The Anti-Dystopian's Student Guide
A reading list for students interested in studying tech & politics
Hello there, and long time no see!
If you’re wondering where the Anti-Dystopians has been (sorry!), the mystery has now been revealed: I was trying desperately to finish my PhD. So, after many months in my writing cave, I am thrilled to say that I have completed the thesis and it has now been submitted! (I still have to defend and do any corrections in the next few months, so the Doctor-Title-Update is still incoming.) I’ll be starting as a Career Development Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford in the fall, so be sure to keep an eye out for more episodes after I make the big move from Cambridge to Oxford.
I started this podcast in the first year of my PhD as a way of trying to continue academic conversations about tech and politics during lockdown, and I’m so grateful to all the guests who shared their time, expertise and wisdom with me. I’ve been really blown away by how generous people have been in recording these episodes. It has shaped my own intellectual journey in such an enjoyable and profound way—with so many wonderful relationships and friendships forged as a result.
In that spirit, I often get emails from students asking me for reading recommendations when starting to research into tech and politics. So I’ve put together the Anti-Dystopian’s Guide for Students, a compilation of some of the resources I’ve linked in episodes’ show notes over the years. This is definitely not meant to be a comprehensive or total guide to everything out there on tech and politics; but it includes many of the standout pieces that have been written or recommended by podcast guests that had an impact on my thinking and hopefully might be of use to others out there.
If you’re interested, take a look below — or you can always check out the full Anti-Dystopians’ show notes archive. Until then, see you in the fall when the podcast will be back with new episodes (I mean it this time!).
The Anti-Dystopians’ Guide for Students Studying Tech & Politics
Towards Utopia
James Muldoon, Platform Socialism
Ruha Benjamin, Viral Justice & Imagination: A Manifesto
Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists
Josh Simons and Dipayan Ghosh, Utilities for Democracy
Chellis Glendinning, Notes Towards a Neo-Luddite Manifesto
Alternatives to Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism
Cory Doctorow, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism
Evgeny Morozov, Capitalism’s New Clothes
Amy Kapczynski, The Law of Informational Capitalism
Catriona Gray, More than Extraction: Rethinking Data's Colonial Political Economy
Tim Hwang, The Subprime Attention Crisis
Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism
On Crypto & Blockchain
David Golumbia, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism.
Molly White et al, The (edited) latecomer’s guide to crypto
Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm
David Gerard, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain
Stefan Eich, Old Utopias, New Tax Havens: The Politics of Bitcoin in Historical Perspective
On Data and Artificial Intelligence
Dan McQuillan, Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence.
David Golumbia, Artificial General Intelligence and White Supremacy
Jennifer Cobbe, Algorithmic Censorship by Social Platforms: Power and Resistance
Automated Systems & Surveillance
Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor.
Amnesty International, Automated Apartheid: How facial recognition fragments, segregates and controls Palestinians in the OP
Lauren Bridges, Amazon’s Ring is the largest civilian surveillance network the US has ever seen
Lauren Bridges, Infrastructural obfuscation: unpacking the carceral logics of the Ring surveillant assemblage
Rahim Kurwa, Building the Digitally Gated Community: The Case of Nextdoor
Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson, The Surveillant Assemblage
Trishant Simlai, Negotiating the Gaze
Trishant Simlai and Raza Kazmi, Are Conservation Organizations Complicit in Ethnic Discrimination?
Internet Infrastructure & the Cloud
Jina Moore, Anatomy of an internet shut down
Corinne Cath Speth, Internet governance cultures
Knodel et al, How the Internet Really Works, illustrated guide (with cats!):
Ingrid Burrington, Infrastructural Power Beneath the Internet
Race & Technology
Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology
Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression
Matt Mahmoudi, Race in the Digital Periphery: The New (Old) Politics of Refugee Representation
Dalia Gebrial, Racial platform capitalism: empire, migration and the making of Uber in London
Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
Gender & Technology
Mar Hicks, Programmed Inequality
Julia Slupska, “Safe at Home: Towards a Feminist Critique of Cybersecurity”
Cynthia Conti-Cook, “Surveilling the Digital Abortion Diary”
Samantha Cole, period tracking apps and what they do with your data
Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class
Caitlin Chin-Rothmann, The privacy implications of the overturning of Roe v Wade in the US
Anna Moore, AirTags, location tracking and domestic violence
Resources for protecting yourself online:
Colonialism & the Global South
Michael Kwet, Digital Colonialism
Stefanie Felsberger, “Colonial Cables – The Politics of Surveillance in the Middle East and North Africa.”
Paola Ricaurte, Artificial Intelligence and the Feminist Decolonial Imagination
Paola Ricaurte, Data Epistemologies, The Coloniality of Power, and Resistance
Sebastián Lehuedé, Territories of data: ontological divergences in the growth of data infrastructure
Sebastián Lehuedé, Big Tech’s New Headache: Data Centre Activism Flourishes Across the World
Against Outer Space Colonialism
Alina Utrata, “Engineering Territory: Space and Colonies in Silicon Valley”
Alina Utrata, Lost in Space
Mary Jane Rubenstein, Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race
Ben Little and Alison Winch, The High Frontier and Jeff Bezos’s vision of American Imperialism
Jill Lepore, The Evening Rocket: Elon Musk and Outer Space
Political Exit Projects
Raymond Craib, Adventure Capitalism
Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism
Raymond Craib, Egotopia
Raymond Craib, The Brief Life and Watery Death of a ’70s Libertarian Micronation
Raynond Craib, Crypto Bros Are Trying to Buy an Island in the Pacific
Atossa Abrahamian, N+1 feature on the Seasteading Community
Philip Steinberg, Elizabeth Nyman and Mario Caraccioli, Atlas Swam: Freedom, Capital, and Floating Sovereignties in the Seasteading Vision
Casey Lynch, “Vote with your feet”: Neoliberalism, the democratic nation-state, and utopian enclave libertarianism
Mark O’Connell, Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand
Neil Strauss, Brock Pierce: The Hippie King of Cryptocurrency trying to turn Puerto Rico into a Burning Man utopia
Isabelle Simpson and Ian MacDougall, A libertarian ‘startup city’ in Honduras faces its biggest hurdle: the locals
Silicon Valley Culture & Companies
Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking
Malcom Harris, Palo Alto
Paris Marx, Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation
Ronan Farrow, Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule
Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power.
Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
Margaret O’Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
Duncan Clark, Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built.
A Selection from the Anti-Dystopian’s Guide to Amazon
Lina Khan, “The Amazon Anti-Trust Paradox”
Alec MacGillis, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
Franklin Foer, A deep-dive into Jeff Bezos’s brain
Charles Duhigg, Is Amazon Unstoppable?
Josh Dzieza, Prime and Punishment: dirty dealing in the Amazon marketplace