100 books like The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Published in 1985 partly to explain how a mediocre but persuasive Hollywood actor could become president of the United States, this influential book posits that television, by its very nature, debases civic discourse by replacing education with simplistic, misleading, and often violent entertainment.

It is the theoretical analog of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and proposes that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was a more accurate predictor of today than George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four because pleasure is a more effective means of mass control than force.

Like Mumford, Postman was critical of many of the uses of technology that were eagerly adopted by most. Dying in 2003, he did not live to see universal addiction to hand-held screens, but he accurately predicted the political and social consequences.

Minsky’s thesis on financial instability is a brilliant intellectual blow against the liberal legend concerning the balancing powers of (financial) markets.

It suggests that manifest crises and breakdowns are not simply caused by external tremors, by fiscal or political coups de théâtre; rather, they are brought about by the parameters and endogenous movements of the financial economy itself.

Unlike cybernetic and self-regulating systems, the financial market is inclined to be spooked by its own tranquillity and destabilized by its own stability. The very efficiency of its functioning turns out to be utterly dysfunctional.

Daniel Boorstin’s The Image is an amazing study by the former Librarian of Congress that first set in place many of the ideas about celebrities that are still with us today.

“The celebrity is a person who is known for [their] well-knowness,” Boorstin wrote. He describes “pseudo-events”, the manufactured illusions that we mistake for reality in a media-saturated world.

Drawing on examples like Charles Lindbergh, Boorstin shows how we come closer and closer to degrading all fame into notoriety. Thus, the heroes of the past are blurred before our eyes and eventually disappear.

The Image is the first book I read about celebrity and it remains one of the best.

This book taught me the meaning of the word “totalitarianism.” It’s like a horror movie you can’t escape from, but instead of a zombie fungus eating your mind, it’s the state controlling every little aspect of your life, down to—and worst of all—the words that you think with, and therefore what you can even conceive of.

Few books have stayed in my mind like this one. Even today—or more than ever—its images come to my mind over and over again when I see what is happening in America and the world.

This story and its questions of eugenics and our place in society really horrified me, not because it was unbelievable, but precisely because it was far too real. The genetic superiority/inferiority, coupled with social indoctrination into our “advanced” society, made me meditate a great deal on what it means to be human.

What are humans without societal pressures? The way Huxley looked at the costs of freedom was really compelling. And in so many ways, he accurately predicted the destructive side of the social microscope that we all live in today under social media.

Focusing on the financial crisis of 2008 Adam Tooze’s book shows the transition from a geopolitical to a geo-economic world order in which the political destiny of old nation states is determined by the needs of international financial industry – including the rearrangement of global governance and the erosion of democracies.

I admire the way in which Adam Tooze demonstrates the entanglement between financial capitalism, crises, and the rise of populist and right-wing movements in Europe and the US.

First published in 1947, this iconic book of the “Frankfurt School” could not be a study of AI and 21st-century technologies per see.

Instead it is a phantasmic explainer of how the mistakes of the past impinge on our humanity and the prospects for a better future. "What we had set out to do," Adorno and Horkheimer famously wrote in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism."

With spectacular erudition, the authors clearly show how the terror regime of the Nazis was rooted in the nefarious legacies of enlightenment Europe and its obsession with racial purity. As such, Adorno and Horkheimer presaged why it is that our polluted history feeds into racist AI technologies: Bad data, Adorno and Horkheimer would agree, produces bad outcomes. 

This remarkably thorough and well researched book gives a sense of the sweep of history of the ideas that underpin the digital revolution. These are topics that I know really well, but the book added texture and nuance and I found myself reading it with eyes wide open and jaw slightly slack.

Gleick is a great story teller and he has dug into the topics and their implications so well that I felt like I had a front-row seat to the invention of Morse Code, "memes", and the theory of information itself. Quite an accomplishment!

In today’s media environment of 24-hour news, clickbait, and social media, there is tremendous competition to grab our attention. Our attention and our data have become commodities that can be monetized and sold to the highest bidder.

I love this book because Wu places this struggle for our attention in a broader historical context, tracing its roots to a 19th-century newspaper owner who discovered that advertising revenue could bring in more profits than the price he charged for newspapers. This business model has been applied to radio, television, and now the internet, but the goals remain the same.

Wu is a consummate storyteller and provides numerous examples of how we are being manipulated for profit. 

Few novels epitomize excellence in as many areas as Ayn Rand’s book. I don't know if it was because it never came up during the years of my formal education, but I put off reading it for years after I became vaguely aware of it. And then I read it twice.

One might think of it in terms of being part one of Orwell’s 1984. The two books are nowhere near similar, but whereas 1984 is a dystopian future without regard for how society would get to such a point, Atlas Shrugged is the embryonic steps that could lead to an Orwellian future.

The most remarkable aspect of it, is its portrayal of an economic downtrend imposed upon free-market capitalism and its resulting impact on the country. The crux of Rand’s novel is that if the giants of industry shrugged—or rather just walked away from the imposition of tyranny—everything… show more.