100 books like Facebook

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.

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.

AI will dramatically affect our lives in diverse ways, and this book is a superb guide to the key issues and ways that this might occur.

A main strength of the book is the exploration of a diverse range of possible futures without being unreasonably committed to one particular possibility. No one knows exactly what the future holds, so it is wise to consider different scenarios to open up our imaginations and challenge hidden assumptions.

Having depth as well as breadth, it’s a great, wide-ranging analysis of how AI will affect humanity. 

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.

As with the creation of 2001, this 2009 book was written simultaneously with a screenplay, by Aaron Sorkin for The Social Network. As author Ben Mezrich admits up front, entire scenes and stretches of dialog are made up, making this account of Mark Zuckerberg’s real experiences conjuring Facebook as a student at Harvard more like a work of fiction. While the book is wildly entertaining, it falls way short as a cautionary tale about the social media platform that would end up doing damage to our democracy as a petri dish of misinformation and manipulation. Only at the very end of the 2010 movie do we receive notes of alarm, thanks to the film’s closing song. “Now that you know who you are,” the Beatles sing in "Baby You’re a Rich Man", “what do you want to be?” It suggests that Facebook’s business plan… show more.

Do you still have a Facebook account? I do—though I feel increasingly torn about it. I still use it for professional purposes, but part of me would gladly delete it (not, you know, that anything would actually get deleted, I suspect…). Christopher Wylie agrees. This wonderful account traces his role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where a mysterious “political consulting firm” used Facebook data to help swing the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s successful presidential run. It’s a very personal story, which I love, and we get an insider’s view not only on the shocking and frankly terrifying practices Wylie became embroiled in, but also his own moral struggle to get out of them. A wonderful book.

A memoir that covers Losse’s experience working at Facebook from 2005 when she was the company’s 51st hire. Losse weaves her own experience—at first as a low-level employee in customer support and later as Mark Zuckerberg’s ghostwriter—with sharp analysis of Silicon Valley’s changing role in politics and culture. A powerful reckoning with her own complicity working for a company that exhibited dangerous “totalitarian” ambition from its very beginning.

What can you do if you’re gloomy about the state of the world? Rushkoff’s is a book in which the rich have largely given up on the all-in-it-together ideology of earlier times.

If the system is crumbing, can you get rich enough to escape before its final collapse? Reading Rushkoff’s book I wondered if the replacement of earlier times’ get-rich-quick schemes by today’s get-super-rich-super-quick offers explained how so many people were gulled by the fraudulent offers of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto hedge fund.

Suppose you do manage to quit these schemes with sufficient money before they crash. Where can you flee? New Zealand, Mars…? During the Pandemic we in New Zealand heard much about people who wanted to shelter in Jacinda Ardern’s Aotearoa. If rich escape fantasists Google “New Zealand” and “climate change” they might want to hold out for Mars.

Some of the characters in my book hope that… show more.

‘They trust me….dumb f*cks.’ This telling exchange from the Harvard days of Facebook co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg appears in An Ugly Truth, which shines a harsh light on the tech behemoth that, ultimately, is built on the data of billions of people. As Meta, Zuckerberg’s new business incarnation, wafts into the virtual worlds of the metaverse, the story of Facebook is far from over, which makes this engaging book a tad unsatisfying. Nonetheless, it is a vivid example of how with Big Data comes Big Responsibility.

More and more of our interactions occur via social media. This does more than poison our minds; it poisons our relationships, including our most intimate one: life partner. 

There are established downsides to social media, including its addictive nature and oxymoronic means of fomenting alienation. It promotes comparison-driven inferiority complexes, and allows racists and bigots to hide behind pseudonyms. 

But for marriages, social media’s most worrisome issue is its promotion of phoniness. Cyber platforms prompt people to portray themselves in a faux-optimized light – happier, wealthier, and more moral than they really are. They also promote groupthink and reticence driven by fear of backlash. 

A marriage in recovery requires two honest, unabashed partners. Two people trying to heal must minimize the festering wounds inherent in social media.