"When the technologies we use every day collapse our experiences into 24/7 availability, platforms for personal branding, and products to be monetized, nothing can be quite so radical as . . . doing nothing. Here, Jenny Odell sends up a flare from the heart of Silicon Valley, delivering an action plan to resist capitalist narratives of productivity and techno-determinism, and to become more meaningfully connected in the process"-- We live in a world...

In The History of the Future, Harris once again deep-dives into a tech drama for the ages to expertly tell the larger-than-life true story of Oculus, the virtual reality company founded in 2012 that--less than two years later--would catch the attention of Mark Zuckerberg and wind up being bought by Facebook for over $2 billion dollars. This incredible underdog story begins with inventor Palmer Luckey, then just a nineteen-year-old dreamer, living...

"A brilliant, revelatory account of the Cold War origins of the data-mad, algorithmic twenty-first century, from the author of the acclaimed international bestseller, These Truths. The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge--decades before Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Silicon Valley likes to imagine it has...

Elegantly tracing the intellectual history of computer science, Foer puts the DNA of the very idea of "tech" under the microscope. Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, he argues, are breaking laws intended to protect intellectual property and privacy. This is not the path towards freedom and prosperity, but the total automation and homogenization of our social, political, and intellectual lives. Today's corporate giants want access to every facet...

Where in Washington DC is the nation's most incredible treasure chest? It's a library unlike any other in the world, the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington D.C. Modern Marvels explodes the myth that this 200 year old institution is simply "where members of Congress borrow books". Viewers are taken beyond the magnificent Jefferson Building Great Hall into the secret vaults where more than 600 miles of shelves hold 130 million items, many of them...