How do we live with the tools that shape what we see, feel, and believe?
A slow, modular study of books that examine:
- Interface design and attention
- Emotional habits of consumption
- Platforms and power
- Intimacy, visibility, memory, truth
Scope:
- 1 book per month
- Short, digestible modules (you can read or revisit slowly)
- Focused on media as interface, infrastructure, intimacy, influence
- Includes seminal texts that shaped your thinking, plus occasional current readings
Modules:
Module 1: Second Life by Amanda Hess
Module 2: Anti-memetics
Ideas:
- Ted Chiang, “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”
- Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing
- Moya Bailey, Misogynoir Transformed
- Amanda Hess, Second Life, 2024
- Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression, 2018
- Nicholas Carr, The Shallows, 2010
- Nikki Usher, News for the Rich, White, and Blue, 2021
- Jill Louise Busby, Unfollow Me: Essays on Complicity, 2021
- Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 1969
- Dave Pell, Please Scream Inside Your Heart, 2021
- Brooke Gladstone, The Influencing Machine, 2011
- Victor Pickard, Democracy Without Journalism?, 2020
- Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 2019
- Ted Chiang, Exhalation (esp. “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”), 2019
- Moya Bailey, Misogynoir Transformed, 2021
- Meredith Broussard, More Than a Glitch, 2023
- Joan Donovan & Emily Dreyfuss, Meme Wars, 2022
- Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small, 2024
- Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform, 2014
- Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick, 2019
- Nadia Asparouhova, Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading, 2025