When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world's most powerful internet company, she feels she's been given the opportunity of a lifetime. Run out of a sprawling California campus, the company links users' personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass...

Perhaps we were too distracted by the pandemic, or the endless financial crises, or the rise of TikTok. But under cover of them all, a new and more exploitative system has been taking hold. Insane sums of money that were supposed to re-float our economies after the crash of 2008 went to big tech instead. With it they funded the construction of their private cloud fiefdoms and privatized the internet. Technofeudalism says Yanis Varoufakis, is the new...

"When Elon Musk took over Twitter, two versions of reality emerged. In one, he was a free-speech crusader, a fearless visionary who could grab back power from Twitter's entitled workforce, motivate them to get "extremely hardcore," and multiply Twitter's profit and potential by orders of magnitude. In the other reality, there was the truth. Pulled from hundreds of hours of inside interviews with more than sixty employees, thousands of pages of internal...

Author Kidder gives us a window onto the paradoxical world of software engineering and Internet commerce, where genius and artistry often mingle with vulgarity and greed, and where Paul English, for all his success, seems at times almost an innocent. Fortune, mania, genius, philanthropy--the co-founder of the travel website Kayak.com grew up in working-class Boston in the 1970s, a boy who rebelled against authority but discovered a world that called...

"A year into her dream job at a cutthroat Silicon Valley start-up, Cassie finds herself trapped in a corporate nightmare. Between the long hours, toxic bosses, and unethical projects, she also struggles to reconcile the glittering promise of a city where obscene wealth lives alongside abject poverty and suffering. Ivy League grads complain about the snack selection from a conference room with a view of unhoused people bathing in the bay. Start-up...

"In this eye-opening, must-read book, a political insider and tech expert explains what's at stake for our tech-enabled lives-and what we can do about it. Neither an industry apologist nor irrational fearmonger, Alexis Wichowski considers the unchecked rise of tech giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Tesla-what she calls "net states"-and their growing and unavoidable influence in our lives. Combining original reporting, extensive...

"From the award-winning, bestselling author of The Circle comes an exciting new follow-up. When the world's largest search engine/social media company, The Circle, merges with the planet's dominant e-commerce site, it creates the richest and most dangerous--and, oddly enough, most beloved--monopoly ever known: The Every"-- An unlikely new hire at the Every, Delaney Wells is a former forest ranger and unwavering tech skeptic. She charms her way into...

"A penetrating indictment of how today's largest tech companies are hijacking our data, our livelihoods, our social fabric, and our minds-from an acclaimed Financial Times columnist and CNN analyst. Rana Foroohar tells the story of how Big Tech lost its soul-and ate our lunch. Through her skilled reporting and unparalleled access-won through nearly thirty years covering business and technology-she shows the true extent to which behemoths like Google,...

"A call-to-arms about the broken nature of artificial intelligence, and the powerful corporations that are turning the human-machine relationship on its head. The big nine corporations (Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, Microsoft, IBM and Apple) may be inadvertently building and enabling vast arrays of intelligent systems that don't share our motivations, desires, or hopes for the future of humanity."--Provided by publisher.