has such an influence on what I do; both in terms of my book and my current work on sport.

While it never actually mentions computers, The Tipping Point, which analyses the social forces, networks, and mathematics that make things go viral (before the phrase ‘go viral’ went, well, viral) anticipates the impacts of Web 2.0. Little wonder that Sean Parker, of Napster and later Facebook fame, was so fond of quoting it.