Here are 100 books that The Master Switch fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have been fortunate to have spent the last 40 years of my professional life dealing with new networks and new technology. From the early days of cable television and mobile communications to the development of digital video and the transmission of data over cable lines and satellite. It was a career topped off with the privilege of being the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with regulatory responsibly for approximately 1/6th of the American economy (on which the other 5/6s depended).
At a time when new technology has delivered us to a world of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, we have lost our shared understanding of just what facts and truth are.
Jonathan Rauch helps us recall the importance of facts and truth to the liberal democratic process. He challenges us to reinstate knowledge and truth.
Arming Americans to defend the truth from today's war on facts.
Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America's ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.
In 2016 Russian trolls and bots nearly drowned the truth in a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories, and Donald Trump and his troll armies continued to do the same. Social media companies struggled to keep up with a flood…
I have been fortunate to have spent the last 40 years of my professional life dealing with new networks and new technology. From the early days of cable television and mobile communications to the development of digital video and the transmission of data over cable lines and satellite. It was a career topped off with the privilege of being the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with regulatory responsibly for approximately 1/6th of the American economy (on which the other 5/6s depended).
Microsoft president Brad Smith’s thoughtful book is basically about responsibility in the digital age.
Smith takes an approach that is different from most corporate executive books in that he calls out the threats represented by digital technology his company is built on rather than trying to sugarcoat them.
Then he suggests responsible steps that everyone – individuals, public policy, and companies like his – should take to mitigate those threats.
The New York Times bestseller, now updated with new material on cyber attacks, digital sovereignty, and tech in a pandemic.
From Microsoft's president and one of the tech industry's broadest thinkers, a frank and thoughtful reckoning with how to balance enormous promise and existential risk as the digitization of everything accelerates.
"A colorful and insightful insiders' view of how technology is both empowering and threatening us. From privacy to cyberattacks, this timely book is a useful guide for how to navigate the digital future." -Walter Isaacson
Microsoft president Brad Smith operates by a simple core belief: When your technology changes…
I’ve always loved technology. I like the constant change, the sense of creativity and invention, of how it can act as an incredible force for good and human progress and betterment in the world. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t tinkering with gadgets—taking radios apart to mend them or learn how they worked; designing electronic circuits for music synthesis; programming computers. But I’ve also always been interested in politics and the complex intersection of technology and public policy. So much so that most of my working life has been spent at this intersection, which is why I love these books—and hope you will too.
I remember first readingFuture Shockafter buying a battered, orange-coloured paperback edition at a bargain price from one of the second-hand bookshops that once saturated London’s Charing Cross Road.
It hadn’t really occurred to me before how much the increasingly rapid technological changes around us might create a sense of shock—‘future shock’— for some people. It changed my thinking about the influence of technology on our world and the impact it has on people, society, economics, and politics.
Even after all these years, many of Alvin Toffler’s insights and ideas remain just as topical today.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The classic work that predicted the anxieties of a world upended by rapidly emerging technologies—and now provides a road map to solving many of our most pressing crises.
“Explosive . . . brilliantly formulated.” —The Wall Street Journal
Future Shock is the classic that changed our view of tomorrow. Its startling insights into accelerating change led a president to ask his advisers for a special report, inspired composers to write symphonies and rock music, gave a powerful new concept to social science, and added a phrase to our language. Published in over fifty countries, Future…
I have been fortunate to have spent the last 40 years of my professional life dealing with new networks and new technology. From the early days of cable television and mobile communications to the development of digital video and the transmission of data over cable lines and satellite. It was a career topped off with the privilege of being the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with regulatory responsibly for approximately 1/6th of the American economy (on which the other 5/6s depended).
Tech analyst and investor Azeem Azhar concisely pulls together his take on how the arc of technology has moved from linear to exponential both in its development as well as its impact on society and business.
Azhar brings great insight into how exponential growth – creating an “exponential gap” – has put strains not only on businesses, but also on government and society writ large.
A bold exploration and call-to-arms over the widening gap between AI, automation, and big data—and our ability to deal with its effects
We are living in the first exponential age.
High-tech innovations are created at dazzling speeds; technological forces we barely understand remake our homes and workplaces; centuries-old tenets of politics and economics are upturned by new technologies. It all points to a world that is getting faster at a dizzying pace.
Azeem Azhar, renowned technology analyst and host of the Exponential View podcast, offers a revelatory new model for understanding how…
I’m a professor of Chinese studies, and I’m especially interested in what the close study of culture can reveal about aspects of contemporary Chinese life that are usually dominated by the perspectives of historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists. I’m fascinated not so much by how cultural practices reflect social change but by how they sometimes make it happen, particularly in societies where overt political action is blocked. As my book picks show, I’m intrigued by the inventiveness and drive of people who create culture, often new forms of culture, under conditions of oppression, exploitation, and duress.
This book made a big impact on me because it shifts the study of culture in working-class China from familiar genres such as poetry to the vast domain of the digital.
Qiu argues that a working-class network society has taken firm shape in 21st-century China, made up of migrants, laid-off workers, retired people, young people, and small-scale entrepreneurs. In one sense, these people are the “information have-less” because they belong to the social classes typically on the wrong side of the digital divide.
But Qiu’s book shows that cheap internet access and extensive cell phone penetration in China have enabled the “have-less” to create class identity through their use of information technology. From community-building to memory-making, the book really nuanced my understanding of digital networks as a transformatively cultural force.
An examination of how the availability of low-end information and communication technology has provided a basis for the emergence of a working-class network society in China.
The idea of the “digital divide,” the great social division between information haves and have-nots, has dominated policy debates and scholarly analysis since the 1990s. In Working-Class Network Society, Jack Linchuan Qiu describes a more complex social and technological reality in a newly mobile, urbanizing China. Qiu argues that as inexpensive Internet and mobile phone services become available and are closely integrated with the everyday work and life of low-income communities, they provide a…
I’m a Philadelphia-based journalist and new author. I’m the Editor at Large for Philadelphia Magazine and President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. As an openly Black gay journalist, I’ve headlined for speaking frankly about intersectional issues in society regarding race, LGBTQIA, and pop culture. Such experiences have awakened my consciousness as an underrepresented voice in the media and have pushed me to explore societal topics. My new book The Case for Cancel Culture, published by St. Martin's Press, is my way of staking my claim in the global conversation on this buzzworthy topic.
What I admire the most about this book is how it clearly explains the power of social media and social justice without the kind of paternalistic finger-wagging of bad actors.
Hill and Brewster focus on the impact, intention, and impressions of some of the most important activist movements of our time and how alike and different they are from the past.
This book strikes an incredible balance of admiring the days before Twitter, while respecting the current progress made now that we have such digital platforms at our fingertips.
A riveting exploration of how the power of visual media over the last few years has shifted the narrative on race and reignited the push towards justice by the author of the "worthy and necessary" (The New York Times) Nobody Marc Lamont Hill and the bestselling author and acclaimed journalist Todd Brewster.
With his signature "clear and courageous" (Cornel West) voice Marc Lamont Hill and New York Times bestselling author Todd Brewster weave four recent pivotal moments in America's racial divide into their disturbing historical context-starting with the killing of George Floyd-Seen and Unseen reveals the connections between our current…
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
I’ve been fascinated by the news media and technology for as long as I can remember. I successfully campaigned for a VCR as a five-year-old, and watched multiple news programs with my grandfather growing up. Alongside these interests, I managed to read as many books as I possibly could. I’ve managed to somehow parlay that into a job as a researcher, where I study the news media sector and technological transformation. I read everything on this list while I was writing my latest book, and hope you enjoy them as much as I did!
Many of the concerns around news and technology, center around how the distribution of news through social media impacts the news business.
However, we can only understand how these two sectors interact by understanding platform economics. Thankfully, Robin Mansell and W. Edward Steinmueller have written a simple and concise introduction to a complicated topic. A great way to quickly deepen your understanding of an important issue.
Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences and law, expertly written by the world's leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas.
This cutting edge book introduces the origins and consequences of digital platforms, examining how artificial intelligence-enabled digital platforms collect and process data from and about users by providing social media and e-commerce services. Robin Mansell and W. Edward Steinmueller compare and contrast neoclassical, institutional and critical political economy approaches. They show how uneven…
I am a historian and economist who is fascinated by the intersection of the economy and culture. This started for me with the idea that economic ideas were shaped by the cultural context in which they emerged, which resulted in my book on the Viennese Students. Over time it has expanded to an interest for the markets for the arts from music to the visual arts, as well as the way in which culture and morality influence economic dynamism. Economics and the humanities are frequently believed to be at odds with each other, but I hope to inspire a meaningful conversation between them.
This might well be the least-read book on my list, but I hope that will change soon. Lanham is a Professor of Rhetoric who argues that Andy Warhol was the best economist of attention of the twentieth century, and an exemplar for the economy of the twenty-first, in which value is created through knowledge and attention. Lanham’s inspired distinction between stuff and fluff convincingly demonstrates that the modern economy is more about the experience, style, and packaging of the stuff, rather than the other way around. And that is a good thing. In one of the many digressions in the book he presents Friedrich Hayek as the Dadaist among the economists. This book is a wild ride, with insights on every page.
If economics is about the allocation of resources, then what is the most precious resource in our new information economy? Certainly not information, for we are drowning in it. No, what we are short of is the attention to make sense of that information. With all the verve and erudition that have established his earlier books as classics, Richard A. Lanham here traces our epochal move from an economy of things and objects to an economy of attention. According to Lanham, the central commodity in our new age of information is not stuff but style, for style is what competes…
I’m puzzled by how people and technology evolve—as humankind we created all of these wonders to make our life easier. At the same time, I feel that we are more focus on the technology and processes, rather than people. It drew me to the topic of sociotechnical systems, which fascinates me. I’ve formal education in IT, and everything is binary; however, during my career I was drawn to the intersection of technology and people. My mission in life is to support a new generation of leaders that want to create an organisational environment that puts people in the center!
I love pattern languages. And Team Topologies brings patterns for team types and their interactions. Most importantly, they address fundamental problems of the software industry: how teams organise for fast flow, and how teams cope with cognitive load. The book steams from the author's experience in the DevOps community, and it is widely used across the world. Last but not least, Team Topologies give us a language that support organisation evolution.
Companion book Remote Team Interactions Workbook now available!
Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs?
Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity.
In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel…
I have worked in IT for over 25 years, creating and securing software. I am completely obsessed with ensuring that our software is more reliable, that its integrity can be trusted, and that it keeps our secrets safe. I am not only a computer scientist but an ethical hacker who works hard to create a dialogue between software developers and all of the people who work in our security industry. I am a teacher, a community leader, and a computer nerd who shares messages and lessons wherever she goes.
Accelerate is a book about data. The authors used data collected during their PhD projects in order to prove The DevOps is effective.
They have all sorts of different ways to measure DevOps, it sufficiency, and the fact that way more projects succeed when you do DevOps, rather than waterfall methodology.
The book essentially show can be used as evidence of return on investment when modernizing your IT department. I am a person who loves data, and thus I absolutely love this book. Also, if you listen to the audiobook version, one of the authors reads it to you and her personality really shines through in a fun way.
I really enjoyed listening to Nicole read a book about to me about data!
Accelerate your organization to win in the marketplace.
How can we apply technology to drive business value? For years, we've been told that the performance of software delivery teams doesn't matter that it can't provide a competitive advantage to our companies. Through four years of groundbreaking research to include data collected from the State of DevOps reports conducted with Puppet, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim set out to find a way to measure software delivery performance and what drives it using rigorous statistical methods. This book presents both the findings and…
