Reading list
Not a syllabus — more a description of the kind of reading that tends to sit behind an essay, in case it's useful to yours.
What actually feeds an essay
Less often than you'd think, a single book. More often, it's a slower accumulation: a habit of reading widely and slightly outside the topic at hand, then noticing where two unrelated fields keep describing the same underlying shape. An essay about algorithmic feeds and an essay about civic institutions end up rhyming because they're both, underneath, about who gets to make a decision and who has to live with it.
Categories worth keeping in rotation
- The history of earlier technologies — not to draw neat parallels, but because every “unprecedented” anxiety about a new tool usually has an instructive, imperfect ancestor.
- Writing from inside the industry being written about — product notes, engineering retrospectives, internal debates made public — read against the grain of their own framing.
- Long-form journalism and criticism that sits with a single case long enough to complicate it, rather than the shorter pieces built to confirm a take you already had.
- Fields with no obvious connection to technology — urban planning, labor history, the sociology of institutions — which turn out to have already worked through many of the same questions about power, access and design.
A reading habit, not a reading list
The specific titles matter less than the habit: read slower than the news cycle, read outside your own feed's recommendations on purpose, and treat any single source — including these essays — as one voice in an argument rather than a verdict. The themes that recur across this site came from exactly that kind of slow accumulation, not from a single decisive source. If you're looking for where to start reading here instead, the essays are the place.