The Incomparable Book Club discussion

I enjoyed your discussion of Old Tech Books:

https://www.theincomparable.com/thein...

I know you guys tend to discuss only positive books, but I would recommend some critical takes from the period such as Postman. Many are relevant even today.

(I recognize you weren't 100% "rah rah tech!" You mentioned Stoll's later work, our perpetual security problems, and both Monty and Glenn alluded to problems with tech, so please take this as addendum more than criticism.)

20 years after the dawn of the worldwide web, we have a lot of data to look back on and a ton more issues to deal with. If I were to recommend some similar books from more recent times, it would probably be these:

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (kind of the new Hackers)

This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Informatio n (interesting overview of cryptography since the 90s, among other things)

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (basically a catalogue of everything wrong with tech today)

The Circle (a kind of Microserfs for today)

Not perfect analogues, but I think they would serve as an interesting contrast to the earlier books.

I also enjoyed it - and had some recommendations along a different line - tech's interplay with social norms and individual psychology.

Howard Rheingold wrote, among others, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier — this 1993 book was an in-depth dive into pre-web social spaces like The Well, MUDs, Usenet, IRC, and mailing lists. It looks as if the full text of the book is available now on Rheingold's site:
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intr...

Ellen Ullman, who was a programmer in Silicon Valley in the late 70's/early 80's, wrote a nonfiction memoir/reflection on computing, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents. She also wrote a novel, The Bug, set in a 1984 startup, about the interplay between an intractable software bug and the characters' similarly intractable character traits and conflicts. She's an evocative writer, and to my mind really evokes the psychological state that programming/tech immersion fosters. Well worth a read.

I'd doubly recommend Michael's mention of Ellen Ullman's work (I was genuinely surprised to hear that she wasn't mentioned) and would also add Kate Losse's The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network as an addition to the more modern collection.

Thanks for the recommendations! I'm going to try to read all these. Starting with the Howard Rheingold one, both because it's conveniently available in my browser and because I think the role of the Well in defining online culture has generally gone underrecognized.

Monty wrote: "I think the role of the Well in defining online culture has generally gone underrecognized."

Obviously Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants talks a lot about the Well, and I think Andy Greenberg's book talks about it. While I haven't read a book specifically about The Well (might have to pick up that Rheingold book), a lot of what I have read over the years wrt to hackers, makers, etc has at least mentioned the Whole Earth Catalog and The Well. I don't think it is particularly underrecognized.

I was very pleased to note that I have read all but one or two of the books you covered, and many of them very shortly after they were first published. I used a few of them to help explain hacker culture to my (non-techie) wife. I also second (or third) the recommendation of Ellen Ullman.