top 10

1

Near the car - Technophilia and its displeasure

elena ulman

Ullman not only tells what it was like to be an engineer during the dotcom bubble, but he does it in prose that would be the envy of many a professional writer. The programmers around him live in a strange place and want to push the boundaries of humanity through their code; At the beginning of the book, Ullman and two other programmers stay in the building where they work for three days.

Human end users are a source of scorn for these programmers, and Ullmann's attempt to merge these two groups into a single program is of growing concern. Far from the machine , far from the sterile benefits of logic, because there are people: AIDS patients, whom the program must help. For better or worse, we've all loved machines since Ullman wrote his first works, but this memoir is perhaps the most powerful book on technology ever written. -Liz Lopatto

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2

Technopolis: transferring culture to technology

neil the postman

In Technopoly, Postman argues that the United States is a "totalitarian technopoly" where the people are oppressed by big technology. Meaning systems have lost all credibility and therefore there is no reliable way to classify information according to its meaning, because it is impossible to know what information to discard. As social institutions are released from their moorings, people are so distrustful of themselves that they always ask their gadgets for permission, like doctors who do not treat symptoms but perform blood tests. With black comedy, the postman proclaims that we have filled our tools. -LL

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3

amazing valley

ana weiner

What sets this book apart from other Silicon Valley memoirs is that it doesn't have a happy ending. Think about it: there is no truly happy beginning or middle. Instead, we get a touching personal story about a non-developer woman working at tech companies who love technology and are coding-savvy brothers. It's also a story about change: the realization of moving to a country, a new job with new colleagues, or the relentless optimism the world had about technology (and technology itself) in the early 2010s. -Mitchell Clark

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4

This Machine Destroys Secrets: Julian Assange, The Cypherpunks, And His Informants' Struggle For Power

Andy Greenberg

It's a gripping thriller filled with hackers, whistleblowers, idealists, and downright creepy people. From Daniel Ellsberg to WikiLeaks, the book covers the unknown elements that have exploded geopolitics and continue to distort our society today. The Tales of the Cypherpunks mailing list and 1990s “crypto wars” (which are cryptocurrencies, not JPEG monkeys) are intertwined through compelling portrayals of charismatic villains and villainous heroes. The only caveat is that all versions of the book on the market use the name of the late Chelsea Manning, who publicly changed her name and pronouns within a year of publication. (“I definitely don't like it,” Greenberg wrote me. The book hasn't been reprinted, he explained, so there's no way to confirm.) It's a good book if you want to have fun, and it's a great book if you want to get a better understanding of what Silicon Valley has been like for decades in other places where it doesn't make sense, but it's exotic. —Sarah Jung

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5

Hamlet Holodeck: The Future of Fiction in Cyberspace

janet murray

It's hard to overstate Murray's influence on the way we think about video games and the Internet. Written in the era of Doom, Myst , and the text-based predecessors of massively multiplayer games, his work includes early discussions of agency, immersion, and emergent narratives that we discuss today (and, as the title suggests, many additional references to Star Trek ). But Hamlet in the Holodeck isn't just a reading to prove Murray right or find out where he went wrong. It's a treatise on the potential of computer storytelling in an era similar to and very different from our own, memorable both for its descriptions of long-forgotten experiments and for its attention to forms like chatbots and multiplayer social worlds. -Ada Robertson

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6

Super Pumped: Battle for Uber

mike isaac

We've seen enough examples of founder worship gone wrong to think we've learned our lesson. But Super Pumped , a riveting portrait of Uber under the tutelage of farm CEO Travis Kalanick's brother, is richly detailed and stylish in office drama. The startup Isaac portrays is driven by growth rather than moral direction. But this combination of Kalanick's ego and ambition turned his teammates against him. In the end, Kalanick only saw himself and Uber, and I don't think he was wrong. It didn't surprise him as much as he expected. —Kevin Nguyen

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7

Broadband: The Untold Story of the Women Who Created the Internet

claire evans

By then I had read a lot of books on the history of computing, but most of the history of broadband was new to me. In a way, that's what it's all about: staying true to the subtitle and trying to do more than just reinforce the legends of every single guy we meet. By giving women the calculation of what is theirs, he manages to capture something that many other history books fail to do. Yes, it delves into exciting, groundbreaking inventions and the super-smart, semi-famous people who created them, but it also delves into lesser-known parts of computing history: the communities that supported those inventions and the (sometimes offline) infrastructure that made them work. It's a book about missing pieces, silent or underappreciated systems, and the people who have advanced technology and created the useful Internet we call home. —MS

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the 8

The Boy Kings: a journey to the heart of the social network

miss kate

Part memoir, part corporate portrait, The Boy Kings covers the time of Facebook long before Cambridge Analytica exposed what Mark Zuckerberg's empire, and big tech in general, had achieved. But in The Boy Kings we trace the company's beginnings back to its techno-utopian ideals. Lose only approached the work by accident and has always maintained an anthropological distance from his work. There are plenty of freshman frat jokes out there. But the core of the book is Lose's introduction to a younger, naive Zuckerberg: he was so close to him that his work became his ghostwriting. This shows that the CEO is powerless, reckless and vague in his vision of the future. While other Facebook employees celebrate like emperors, Lose has quickly figured out how to act like an emperor. -KN

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9

Together like the air: revolution, art and property

by Lewis Hyde

Most of us watched the hyped anti-hacking rhetoric of the 2000s, joked about those silly “you wouldn't steal a car” ads, and moved on. But in the decade's push for ever-broader rules protecting intellectual property, Hyde saw something damaging: the erosion of our shared culture as knowledge was treated as purely private property. His response , "As simple as air," is one of the most eloquent and moving defenses I have ever read. In addition to making a thoughtful argument about the powerful organizing principle of modern media, this book can inspire you from the perspective of how artists construct the ideas of others. If corporate giants are constantly eroding the "usable intellectual property" of every book, game, and movie out there, this is the perfect antidote. -AR

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10

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Insights into YouTube's chaotic rise to global dominance

by Mark Bergen

What is YouTube really? A video hosting platform? A social network or a search engine? The world's largest music service or a complete replacement for television? The tension between all this, the management of YouTube and the creators is masterfully explained in one of the best books of its kind, Like, Comment, Subscribe . Yes, this is the messy story of YouTube, from its launch to its dominance as an Internet institution and the global cultural economy, but it is also the story of YouTube's founder and, above all, how changes in the Red platform's goals and metrics created, built and destroyed entire content empires in the blink of an eye. -Nilay Patel

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What did we miss?

Any list will inevitably lead to controversy. (Hell, you should see how long we argued.) So if you think we've missed a great technical book, please let us know and let us know what you think. We'll post our favorite responses below.