This page is for listing books I highly recommend. I try to categorize them by genre.
computer technology has served […] to make people believe that technological innovation is synonymous with human progress.
This book was published in 1992 and subtitled “The Surrender of Culture to Technology”. I heard about the book while watching a talk that John Cleese (of all people) gave at Google. Cleese remarks at some point in the talk that given the number of tech people in attendance, they should all go read Neil Postman's Technopoly.
If you work with technology it is imperative that you realise that your thinking is shaped by the technology that you use just as much as you shape the technology you think with. What's important to acknowledge is a tool, just like any other tool invented by humans, not an end in itself.
It is important to remember what can be done without computers, and it is also important to remind ourselves of what may be lost when we do use them. — p. 120
The book is a healthy gut check for anyone working with technology.
This was a birthday present. I seem to have met a like-minded sceptic of the whole economic system, and he gave me this book as a present with words “it's kind of a red-pill/blue-pill book”. Although, I'm not a fan of the analogy, I did love the book.
Graeber takes us through literally 5000 years and talks about the evolution of the concept of debt and how it's been seen in different cultures at different times throughout history.
The book is written in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis after which Graeber became a prominent figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, in particular around calls to forgive debts held by third-world countries where the principal has already been paid off multiple times.
But, you know, cOmPoUnD iNtErEsT ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A free book. Free as in freedom *and* beer.
An eye-opening book for me personally. I hadn't heard of gift economies before reading this book. Neither had I considered some of the obvious basic (and ugly) truths of the current economic system.
All round solid author. I'm chewing my way through his baroque cycle at the time of writing, but Cryptonomicon is a stand-out book.
Awesome book. The best of the three, but you should also read the other two in the series.