Internet Culture

Everything is a computer. Ovens are computers that make things hot; refrigerators are computers that keep things cold. These computers - from home thermostats to chemical plants - are all online. All computers can be hacked. And Internet-connected computers are the most vulnerable. Forget data theft: Cutting-edge digital attackers can now crash your car, your pacemaker, and the nation’s power grid. In Click Here to Kill Everybody, renowned expert and best-selling author Bruce Schneier examines the hidden risks of this new reality.

From Attorney Ryan, the most well-known labor lawyer in America, the complete guide to workers’ rights that your boss doesn’t want you to read Life for working people is getting harder and more expensive. While employers clamp down with return-to-office mandates, productivity trackers, and...

The machine that kills secrets is a powerful cryptographic code that hides the identities of leakers and hacktivists as they spill the private files of government agencies and corporations bringing us into a new age of whistle blowing. With unrivaled access to figures like Julian Assange, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and Jacob Applebaum, investigative journalist Andy Greenberg unveils the group that brought the world WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks, and BalkanLeaks.

A road map to free your kids from the harms of digital technology and to recover the beauty, wonder, and true purpose of childhood—by a leading tech policy expert It’s no secret that addictive digital technologies like smartphones and social media apps are harming a generation of kids...

The gripping inside story of YouTube, the company that upended media, culture, industry, and democracy—by a leading tech journalist Across the world, people watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Every minute, more than five hundred additional hours of footage are...

From the author of Growth, one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2024, a guide for helping the next generation through an educational world, and a job market, forever changed by AI – as well as for anyone navigating the upheaval in today’s workplace We live at an extraordinary...

With far-reaching implications, this urgent treatise promises to revolutionize our understanding of what it means to be human in the digital age. We used to say "seeing is believing"; now googling is believing. With 24/7 access to nearly all of the world's information at our fingertips, we no...

From Bustle columnist and host of None of My Business Sophia Benoit, this “charming and often laugh-out-loud funny” (Vogue) memoir-in-essays explores the ins and outs of modern womanhood—from finding feminism, the power of pop culture, and how to navigate life’s constant double...

Very evil…very funny A lethal joyride into today’s new breed of technogeeks, Douglas Coupland’s new novel updates Microserfs for the age of Google. Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers are bureaucratically marooned in JPod, a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive...

Consider Facebook - it's human contact, only easier to engage with and easier to avoid. Developing technology promises closeness. Sometimes it delivers, but much of our modern life leaves us less connected with people and more connected to simulations of them. In Alone Together, MIT technology and society professor Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives.

In this insider’s look into the world’s biggest tech company, former CEO and SVP of Google share how they helped engineer a new strategy and philosophy to help them thrive—a perfect book for seasoned business employees and the tech curious. Today, Google is a global icon that regularly...

Two defense experts explore the collision of war, politics, and social media, where the most important battles are now only a click away. Through the weaponization of social media, the Internet is changing war and politics, just as war and politics are changing the Internet. Terrorists livestream their attacks, “Twitter wars” produce real world casualties, and viral misinformation alters not just the result of battles, but the very fate of nations. The result is that war, tech, and politics have blurred into a new kind of battlespace that plays out on our smartphones.

Historian Thomas J. Misa's sweeping history of the relationship between technology and society over the past 500 years reveals how technological innovations have shaped—and have been shaped by—the cultures in which they arose. In this edition, Misa brings his acclaimed text up to date by drawing on current scholarship while retaining sharply drawn portraits of individual people, artifacts, and systems. A masterful analysis of technology and culture, Leonardo to the Internet frames a history that illuminates modern-day problems and prospects of a technology-dependent world.

The acclaimed editor of The New York Times Book Review takes readers on a nostalgic tour of the pre-Internet age, offering powerful insights into both the profound and the seemingly trivial things we've lost. Remember all those ingrained habits, cherished ideas, beloved objects, and stubborn...

An instant New York Times bestseller, Dan Lyons' "hysterical" (Recode) memoir, hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "the best book about Silicon Valley," takes readers inside the maddening world of fad-chasing venture capitalists, sales bros, social climbers, and sociopaths at today's tech...

A New York Times Bestseller An audacious, irreverent investigation of human behavior—and a first look at a revolution in the making Our personal data has been used to spy on us, hire and fire us, and sell us stuff we don’t need. In Dataclysm, Christian Rudder uses it to show us who we...

In 2014, on the side of a Los Angeles freeway, a One Direction fan erected a shrine in the spot where, a few hours earlier, Harry Styles had vomited. “It’s interesting for sure,” Styles said later, adding, “a little niche, maybe.” But what seemed niche to Styles was actually an irreverent signpost to an unfathomably large, interconnected, and influential multiverse: stan culture. In this book, Kaitlyn Tiffany, a staff writer at the Atlantic and proud superfan herself, guides us through the nebulous online world of fans, stans, and boybands.

Recent years have seen a revival of the heated culture wars of the 1990s, but this time its battleground is the Internet. On one side the alt-right ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements, to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-supporting gay libertarian Milo Yiannopolous. On the other side, struggle sessions and virtue signaling lurk behind a therapeutic language of trigger warnings and safe spaces. The feminist side of the online culture wars has its equally geeky subcultures.

If you've ever made a secure purchase with your credit card over the internet, then you have seen cryptography, or "crypto", in action. From Stephen Levy - the author who made "hackers" a household word - comes this account of a revolution that is already affecting every citizen in the 21st century. Crypto tells the inside story of how a group of "crypto rebels" - nerds and visionaries turned freedom fighters - teamed up with corporate interests to beat Big Brother and ensure our privacy on the internet.

Nobody meant for this to happen. Facebook didn't mean to facilitate a genocide. Twitter didn't want to be used to harass women. YouTube never planned to radicalise young men. But with billions of users, these platforms need only tweak their algorithms to generate more 'engagement'. In so doing, they bring unrest to previously settled communities and erode our relationships. Social warming has happened gradually - as a by-product of our preposterously convenient digital existence.