Technology
Cultural criticism of the machine age, alongside technical guides from the platform era. Most of these books take a single machine or method and follow it across centuries, from surveillance and money to fakery and the manufacture of belief, then ask what it costs the reader now. The older guides, further down the shelf, met readers at the tools of their day.
The Two Letters
Two messages humanity mailed to strangers it will never meet, a golden record that says find us and a desert nuclear warning that says flee, and which of the two outlives the people who sent it.
The Black Ram
One machine behind five thousand years of blame, from the sacrificial goat to the show trial, and what the cast-out can still do.
Synalosis
One name for the shape behind the hunt, the siege, and the feed, and the three cuts a target can still make.
The Eighteen-Minute Lie
How a fabricated statistic about the attention span fooled a century, and who got rich selling the cure.
Not My Thing
The staged classroom cruelties that train obedience while calling it empathy, from the armband to the diversity seminar.
The Source Code of the Self
A playwright's casket scene became the operating system of popular psychology, four centuries before the feed.
The Off Switch
Money and property turned into permissioned systems, and the growing power to switch off a life's transactions.
The Scientific Aesthetic
A single test, the originating act, cutting through science and art to name who did the work.
UNDERWRITTEN
The first full institutional history of American public broadcasting, from the 1967 act to its 2026 dissolution.
Carceral Nation
Three centuries of surveillance escaping the prison walls to become the organizing principle of civic life.
Selling Saturday Morning
Saturday-morning television built a commercial pedagogy of childhood, and its grammar of want outlived the cartoons.
The Counterfeit Bargain
A nine-part taxonomy of fakery, tested where the line between real and fake decides what we pay and believe.
The Failed City
An autopsy of urban collapse across five kinds of failure and twenty cases spanning two millennia.
What the Light Carries
Literary fiction about what happens to meaning when it has to cross time.
The God in the Wire
What becomes of a civilization that trades its gods for its machines.
Google Apps Administrator Guide
A platform-era manual for running Google Apps, a working guide from the tools of its day.
Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac
Office 2008 on the Mac, a hands-on guide from the days of the boxed software suite.
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
Mac OS X Leopard for the everyday user, meeting the machine where it stood.
Windows 95 Communication and Online Secrets
Getting online in the Windows 95 years, a dispatch from the early connected desktop.