Books like Enshittification

I heard about this book from an artist and software creator who said he used Walker's concepts to connect better with his newsletter subscribers and help them guide him into making better products. A key insight is that if you listen carefully and build what your users/fans/customers want that they will reward you by buying it right out of the gate.

This is a revised edition, so Walker is able to provide links to case studies of students of his who built strong online businesses using his techniques. They range from people like real estate developers selling courses to costumiers selling courses on how to create amazing "kits" for historical re-enactors.

Understand that Walker himself is selling a course, but you don't need to buy it to follow the principles in the book. I think it's a valuable for anyone looking to establish new or enhance existing income… show more.

I had never heard of the multimillionaire entrepreneur Ravikant before this. I tend not to be a business book reader, but in 2025 I tried to focus on reading nonfiction books that others recommended to me, and this was one of them. The book is a collection of interviews and, yes, Tweets he shared with followers over the years that express his ideas. So yes, because of this mode of presentation, the book can feel a little disjointed. But thought the editor did a create job of presenting these chunks of wisdom in as tightly a manner as possible, so the ideas read seamlessly.

The first half of the book is all about wealth--how I got this way and how you can, too! Mostly, I was surprised how much he attributed to reading the right books and continuing one's education throughout life.

The second half, surprisingly, was all… show more.

I enjoyed this book a lot, but don’t trust me. I’m over 25, way over. Still, I just wish I had read it when it first came out, when the geeky parts were fresh. That’s the trouble with near future sci-fi, pieces of it go stale rather quickly. The opinions of a teenage hero about things like Domino’s pizza could lose the sympathies of some readers despite grounding the story in the reality of everyday life. Info dumps were a necessary evil in order to explain the cleverness of M1k3y’s hacks, but the simplistic summary of the sixties decade made me laugh. I remember those days. Really. So why does Orwell’s 1984 remain relevant today despite the changes? It has none of the realistic details of Little Brother, and it has only two sides, Winston and Big Brother. Doctorow’s book has a third entity, the terrorists, and for them he… show more.

LeGuin's light science fiction really could have been an imagined contemporary world, as it contrasts a socialist- anarchistic society with a truly contemporary capitalist and government-authoritarian system. Its central character, committed to the former, visits and experiences the latter, only to realize that individualism can still contribute in a more egalitarian order. The book raises basic questions about behavior within a larger community and its dominant values with a strong central character who leads the life of the mind.

This is an amazing book to really get sucked into.

Written in 1976, it is a fantasy to go hide in from today’s dystopia of post-COVID and early climate change. You can join 1960s Consuela Ramos in her escape from a forced hospitalization in a mental institution to a utopian world that she visits with Luciente, a time-traveler.

That future is full of amazing people who do not celebrate hierarchies of race and gender but live in anarchist poly-amorous villages where hard labor is performed by machines and babies are produced in breeders with biological components of three parents.

The book is rich in blueprints for liberated education, conflict resolution, socio-economic innovation, and relationships. The beautiful world is threatened by a wicked parallel future world that Consuela must help to prevent.

I’ve been wanting to dive more deeply into Ted Chiang’s fiction since seeing the movie Arrival and reading his essays in The New Yorker. This collection did not disappoint.

I happened to be reading it in the hours and days after the birth of my second child, stealing minutes to do so while breast pumping.

I kept remarking to my husband, “This man’s mind…his mind!” Dazzling. And when, a few days after birth, our baby had a serious health scare, the message of “The Story of Your Life”—that if given the chance to see a horrible future in which you outlive your child, you’d make that baby anyway—gave me the strangest, most profound comfort.

It was a toss-up here between this book and The Scar, set in a different part of the same world. One of Miéville’s acknowledged influences is the wonderful Mervyn Peake, and like Peake, he’s never in a hurry to get a story underway.

I’d have probably tossed Perdido Street Station aside after 100-200 pages except for a friend’s fervent recommendation—and I’d have missed out big time if I had! Because the story as it develops is truly grand, truly epic. Like Peake, Miéville has a gift for raising action to a mythical status. I love, love, love a novel that builds up to a long, rolling, thunderous climax!

I love how this book told the story of technology that feels only slightly ahead of reality.

I was working at Google at the time that I read this, and what resonated with me was the enormous amounts of data being collected, the optimism around what that data could enable, and the subtle ways algorithms were already beginning to shape human behavior.

It made me start thinking about where those nudges could ultimately lead. And it’s not just the amount of data being collected, but how willingly people embrace it when the experience is good enough, and it comes beautifully packaged.

That’s a similar idea I explore in my book: how much control we willingly hand over to our technology overlords in exchange for free email, better-targeted advertising, and a little more convenience.

One of the progenitors of the Cyberpunk genre; unlike modern takes on Cyberpunk, this keeps to the core dystopian themes that have been all but forgotten thanks to the over emphases on aesthetics.

This is a cyberpunk classic, but what I really love about it is the combination of modern computer technology with Sumerian mythology, the Tower of Babel myth, and how well Stephenson is able to integrate them, so we have hackers throwing around Sumerian terms like 'me' and 'nam-shub'.

And for me, I love that there’s just a lot of cool stuff happening here, like a biker with an atomic bomb on a deadman switch, a nuclear-powered needle gun. And our lead character is named Hiro Protagonist. But probably the biggest point for me is that despite the dystopian setting, there really is more hope in this story than one would think.