100 books like Infomocracy

Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, was not, he said, “a book about what is, but a book about what could be.” Further, “it is mostly about managers and engineers” and more precisely, about automation and what American society could become if machines took over work, and labor, as we have known it, was made redundant. His imagined city of Illium was socially and physically split between the managers and engineers of its industrial plant and the former workers had been displaced by automation and now led meaningless lives of busy work provided by the government. The engineer Paul Proteus becomes disaffected and joins in a revolution being plotted against the new order. They succeed, but soon realize that the people of Illium were “already eager to recreate the same old nightmare.” The logic of the machine continued its sway.

I like that you have to watch Vonnegut carefully.… show more.

I had to include this book in the list. It’s not a business book, per se—this is hard science fiction—but the Earth’s response to a far-off alien invasion leads to all kinds of business and technological innovation, from “hibernation chambers” to the development of spacecraft that can travel at close to light-speed.

I then went on to watch the Netflix series, but the book is the real deal. I’m a slow reader, which meant I spent at least a year reading through all three books—but it was so worth it!

William Gibson’s latest novel Agency is as prophetic as his establishment of cyberspace and cyberpunk culture in the 80s and 90s. His latest novel chronicles reality-busting skirmishes among gangsterish multi-generational families based in a glitzy post-apocalyptic 22nd century London. In this future, nano-machines conjure luxuries from nothing while sky-high scrubbers struggle to restore a ravaged atmosphere after the jackpot, a global environmental catastrophe. Agency tells a heist-type story about the emergence of Eunice, a sentient AI born in our stub out of American special operations research. Leading a cross-dimensional band of techies, publicists, hipsters, and hackers, ace software designer Verity fights to introduce Eunice to her world in order to save it. Yet Gibson is telling us about today's ecological and technological forces. He writes of pre-jackpot life in our era: “‘Did we ever come to terms with the sheer cluelessness of it?’

This is an absolute classic of the genre. Brooks draws in various ‘accounts’ of a recent zombie outbreak and structures them as if the broad details are common knowledge to his in-universe audience.

This approach means the real-world reader is always discovering new details and nuggets of information in a way that really whets the appetite while increasing the sense of horror at the way events unfolded in a world that isn’t quite our own.

There’s no better place to start exploring the revolutionary potential of renewable energy than Revolutionary Power. The new justice tsar at the US Department of Energy, Baker takes you inside the struggle of African American communities with the environmental injustices of fossil fuels. No industry has created more inequality, violence, injustice, pollution, and corruption, worldwide, over its history than energy. The great hope of renewable energy is to solve climate change while also restoring justice: creating new energy technologies and also new practices of energy development, new forms of ownership, and new ways to integrate technology generatively into communities and landscapes. In the story of her life and her community, Baker illustrates why the quest for energy justice and democracy is critical to the success of the clean energy revolution.

Humans are creatures driven by what we see happening around us and the stories we tell about those events. And, for more and more of us, cities are where daily life happens. So, the future of cities as places and spaces of human engagement and interaction really matters. Energy Overlays and the Land Art Generator’s other amazing books create a window into how renewable energy might transform the future of urban spaces, places, people, and stories. Prompted by a simple question, “What if energy was also public art?” the Land Art Generator hosts bi-annual global design competitions in collaboration with some of the world’s most iconic cities. The result is a rich and magical tour of the urban future, envisioned by leading architects, urban planners, and energy imaginaries.

At their best, anthropologists open up for readers the infinite variety of what it means to be human. Laura Watts is the best. More than just an incisive cultural analyst, Watts is a skilled poet and storyteller. Her book about renewable energy innovation in the Orkney Islands takes us, literally and figuratively, to the end of the world. We learn what it means to live in a world wrought by energy technologies. We walk among all different kinds of people who have the imagination and the gumption to try to re-imagine and re-energize that world in radically new ways. And along the way, we begin to see how all of those people come together, in one place, in odd collaborations, to make futures for the rest of us.

Power. We all need it. In the future, a lot of it will be solar. By 2050, half or more of global energy will come via photovoltaic technologies. That’s 100+ billion solar panels, with an annual churn of 2-4 billion. Which makes the solar industry one of the most important on the planet. Solar Power takes a hard look inside the solar industry: its materials, processes, facilities, workforces, waste streams, and landscapes. Mulvaney pulls no punches, but his fundamental message is simple: there are a lot of different ways to make and deploy 100 billion solar panels. The choices we make will have huge implications for how the benefits, costs, and risks of solar energy get distributed across different groups of people. Just like any other giant industry.

The year is 2095, and human beings must take performance enhancement pills to compete with automated systems. The future in Machinehood could be ours tomorrow.

Welga and Nithya, the novel’s protagonists, are constantly on the verge of burnout while pushing themselves to perform. A mysterious terrorist organization called the Machinehood turns up to demand equal rights for AI, and that humans put an end to pill manufacturing, triggering events around the world. Parts of the novel are set in Chennai, India, and despite all its futuristic advances, the city retains its present day identity. Machinehood also portrays women in technologically-driven spaces, which is something I'm always rooting for.

Autonomous is one of those books you finish reading and then just want to sit and stare off into space for a while.

The story takes place in a future world where Big Pharma runs basically the entire show. The main character is a drug pirate, fabricating expensive drugs to provide them to the population on the cheap… but when one of her fabbed drugs causes some horrible side effects, it kicks off a domino effect of chaos and death.

Other characters include a military agent sent to hunt our drug pirate down and his robotic, AI-powered partner. Every character is riddled with absolutely deal-breaking flaws, so if you’re looking for heroes, you’ve come to the wrong place. The story raises questions about morality, freedom, AI, and more. I can’t recommend it enough!