My Reading List - 2021

I’ve been lucky to read quite a few great books in 2021.

I try to read around a book a week, on average. Sometimes I’ll get through a short one and finish two in a week, and sometimes I’ll just blow off reading if I’m doing something else. My total number for 2021 is around 55-60 books, though I long ago lost firm track of exactly how many. There’s been great stuff released this year (much of which I won’t get to until next year), but 2021 gave me the opportunity to catch up on things I’ve been meaning to get to for a while. The pandemic has kept me focused. ?

I don’t have near enough room here to go through all of them—and not all of them are recommended—but I’ll give brief reviews for the ones I enjoyed the most or found the most interesting.

Future Politics by Jamie Susskind

This one was in the realm of the political world as evolved through a technological lens. Susskind's prime interest is taking up where Lawrence Lessig left off: code is law. We're growing more and more used to changes in code translating as changes in law and how we interact with our world. For instance, the new Build Back Better plan would mandate all cars, by 2026, feature a breathalyzer of some sort to keep drunk drivers off the road. Apple's proposed iCloud photo monitoring to watch for pictures of "child abuse" would automatically report such images or remove them. What used to be a nudge in the right direction is now a technological replacement for free will to keep laws active. Code removes choice, which might make people safer but impinges on their freedom. Where do we draw the line, and how do we determine how far down the path we can go before we lose what it means to be human entirely?

Susskind also examines this in the light of politics: how do we use social media networks for good while cutting down on the bad? Where do elections go when we discover we have the power to sway them with fake news and posts? Should we realize the Taylorist vision of behavioral modification for the common good of humanity, or do our original codes, that of law, supersede our new code, buried in browsers and apps?

Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education by David J. Staley

This one I highly recommend to anyone working in the academic space, particularly tech startups interested in school disruption. We're used to universities being what they are now: buildings full of students who pay large fees to learn as everyone learned for centuries. We now know this model doesn't work for everyone. In fact, it doesn't work for a great number of people anymore. Debt, worthless degrees, questionable classes and curriculums, safe spaces. It isn't hard to see why people want a radical innovation to free them from the bonds of the old school.

Alternative Universities answers that call with several chapters of focused case studies on different models. Platform universities, spatial and ambient intelligent rooms and locations, deliberative or smaller schools, microdegrees and microcolleges, "Nomad University", and apprenticeships form some of the core ideas that underpin the new school for students who want to learn without limitations. As a student of the classic college system, this book taught me interesting things while reinforcing my deep belief that there must be superior ways of learning. Best of all, it makes the future for academia seem potentially bright again.

Ours to Hack and to Own by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider (Editors)

We take our conventional social media networks now for granted. We're accustomed to Facebook and Twitter being free networks that harvest data for their own profit. Centralized control of networks belongs to the rich, rarefied few. Many people are growing entirely burned out on social media these days. And why not? It's an exhausting, dubious system that takes more than what we want to sell. We're not customers, we're products.

Ours to Hack and to Own proffers the idea that not only can we develop our own new social networks, such as Diaspora or Mastodon, but that we can make laws supporting data cooperatives and crowdsourced, decentralized control of the platforms we use. The data that has made founders obscenely rich came from us—why wouldn't we get say in how it's used and how it can be sold? I was hoping this book would track into another topic I'm interested in, health and medical data cooperatives, but the book focuses mostly on current and proposed cooperative platform solutions. Time will tell if we are eventually able to harness our own data for ourselves, but this book is a necessary start to a radical conversation.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

This book, published by Verso (one of my current favorite publishers), is a few years old and has been referenced frequently in other, similar books. I can see why. It's detailed, articulate, and covers nuanced capabilities of technology while always remaining tethered to the human and the relatable.

Covering topics from 3D printing to blockchain to self-driving cars and smartphones, Radical Technologies lives up to its subtitle by showing the design process for everyday life, and how it's completely changed from what it once was. We now use cryptocurrencies online, with wallets stored on smartphones that are connected to satellites. 3D printing takes filaments and turns them into products and gadgets—and weapons. We have a whole new grammar of how we interact with the world: pinching, swiping, clicking, all actions created and informed by the interfaces on the devices we use.

Radical Technologies covered much of the same ground as Future Politics, albeit in a more pessimistic way. Another good book from Verso, New Dark Age by James Bridle, includes related sections about how technology can be used on massive scales to obfuscate the truth. Radical, new technologies that change how we live have the potential to change how we record and how we interact with truth itself. While many other books have come out in this same vein since its publication, Radical Technologies is still a fascinating primer for techno-intellectual debates growing more urgent daily.

A New City O/S by Stephen Goldsmith and Neil Kleiman

Working for a state agency, my focus has long been on using platform and digital solutions to make government work better for the people. Smart cities are now famous—or maybe infamous—for their ubiquity, but their potential benefits are only now beginning to be fully explored.

A New City O/S lays out the positives of treating city governments as we treat operating systems for our devices. We want interoperability, coded solutions, intuitive interfaces, quick response, a wealth of data to use and act on, and plenty of feedback interactions from users to refine and better the system. Government, at its core, is based on interactions between citizens (users) and their government (operating system). If we want smart solutions to our problems, we have to think smartly about the future while being free to innovate.

Quick Honorable Mentions

The Spatial Web by Gabriel Rene and Dan Mapes—interesting insights in Web 3.0, including ambient and spatial computation.

Blockchain Wars by Evan McFarland—detailed look at how blockchain can impact supply chains, social media platforms, payments, devices, and a little bit of society everywhere.

Smart Citizens, Smarter State by Beth Simone Noveck—Noveck writes frequently on smart governments and platform solutions for citizens as users. I highly recommend her books for those in any government, be it local, state, or federal.

My hope for next year is to read even more (if possible) and to delve into similar topics with an eye to disruption. All of the books chosen on this list are instructive not only for their quality of writing and intellectual candor, but for their potential future business solutions to the enterprising organization. Pursue at leisure.