This year’s list of my best reads and listens is a little bit different, and a whole lot shorter. That’s not to say the volume of my reading was any less than usual, in fact, it went way up (yes, that was apparently possible). But. A lot of that reading was very niche stuff focused on very niche client needs: interesting enough, but not exactly casual reading. And that was before, out of nowhere, I became a university student again.
That was how, this September, I found myself sitting in a study carrel tucked between the stacks in a massive multi-storey university research library, with my laptop and my books and coffee cup, shaking my head with bewilderment. After all, that was how I spent my undergraduate years in the late nineties: tucked into a cosy spot in a library carrel, laptop (check) books (check) coffee (check). The last time I’d done that was just after the turn of the millennium. And boom, there I was, right back in my happy place, as if the past 25 years hadn’t happened.
Giggling.
Yep, there I was, a grown-arse woman in her late 40s, giggling in public. (Very quietly: one must obey the silence of the silent floors.) Giggling out loud as I thought to myself: is this for real? Oh yes, this is for real. Let’s fucking go.
This means that my reading has mostly been the materials on the various course syllabi, or the rabbit holes that the footnotes in those readings have led me down. (Spoiler: you have no idea where they’ve led me, and you’re going to wait a good while to find out.) The overwhelming majority of those readings are locked behind academic shibboleths, and those that aren’t are a bit too, well, academic. This is not stuff that you just open up in a tab and read, nor would you really want to.
(The header image is my idea of light holiday break reading, out of the campus library. Yes, I said light. You don’t want to see the heavy stuff.)
As a rule, I don’t want to recommend readings that you can’t access without an academic shibboleth, nor really understand without a professor conducting a Socratic dialogue with you about it.
Which is why this year’s list is deceptively short.
With that in mind:
Work reading
Books
Regulating Free Speech in a Digital Age by David Bromell is the single best work I’ve read on the subject, both legally and politically. I always have time for academics who write from down on the ground, not up in ivory towers.
Concealing for Freedom: The Making of Encryption, Secure Messaging, and Digital Liberties is a history of the technical and political battles on hand. Free open access, this.
Number Go Up by Zeke Faux is an account of the SBF/FTX rise, fall, and ending. You can’t help but see multiple parallels between that saga and l’affaire WordPress, and you may find yourself taking notes for how that trial is likely to unfold. Now how’s that for a spoiler.
To make up for the paucity of that portion of my reading list, check out Tech Policy Press’s year in books review. I was chuffed to see that I’m already five down on that list. I won’t tell you which ones.
Articles and such
‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza and also ‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza, both by Yuval Abraham. The next time you see men in tailored suits in a Zone 1 office having a leisurely fireside chat about dystopian sci-fi AI possibilities, gently remind yourself – if not them – that those scenarios are already happening in Palestine.
The TESCREAL bundle: eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence by Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres is a must-read introduction to “know your posh junkie tech bros”, sorted by category and tag, so to speak.
The Bypass Strategy: Platforms, the Online Safety Act, and Future of Online Speech by Ellen Judson & co. File this one under “what did I warn you people? Did you people listen to me? Did you people give me a job that had more than 12 months’ programme funding so I could sort this? Did you people even offer me a job so I could sort this? No, you didn’t.” There, I feel better now. You don’t.
Social Media, Authoritarianism, and the World As It Is by Meredith Whittaker, who just gets everything.
Resistance in the Data-Driven Society by Stefania Milan is a guide to the weapons you must choose from. For what, you ask? You’re going to find out very shortly.
A Nonprofit Tried to Fix Tech Culture—but Lost Control of Its Own by Paresh Dave, over at Wired, is a familiar tale of how a digital rights organisation’s internal dysfunctions and power imbalances came to mirror the very structural injustices they supposedly existed to fight, and no, for once, I’m not talking about what it was like to work at Open Rights Group.
Implementing Recommendations for Supporting Human Rights in Web Standards by Nick Doty at CDT and the IETF RFC Guidelines for Human Rights Protocol and Architecture Considerations – hang them in the Louvre.
Effective Engagement with Technology Companies: A Guide for Civil Society from BSR. It dovetails nicely with GPD’s effort from a while back. For the flip side, see Delivering Effective Recommendations to Tech Companies by Katie Harbath. Talk to each other, not at each other, folks.
As for reading not yet ventured: I remain irrationally angry about Ross Anderson’s death. (Irrational in that it wasn’t his fault – it just happened – but I’m still pretty pissed off at Death about it.) I’m left with his own web page containing his many decades’ worth of works, which could last me for years. Look at that old school plain HTML, folks. That’s how you do it. “Stop looking and start reading”, grumbles Ross from parts unknown. “Aye awright you auld grump,” I reply.
Not Work reading
As for nonfiction beyond the day gigs, A Memoir of My Former Self is by Hilary Mantel but not her own doing. It’s a posthumous collection of published essays and other works, gathered up as a farewell in lieu of the one she never got to write. It is worth the price alone for the transcripts of her Reith lectures, where she explained her writing process behind her four history novels.
It also contains her iconic essay The Joys of Stationery, in which she skewers the biggest lie we tell ourselves: the notion that buying a fancy new notebook will somehow magically transform the thing we need to write. For the rest of my life, every time I pick up some posh £40 Japanese notebook, I will hear her floating over my shoulder, whispering “you could do that with a £3 jotter from Tesco, you know.” (Will I still buy the £40 Japanese notebook? Obviously.)
By the way, I just bought two new expensive notebooks.
The Long History of the Future by Nicole Kobie is just good fun. It looks into why the visions of the “future” we grew up with – the one with flying cars and robots – never came into being.
Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen is awful in the good way and you need to read it.
Feet-up reading
Turning now to fiction, the book of the year, without a doubt, was In Ascension by Martin MacInnes. It’s very deep sci-fi, and a bit slow to start, but stay with it. The awe you’ll feel at the end is worth it.
Second place went to Minor Detail by Adania Shibli. It’s a novella, from Palestine, which is a perfect piece of writing in every way.
Runners-up included Orbital by Samantha Harvey, Widowland and Queen High by CJ Carey, and Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov. The latter could be read as a satire on Brexit, and more widely, the reactionary politics of nostalgia.
Podcasts
There wasn’t really much new this year (see last year), but the one major addition is the best you could hope for.
Revolutions
Go to your podcast app and stick season 12 of the Revolutions history podcast in your queue. This season is not nonfiction history. This season is a science fiction story about the Martian Revolution of the 2200s, narrated with absolute seriousness as if it was real history being studied in retrospective centuries after that.
The “Martians” here aren’t aliens. They’re humans from Earth who relocated there as corporate workers for a tech bro’s space corporation, and settled a colony in the process. A century later, for their second, third, and fourth generation Mars-born descendants, that colony is its own unique society and civilisation – universities, poets, music, and all – suffocating under technocratic colonial corporate rule from Earth.
(“Suffocating” is literal here: in this mostly underground civilisation, the corporate overlords have the technical ability to isolate any given room containing disobedient Martians, and with the push of a button, pump the oxygen out.)
Earth is a place the overwhelming majority of the Martians have never even been, nor have any cultural affinity with, nor view as any sort of positive force in their lives. The Earthlings, for their part, view Mars as a filthy mining resource to be exploited by corporate slaves whom they view as inferior kinds of humans. There is only one way this could possibly end.
Get it now? This podcast takes the real history of the colonial revolutions of the past, maps it against the behaviour of corporate tech bros today, and shows us how the colonisation of space is likely to play out in the future. The plotline is rich with lore, texture, and characters, all of whom are ratcheting up the tension, week-by-week, on the road to a full-scale revolution.
And it’s very, very good.
(For an alternative Martian Revolution, see series 4 of AppleTV’s For All Mankind, which is the best show ever made that nobody’s watching. Sorry, was that an S4 spoiler?)
Farewell David
The thing about podcasts is that the voices on them are some of the few voices in your life that you hear every single day. You get to know them. You find yourself picking favourites. For me, The Telegraph’s daily Ukraine: The Latest podcast is that. It’s the only one I listen to no matter what: no episodes skipped, no content fast-forwarded through.
Which is why presenter David Knowles’ sudden death absolutely punched me in the stomach. One of those voices in my life was gone; not just any voice, but a good human being doing amazing work where it was needed. I heard him sign off as usual on a Friday. He was gone the next day. It didn’t seem conceivable, and still doesn’t.
The podcast’s listenership has been on a shared journey of mourning with the two remaining presenters, who – despite being toff/military guys – have allowed themselves to be remarkably vulnerable in public. David’s death was announced with some music he loved, from a bandura, which went right through me; his funeral service was livestreamed; and they shared the audio of the bagpiper piping a tune at his grave as he was laid to rest, complete with the sound of his feet on the Scottish pebbles. Just this morning I listened to a bonus episode, recorded before he died, where David went to a lower-league football match in Ukraine, capturing the little joys of everyday life that war cannot destroy.
His work continues, as does the podcast’s mission. The remaining hosts never doubted that for a minute. That’s been the most meaningful tribute of all. I never met David, but I felt like I knew him. It was a privilege to have him in my life, and to be invited – even as a mere listener – to participate in his final journey.
If you’ve got a David in your life, podcaster or not, let them know that. Life is short.
