Happy holidays from the team at DFD — and if you are among the tortured souls rushing out this Christmas Eve to find a few last-minute gifts for the readers on your list, allow us to offer a few suggestions. Below are some of the books DFD read in 2024 that offer insight into the digital future, whether they’re tackling the artificial intelligence hype machine, explaining how tech gives one society a leg up over another or reimagining our fundamental relationship with “progress.” It’s more crucial than ever for policymakers to understand technology, as it both becomes more sophisticated and ever more interwoven with real-world governance. The year ahead of us promises, if nothing else, a nonstop flood of political and technological novelty. So as 2025 prepares its assault, it’s worth taking a moment to ground ourselves in how we got here, and what might be on the horizon. Happy holidays and happy reading! “Technology and the Rise of Great Powers” by Jeffrey Ding This book from a George Washington University political science professor offers a receipt-laden theory about why some societies benefit from innovation and some don’t. Ding argues that history’s winners, from America with the steam engine to England with the mechanical loom, do so by taking pains to make sure the benefits of those technologies spread through the whole of society, with major implications for the age of AI and geopolitical competition with China. What at first seems presented as a dry monograph turns out to carry a provocative argument that governments should treat new technologies democratically, and one with a lot of current relevance: As Ding said during a recent podcast appearance, while both the U.S. and China are currently overly concentrated, China has “not really learned the lessons” history has to offer from the spread of innovations like electricity and the railroad. “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s” by John Ganz A history of the weird, wild political events of 1992 that in Ganz’s telling foreshadowed our current political chaos, “When the Clock Broke” also contains a few lessons about how technological disruption can shape politics. Mostly, that’s in the form of Ross Perot, one of its central figures: Perot predated Elon Musk as the tech-world “disruptor” of government par excellence, parlaying his computer business empire (which, like Musk’s, enjoyed huge and lucrative government contracts) into his historically successful 1992 independent, anti-government presidential bid. But it’s not just the Perot-Musk connection: Ganz’s book skillfully shows how the early Information Age’s rapidly changing technology and culture inevitably flowed downstream to shape its politics. “The Metaverse: Building the Spatial Internet” (2024 edition) by Matthew Ball It might seem strange to tout a book about the metaverse in a moment where the technology seems at a decided ebb, but the tech industry isn’t letting that slow it down as 2025 will see a lengthy slate of new AR and VR devices. Matthew Ball, the venture capitalist and former Amazon executive now best known for his wonky, in-depth media analysis and metaverse boosterism, recently updated his 2022 primer on how sophisticated new virtual reality tools “will revolutionize everything.” Though Ball’s public persona is somewhat of a metaverse hype man, his book is refreshingly sober in its straightforward analysis of what this technology is, how far along it’s come in its development cycle, and why people would ever want to use it in the first place. At least for now, it’s the only metaverse book you really need, and given the amount of money big tech platforms are still allocating for the technology, you probably do need it. “Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works For Us,” by Gary Marcus Marcus, a leading AI critic, published this year a terse, 248-page broadside at the industry that he told DFD in September “rips off artists and writers,” is “bad for the environment,” is “racist” and relentlessly “used for misinformation.” Oh, also Marcus is an AI entrepreneur himself, who sold a machine-learning company to Uber. Those familiar with Marcus’ scathing, relentless criticism of AI hype on social media and his Substack won’t be terribly surprised by the book’s content. But its urgency and straightforwardness are a welcome tonic for an industry where those arguing both sides of the issue all too frequently fall back on soporific jargon, abstractions and hype. “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter,” by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac The book excavates Elon Musk’s purchase of the social media platform with unparalleled visibility into his thinking, pulled from direct reporting of pivotal moments as well as text exchanges, conversations and emails with the key figures in the drama. Though Conger and Mac spare little detail from Musk’s personal failings, including online bullying and Covid-19 denial, their work also probes the limits of the people who built and ran Twitter as a dysfunctional company ripe for a takeover. Co-founder and ex-CEO Jack Dorsey appears as a detached eccentric (including when assistants brought two rhesus macaques into the office for his pleasure), and his hand-picked novice successor Parag Agrawal flails as Musk moves in for control. With the owner of the rebranded X now serving as influential “first buddy” to the president-elect, “Character Limit” offers a peek at how Musk spins power from chaos. “The Real World of Technology” by Ursula Franklin This year marked the 35th anniversary of “The Real World of Technology,” a series of lectures given by the sui generis Canadian activist, metallurgist and author Ursula Franklin and compiled later in book form. I first encountered this book when it was recommended in DFD’s “Future in Five Questions” feature by Signal co-founder Meredith Whittaker, and in the three and a half decades since the lectures were given, their prophetic power has only become more apparent. Franklin warns of the world turning into an “unlivable techno-dump” without significantly more democratic input into technology’s development and deployment than was the case in 1989. Honest people might differ in such an assessment, but her sketch of such a world, where social “reciprocity” is eroded by digital communication and environmental concerns are pushed aside to build more and more powerful computers and rocket pads, will be eerily familiar no matter one’s feelings about it. “Technology & Empire,” by George Grant Because no list of recommendations is complete without two dispatches from prophetic Canadian intellectuals … In a retrospective feature published this year in Compact magazine, the author argues that philosopher George Grant’s vision of a world where “modern politics joined hands with modern technological science to push back the frontiers of anything that limited the exercise of that will” has come to even greater fruition than he envisioned in the 1970s and 1980s. “Technology & Empire” is a reader’s most direct, bracing introduction to Grant’s dark vision of a world where technological advancements that improve life have left people without the ability to make any sense of that life — as he wrote in that book in 1969, “the elimination of the idea of final purpose from the scientific study of the human and non-human things not only led to the progress of science and the improvement of conditions but also had consequences on the public understanding of what it was to live.” A worthy framing thought for one’s aimless post-holiday doomscrolling. Daniella Cheslow contributed to this report.
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