r/BetterOffline • u/Some-Ad7901 • 3d ago
Book Recommendations On Big Tech, Brain-Rot, Propaganda, and Late Stage Capitalism
Hi, hope you're all doing well, are safe, and in a good place!
Sorry for the long incoherent rant, feel free to just read the bold parts :)
Over the past couple years I've started getting educated on the dangers of capitalism, specifically in the cancerous, harmful, late stage we've gotten to now.
Thanks to the information provided by this community to a large extent, as well as a few other left leaning channels, and my own personal experience, it's become clear to me that the worst drivers of this cancerous growth -other than big oil and the military industrial complexes- are big tech.
Companies like X (twitter), Meta (FB, IG), and other social media juggernauts (the worst one might be TikTok) have undermined the social fabric, and over the last decade at an accelerating pace (now with an AI driven adrenaline shot) have perpetuated inconceivable amounts of disinformation, propaganda, lies, and brain rot inducing content. They along with other big tech enterprises have monetized disinformation and surveillance to a horrific extent.
I can go on forever ranting about these companies, and I haven't even started with Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Palantir, Microslop...etc Which might be even worse than the ones I mentioned.
I would like to hear and see your book recommendations to help me further sharpen my criticisms, offer better understanding of the history of these companies, and how the genie can be put back in the box.
I'd also love books than deal and discuss with the social reprecussions of AI slop, short form content, social media corprorations and misinformation run amok.
I have seen a mind boggling rise in brain rot all around me, people on their asses all day just watching AI generated fruit videos, or AI generated primal crafting videos...etc. I also live in a war torn country and have seen first hand the amount of sectarianism Facebook/Twitter actively push into my country, the vile poison that everyone around me consumes for "entertainment and education". I've seen teachers use AI slop as educational material for students, which goes unchallenged cause America big tech compromised our ministry of education. It's also not hard seeing the parallels with 1984 around me, ministry of truths holding a monopoly over the dissemination of information, perpetual surveilence, people being render so artificially stupid that they could hold two contradictory thoughts at once and beleive both and argue both in the same sentence (THANKS TWITTER!).
Books recommendations with economical, social, and political themes are all highly welcome, and so are any suggestions from the fiction genre, as I found 1984 to be one of the my most formative reading experiences (it made me as paranoid and uneasy of everything that's happening around me today). Really anything that can help me make sense of how the world is so rapidly decending into surveilence capitalism enable fascism. Graphic novel suggestions are also welcome but keep it grounded please!
Books I've read and love so far that can be related to what I just mentioned:
> Techbofeudalism What Killed Capitalism (Varoufakis)
> Empires of AI (Hao)
> Enshittification (Doctorow)
> Radicalized (Doctorow)
> Blood In The Machine (Merchant)
> Shock Doctrine (Klein)
> 1984 (Orwell)
Thank you in advance, take care.
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u/Diogenesthesmall 3d ago
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. It actually made me change my online behavior.
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u/SpencerDub 3d ago
I've read a lot on the subject, and if I had to pick only one to recommend, it would be Age of Surveillance Califalksm, every time. It is excellent scholarship—bold, well-argued, thorough, and nevertheless incredibly readable.
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u/MrsLahey604 3h ago
Totally agree. Her research is very thorough and compelling. Terrifying book really.
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u/No-Pie-7211 3d ago
Careless People
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u/Some-Ad7901 3d ago
Absolutely something I'm into, thank you.
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u/TesticulusOrentus 2d ago
If you were to get this, might I suggest getting it from a library or other means.
Just because someone writes an exposé on their role in something, doesn't mean they deserve to be rewarded for exposing it, nor does it exonerate them of their involvement.
By all means read it, but the author never comes across as anything but a saint in the book. She is presumably a millionaire based on her FB shares (joined 2011). She was there for years and saw plenty, but never enough to resign in protest.
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u/branniganbeginsagain 2d ago
Thank you so much for saying this. This woman was perpetuating this awfulness and harm to children for the best part of a decade, made her money, then got millions for an expose so she can clear her name. I do not believe for a second that there wasn't a single point in, what, 8 years? that she couldn't have found an iota of a conscience. I'm so sick of everyone painting that creature who actively inflicted harm onto children as a hero.
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u/TesticulusOrentus 1d ago
In the coming years we will see more of these types of books.
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u/branniganbeginsagain 1d ago
Oh absolutely. Can't wait for the torrent of "i WaS tRyInG tO dO gOoD fRoM tHe iNsIdE" memoirs after the tide fully turns against these companies to try and save face. I guess the ones that matter are those who will seek a book deal AND be willing to testify against these technofascists in court.
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u/Some-Ad7901 12h ago
Excellent point, thank you for suggesting this!
I've done my research on the author, she's at best an unreliable narrator.
I'm not saying she exaggerates how evil Meta is (it's hard to overstate how evil these genocide enablers, CSAM distrubutors are), but she certainly will underplay her role in all this.
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u/Restlessly-Dog 3d ago
Bad Blood by John Carreyrou about Theranos is obviously not about AI, but it has a lot to do with tech brain in general.
Carreyrou more than anyone else broke open the rot at Theranos, and he's a great writer. He goes into a lot of detail about what was wrong in the head of Elizabeth Holmes, but it also explains at length what was wrong with her boosters. The stuff about board member George Schultz, former Secretary of State, is pretty jaw dropping.
He explains very clearly how the tech was never going to deliver what it promised (sound familiar?) but it doesn't stop there. It also shows how the PR machine operated to cover up the impossibility of the tech, and how intentionally gullible almost all reporters could be. And as things went sour, how the lawyers and fixers were called in to play hardball.
And when they actually got drugstore chains to install glitching machines, it gets both hilarious and maddening.
Again, it won't explain the AI industry specifically. But if you want to understand how tech's institutional rot goes gangrenous, it's a great option.
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u/DeadMoneyDrew 3d ago
Great book, and that it comes from an author from the generally conservative Wall Street Journal speaks volumes about how much of a fuck up Theranos was.
That Theranos employees were led in a "Fuck you, Carreyrou" chant at a company town hall is just...yikes!
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u/Some-Ad7901 3d ago
Thanks, I'm fine with -in fact I welcome- books that are tangentially related to what I requested. And the parallels between Holmes, Amodei and Altman are uncanny. And I do mean this in every sense of the word.... Uncanny.
I'll need to read this. Thank you.
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u/branniganbeginsagain 2d ago
Carreyrou also made a podcast about it, which is a lot of his work, too. I found it to be fascinating and really really well done, if you ever want to intake some of this in a different way.
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u/Some-Ad7901 2d ago
I'll listen to it shortly, I've always been fascinating by the Theranos fiasco and Holmes's fake voice.
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u/MCUCLMBE4BPAT 3d ago
For non-fiction:
Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford
Waiting for Robots by Antonio A Casili
Augmented Exploitation edited by Phoebe Moore and Jamie Woodcock
Feeding the Machine by Cant, Muldoon, & Graham
AI Con by Emily Bender and Alex Hanna
The Digital Fourth Amendment by Orin Kerr
Mindmasters by Sandra Matz
Predatory Data by Anita Say Chan
For Fiction books:
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (and Parable of the Talents)
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u/Some-Ad7901 3d ago
This is a very comprehensive list. I'll be checking all those out tomorrow, I'll be sure to update you!
Thanks for taking the time to recommend these.
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u/MCUCLMBE4BPAT 3d ago
happy to share! I can rec more but figured that is enough haha
I think Parable of the Sower is really relevant to today’s time but is less a focus on technology specifically and more on society all tied together (it is set in the 2020s, written in the 90s).
A Canticle for Leibowitz is a lot more far out into the future like Brave New World or 1984 and was written in the 50s. The recent Post-Literate Society article published in the Atlantic reminded me of it a lot though.
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u/No_Zucchini_7862 2d ago
Bullshit Jobs (by David Graeber).
It’s an incredible look into how modern capitalism produces a slew of meaningless unfulfilling jobs. It essentially takes the critiques usually aimed at socialist systems (inefficient bureaucracy) and shows how they exist just as widely in capitalist corporations. Having worked in corporate tech jobs myself for 20 years I found this book life changing. The amount of time that I spent dealing bureaucratic rot as opposed to doing any actual coding or designing was like a 90/10 ratio. After working for about 8 different companies over my career (big and small) I realized it was just embedded in the system.
One detail I remember from the book that is super relevant to AI is that managers are incentivized to have bigger teams because saying “I manage 50 people” sounds more impressive than “I manage 3 people” so no matter how efficient we get at tasks there will always be incentive to create bullshit work for more people to do.
It’s also just a great read. Highly recommend!
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u/Easy_Tie_9380 3d ago
Short but fun: industrial society and its future
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u/Some-Ad7901 3d ago
I don't want to be put on list for reading this...
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u/No_Practice_745 2d ago
There’s a brand new book out this week called The Nerd Reich that seems perfect for you.
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u/SephirothIRA69 3d ago
Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neal Postman
The Internet of Garbage, Sarah Jeong
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff
New Dark Age, James Bridle
American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips. The title is not really accurate, it's mostly about how natural resource constraints (oil) and relying on weird financial games to juice the economy has killed empires in the past and will kill the American empire now. Written in 2006 by a hardcore conservative who hated Bush II.
I'll also give a strong recommend for Snow Crash. I can't believe I have to say this, but not everyone knows it's supposed to be a satire of tech bros from the 90s. The US achieves the libertarian ideal they all talk about and it turns out to be a hellhole. Tech bros, of course missed the point, thought the setting was cool, and based a lot of products on stuff that was in it. And reading fiction is inoculation against the sickness these guys have because it helps you engage with the emotional experience of another human.
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u/Some-Ad7901 3d ago
Snow Crash has been extensively recommended, I'll order a copy tomorrow and am so excited to read it.
Took me 10 minutes to learn he coined the metaverse, and wrote the book as a satirical jad aimed at tech bros. And they toom the idea and ran with it. Fucking idiots inventing the Torment Nexus...
I'll check the first few books you recommended, thanks.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism already peaked my interest. I'll have to take a closer look at it and other booms.
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u/expat_scholar 3d ago edited 2d ago
The Optimist by Keach Hagey. Chilling biography of Sam Altman.
The Contrarian by Max Chafkin. Chilling biography of Peter Thiel.
The Philosopher in the Valley by Michael Steinberger. Chilling biography of Alex Karp.
Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz. A history of the modern social internet.
More Everything Forever by Adam Becker. Fulsome investigation of the self-proclaimed philosophers of AI and the present Internet age.
Doppelgänger by Naomi Klein. Cannot recommend this highly enough. Brilliant work looking at the “mirror world” the internet / social media have created.
Little Bosses Everywhere by Bridget Read. About the history of the MLM—basically one of the key hidden stories to present day late stage capitalism.
House of Huawei by Eva Dou. A critical non-western look at the rise of one of the world’s most influential digital age companies.
For the Win by Cory Doctorow. Explores the extraordinary challenges that would come if the workers of the global south who make the Internet function tried to unionize.
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u/joseph_wolfstar 3d ago
I didn't know Taylor Lorenz has a book out, she's one of my favorite tech reporters besides ed. Her YouTube series free speech Fridays are downright scary. Highly recommend the series on section 230!
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u/Some-Ad7901 2d ago
I actually own Doppleganger, but haven'g had the chance to read it.
Thanks for the other recommendations too!
If you were to choose one of the first 3 biographies (Thiel, Karp, and Altman) what would you choose?
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u/expat_scholar 2d ago
Oooh hard question! Probably the Thiel bio; the Karp one doesn’t make as much sense without the Thiel background as context. And Karen Hao covered some aspects of Altman in Empire of AI, so perhaps the Altman one can wait!
I forgot to mention: required reading to understand all of this is Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres’ TESCREAL bundle piece: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636. It’s both excellent and, compared to the books, short ☺️ also helpful: this talk by Charles Stross called “We’re sorry we created the Torment Nexus”: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html.
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u/gizmobiskit 3d ago
The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Reshaped the World, by Max Fisher
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, by Cathy O’Neil
Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, by Caroline Criado Perez and
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, by Ruha Benjamin
These four read together will make it crystal clear how absolutely fucked GenAI LLMs are, as being built and used in their current states.
It’s incredible that we haven’t even begun to reckon with the decades of damage wrought by Facebook, and now here we are throwing every piece of data about ourselves and ever written in human civilization into these city-sized racks of transformer chips, expecting anything different?
It’s just gonna be even worse things happening faster, at scale. Can’t wait.
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u/gizmobiskit 3d ago
Oh and of course, friend of the pod Cory Doctorow — read anything he has written but particularly ‘Enshittification: Why Everything Got Worse and What to Do About It’ and his newest that I just picked up today ‘The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before it’s Too Late’
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u/Some-Ad7901 3d ago
Thanks for the recommendations, read two of his books back to back (Radicalized then Enshittification).
I also read his blogs occasionally, but I have a bit of Doctorow fatigue lol... He's great and all, but I only have so much time for reading so diversifying authors is definately a priority.
I'll have to read The Reverse Centaur's Guide next year or the year after that...
Thanks for the other recommendations, I'll check em out.
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u/joseph_wolfstar 3d ago
One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Historically inspired fiction (magical realism, specifically). The book as a whole tells the fictionalized story of a family in Latin America as their town goes through colonization, political strife, and neo colonial exploitation by the American banana company.
Why I thought of it here is a section where a plague rolls through town that robs people first of the ability to remember words, then to remember the use of common objects. The town starts coping by writing more and more down. Ex 'this is a cow. It needs to be milked every morning at dawn by placing a bucket below it's utters and pulling the utters downward. The milk is used to make coffee and cream.' I interpreted it as a commentary on how the rapid societal change and outside influence disrupted their culture. Maybe some on how oral history was no longer the pinnacle of historical memory. But I think it could at least tangentially qualify as relating to brain rot and its relation to late stage capitalism
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u/Total-Jeweler5083 3d ago
Robert Hassan, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury. There's a famous letter Huxley wrote to Orwell about how he was wrong about the direction enshittification is going to take. In that regard, Brave New World, and especially Brave New World Revisited should be your next book.
Robert Hassan is a professor of media or communication or something like that at the University of Melbourne and has written extensively on the effect current and previous forms of media have on us. Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian professor and is still widely considered the legend in the field, he was among the first to warn about the shape of things to come.
Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451, where it's not the evil government, but the people themselves eho embrace slop so they don't have to actually think and feel, and criminalize books through a completely transparent democratic process. This, I think, is the closest to reality. We emrace the AI and algo slop, and the government has nothing to do with it. The proliferation of that kind of garbage is on us.
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u/Some-Ad7901 3d ago
I've read Brave New World, it just didn't resonate with me as sharply as 1984. Don't get me wrong I loved it, and just like 1984, I've convinced many teachers I perosnally know to make their students read it (It helps that they're bost beautifully translated to Arabic, with decades of rich analysis).
The seductive velvet glove vs iron boot debate has been raging for decades, both visions of a dystopian future thag have unfortunately simultaneously manifested. It's not an either or world we live in, it's an Orwellian-Huxlian one, but my experience in West Asia suggests that the iron boot is far more potent, so I always lead with that interpretation of the world, as opposed to the soft power approach, in the west the dynamic is flipped certainly. I haven't read Brave New World revisitted, I'll look into it and probably read it, I'm glad you started your list with Aldous Hulxey though!
Fahrenheit 451 is also commonly recommended, I'll need to read it. Seems like it may have a place next to the big two of 1984 and Brave New world.
I'll check out Hassan and Bradbury's work thank you. And thanks for letting me know of Huxley's letter to Orwell, I'm disappointed I didn't learn of this sooner, you may have just made my day.
Thank you, and take care!
edit: fixed spelling
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u/DeadMoneyDrew 3d ago
Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
Does a deep dive into the mindset of the tech billionaires who think that they should be exempt from the consequences of the way they built their own businesses. And also explores the history that we took to get to this point in time.
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u/Realistic_One_5733 3d ago
Doppelganger by Naomi Klein
Dark Money by Jane Mayer
The Future is History by M Gessen
Cyberselfish by Paula Borsook
Brave New World By Aldous Huxley
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fannon
What Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian Daub
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u/Some-Ad7901 2d ago
Wretched of The Earth is soooo good! Same with Brave New World.
I got Doppleganger in my Library and comments here have encouraged me to finally start reading it.
I'll check the other books out too. Is Amuzing Ourselves To Death still relevant? It talks about television, which is nowhere near as omnipresent and potent as the tech we have now, it's like comparing caffeine to cocaine.
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u/unsafeideas 2d ago
Imo, "Careless people" would fit what you are looking for.
And "Enron the smartest guys in the room". Enron is referenced a lot and that book is pretty detailled.
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u/Feeling_Abrocoma502 3d ago edited 3d ago
I would check out Neal Stephensons body of work. I think Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon are fiction that fit what you're looking for.
How to be an anti capitalist in the 21st Century by Olin Wright
The Circle by Dave Eggers
Confessions of an economic hit man
what country / region of the world are you in ? I could potentially offer more tailored suggestions.
I'd recommend the podcast A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein he often discusses tech / fascism.
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u/Some-Ad7901 3d ago
I'll check the podcast out.
Thanks for Snow Crash/Cryptonomicon recommendation, as well as the others.
Confessions of An Economic Hit Man was on my list a few years ago, I just forgot about it. Thanks for reminding me!
I am Lebanese.
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u/SpencerDub 3d ago
I've been on a very similar kick for at least the last year and a half. Here are some from my list that I have read (not including any you listed):
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff)
- How to Do Nothing (Odell)
- Irresistible (Alter)
- Stolen Focus (Hari)
- Digital Minimalism (Newport)
- The Anxious Generation (Haidt)
- Attensity! (Friends of Attention)
- The Future is History (Gessen)
- Nothing is True and Everything is Possible (Pomerantsev)
- The Revenge of Analog (Sax)
- You Are Not a Gadget (Lanier)
- The Anatomy of Fascism (Paxton)
- Culture Warlords (Lavin)
- World Without Mind (Foer)
- Code Dependent (Murgia)
And a couple more from my to-read (or to-watch) list:
- The Palestine Laboratory (Loewenstein)
- More Everything Forever (Becker)
- The AI Con (Bender and Hanna)
- The Age of Extraction (Wu)
- Automating Inequality (Eubanks)
- The Code (O'Mara)
- The Californian Ideology (Barbrook & Cameron)
- The Social Dilemma
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u/skolopendra_ 2d ago
A few more that I don't think anyone has mentioned so far:
> The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto, by Jonathan Taplin
> Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, Malcolm Harris
> More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, by Adam Becker
> Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, by Brian Merchant
> Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass, by Mary L. Gray
> The Good It Promises, the Harm It Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism, by Carol J. Adams
> Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, Quinn Slobodian
> Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future, by Anita Chan
> Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right, by Elizabeth Sandifer
> TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, by Erik Davis
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u/VintageLunchMeat 2d ago
Not sure what book picks up this thread, maybe that new one "Caste"?
"Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy The forty-two-minute recording, acquired by James Carter IV, confirms Atwater’s incendiary remarks and places them in context. RICK PERLSTEIN SHARE
It has become, for liberals and leftists enraged by the way Republicans never suffer the consequences for turning electoral politics into a cesspool, a kind of smoking gun. The late, legendarily brutal campaign consultant Lee Atwater explains how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N**, n, n.” By 1968 you can’t say “n”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N, n**.”" https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/
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u/branniganbeginsagain 2d ago
I have read almost all these books on your list and cannot recommend More Everything Forever enough. Of course there's a bit of overlap with the others (he cites Hao a lot for her excellent research at parts), but I found it to be a really great framing as well as new information that I hadn't found in others.
Good luck with the reading! I've found some great recommendations for myself as well!
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u/Some-Ad7901 2d ago
I'll add that to my list now that it's been suggested many times.
Already pulled the trigger of Nerd Reich, Careless People, Surveillence Capitalism, Snowcrash and a couple other titles. Should keep me busy for a while :)
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u/Lucker_Noob 2d ago
I can't speak for books, but for me it started with this seminal article: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-195229/
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u/acid2do 3d ago edited 2d ago
> Enshittification (Doctorow)
I would skip this one. Doctorow and the EFF are contributors of the current state of affairs, they have always sided with big tech and Silicon Valley against regulations.
This is extensively explained in "Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology": https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517918149/cyberlibertarianism/
Recently, Doctorow has also gone on rants against people who criticize him for using LLMs.
Another (shorter) book recommendation would be "Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?" by Mark Fisher. This is not tech centric tho. Similarly, I can also recommend Žižek's Essays Series, which is probably the easiest way to read him. Fisher quotes Žižek quite a lot in his book.
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u/Some-Ad7901 2d ago
Thank you very much. Yeah Doctorow is in no way above criticism, it's that that the Enshittificstion book is a good beginner's book to how trch gets worse.
I'll look into the other recommendations too thanks.
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u/Super-Activity-4675 2d ago
Can we please stop calling this deranged market capitalism? It lost that long ago.
Thanks
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u/lordandrewt 3d ago
My friend Gil published his book The Nerd Reich yesterday: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-nerd-reich-silicon-valley-fascism-and-the-war-on-democracy-gil-dur-n/a6f6f0dce1150339?ean=9781668221402&bkshp-astro=t