Hello there, and long time no see!

If you’re wondering where the Anti-Dystopians has been (sorry!), the mystery has now been revealed: I was trying desperately to finish my PhD. So, after many months in my writing cave, I am thrilled to say that I have completed the thesis and it has now been submitted! (I still have to defend and do any corrections in the next few months, so the Doctor-Title-Update is still incoming.) I’ll be starting as a Career Development Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford in the fall, so be sure to keep an eye out for more episodes after I make the big move from Cambridge to Oxford.

I started this podcast in the first year of my PhD as a way of trying to continue academic conversations about tech and politics during lockdown, and I’m so grateful to all the guests who shared their time, expertise and wisdom with me. I’ve been really blown away by how generous people have been in recording these episodes. It has shaped my own intellectual journey in such an enjoyable and profound way—with so many wonderful relationships and friendships forged as a result.

In that spirit, I often get emails from students asking me for reading recommendations when starting to research into tech and politics. So I’ve put together the Anti-Dystopian’s Guide for Students, a compilation of some of the resources I’ve linked in episodes’ show notes over the years. This is definitely not meant to be a comprehensive or total guide to everything out there on tech and politics; but it includes many of the standout pieces that have been written or recommended by podcast guests that had an impact on my thinking and hopefully might be of use to others out there.

If you’re interested, take a look below — or you can always check out the full Anti-Dystopians’ show notes archive. Until then, see you in the fall when the podcast will be back with new episodes (I mean it this time!).

The Anti-Dystopians’ Guide for Students Studying Tech & Politics

Towards Utopia

• James Muldoon, Platform Socialism

• Ruha Benjamin, Viral Justice & Imagination: A Manifesto

• Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists

• Josh Simons and Dipayan Ghosh, Utilities for Democracy

• Chellis Glendinning, Notes Towards a Neo-Luddite Manifesto

Alternatives to Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism

• Cory Doctorow, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

• Evgeny Morozov, Capitalism’s New Clothes

• Amy Kapczynski, The Law of Informational Capitalism

• Catriona Gray, More than Extraction: Rethinking Data's Colonial Political Economy

• Tim Hwang, The Subprime Attention Crisis

• Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism

On Crypto & Blockchain

• David Golumbia, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism.

• Molly White et al, The (edited) latecomer’s guide to crypto

• Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm

• David Gerard, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain

• Stefan Eich, Old Utopias, New Tax Havens: The Politics of Bitcoin in Historical Perspective

On Data and Artificial Intelligence

• Dan McQuillan, Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence.

• David Golumbia, Artificial General Intelligence and White Supremacy

• Jennifer Cobbe, Algorithmic Censorship by Social Platforms: Power and Resistance

Automated Systems & Surveillance

• Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor. 

• Amnesty International, Automated Apartheid: How facial recognition fragments, segregates and controls Palestinians in the OP

• Lauren Bridges, Amazon’s Ring is the largest civilian surveillance network the US has ever seen

• Lauren Bridges, Infrastructural obfuscation: unpacking the carceral logics of the Ring surveillant assemblage

• Rahim Kurwa, Building the Digitally Gated Community: The Case of Nextdoor

• Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson, The Surveillant Assemblage

• Trishant Simlai, Negotiating the Gaze

• Trishant Simlai and Raza Kazmi, Are Conservation Organizations Complicit in Ethnic Discrimination?

Internet Infrastructure & the Cloud

• Jina Moore, Anatomy of an internet shut down

• Corinne Cath Speth, Internet governance cultures

• Knodel et al, How the Internet Really Works, illustrated guide (with cats!):

• Ingrid Burrington, Infrastructural Power Beneath the Internet

Race & Technology

• Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology

• Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression

• Matt Mahmoudi, Race in the Digital Periphery: The New (Old) Politics of Refugee Representation

• Dalia Gebrial, Racial platform capitalism: empire, migration and the making of Uber in London

• Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness

Gender & Technology

• Ben Little and Alison Winch, The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism

• Mar Hicks, Programmed Inequality

• Julia Slupska, “Safe at Home: Towards a Feminist Critique of Cybersecurity”

• Cynthia Conti-Cook, “Surveilling the Digital Abortion Diary”

• Samantha Cole, period tracking apps and what they do with your data

• Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class

• Caitlin Chin-Rothmann, The privacy implications of the overturning of Roe v Wade in the US

• Anna Moore, AirTags, location tracking and domestic violence

  • Resources for protecting yourself online:

    • The DIY Guide to Feminist Cybersecurity

    • Tactical Tech’s Data Detox Kit

    • Avast’s guide to how to digitally disentangle yourself from a former abusive partner.

    • Seyi Akiwowo, How to Stay Safe Online

Colonialism & the Global South

• Michael Kwet, Digital Colonialism

• Stefanie Felsberger, “Colonial Cables – The Politics of Surveillance in the Middle East and North Africa.”

• Paola Ricaurte, Artificial Intelligence and the Feminist Decolonial Imagination

• Paola Ricaurte, Data Epistemologies, The Coloniality of Power, and Resistance

• Sebastián Lehuedé, Territories of data: ontological divergences in the growth of data infrastructure

• Sebastián Lehuedé, Big Tech’s New Headache: Data Centre Activism Flourishes Across the World

• With Google as My Neighbor, Will There Still Be Water?

Against Outer Space Colonialism

• Alina Utrata, “Engineering Territory: Space and Colonies in Silicon Valley”

• Alina Utrata, Lost in Space

• Mary Jane Rubenstein, Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race

• Ben Little and Alison Winch, The High Frontier and Jeff Bezos’s vision of American Imperialism

• Jill Lepore, The Evening Rocket: Elon Musk and Outer Space

Political Exit Projects

• Raymond Craib, Adventure Capitalism

• Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism

• Raymond Craib, Egotopia

• Raymond Craib, The Brief Life and Watery Death of a ’70s Libertarian Micronation

• Raynond Craib, Crypto Bros Are Trying to Buy an Island in the Pacific

• Atossa Abrahamian, N+1 feature on the Seasteading Community

• Philip Steinberg, Elizabeth Nyman and Mario Caraccioli, Atlas Swam: Freedom, Capital, and Floating Sovereignties in the Seasteading Vision

• Casey Lynch, “Vote with your feet”: Neoliberalism, the democratic nation-state, and utopian enclave libertarianism

• Mark O’Connell, Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand

• Neil Strauss, Brock Pierce: The Hippie King of Cryptocurrency trying to turn Puerto Rico into a Burning Man utopia

• Isabelle Simpson and Ian MacDougall, A libertarian ‘startup city’ in Honduras faces its biggest hurdle: the locals

Silicon Valley Culture & Companies

• Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking

• Malcom Harris, Palo Alto

• Paris Marx, Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation

• Ronan Farrow, Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule

• Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power.

• Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

• Margaret O’Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America

• Duncan Clark, Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built.

A Selection from the Anti-Dystopian’s Guide to Amazon

• Lina Khan, “The Amazon Anti-Trust Paradox”

• Alec MacGillis, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America

• Franklin Foer, A deep-dive into Jeff Bezos’s brain

• Charles Duhigg, Is Amazon Unstoppable?

• Josh Dzieza, Prime and Punishment: dirty dealing in the Amazon marketplace