internet culture syllabus 📚

books about technology that intersect with gender, race, history and more.

Jan 31, 2025

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The working title for essay 006 is Debased + Exalted, and it will be about: Possession (1981), Nosferatu (2024), FKA Twigs’ “Eusexua,” Ethel Cain’s “Perverts” + Simon Critchley’s Mysticism.

Every time I click into a listicle promising to compile the best books about internet culture or technology I drop to my knees in defeat at the sight of yet another collection of Big Tech ass-kissing, poorly-cited theory, misdirected alarmism and neoliberal helplessness. Or, I’ll read through some authoritative book or article about social media only to find ahistorical hot takes punctuated by phrases like “now more than ever” and “like never before.” Easily found proof to the contrary be damned! It makes me vibrate with anger: If I can learn about the histories of internet culture on my own dime and time, why can’t the major publication contributors with book deals?

I owe this outrage to the modest, yet mighty, stack of books I keep near my desk. These are books I have read and annotated and studied several times over. They are the backbone of my writing. Reading each one of these books felt like finding the missing piece, that crucial insight that put words and facts to the vague ideas and hunches that were motivating my writing. This is my own personal internet culture syllabus.

Each of these books goes against every convention that typically structures how we think and write about technology at large. They reject the marketing and self-mythologizing and treat culture and technology as points along the same spectrum. They are anchored in the understanding that histories, markets, governments and ideologies are inseparable from, and are reproduced in hardware, software, interfaces, information and vice-versa. They are well-written, thoroughly-researched and fascinating reads. And I hope to read a lot more like them.

Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet by Lisa Nakamura

The tech industries have long marketed their products on the promise that they will contribute to an internet as a neutral space that transcends the limits of the material world. But according to Lisa Nakamura, this “early-nineties understanding of the Internet as a utopian space of identity play,” avoided “all discussion of race in favor of concerns that were perceived as more ‘universalist’.”

These color-blind dreams of an “information superhighway” did a poor job of invisibilizing its own dependence of gendered and radicalized hierarchies. Digitizing Race challenged the then-pervasive “digital divide discourse that persistently envisioned users of color as backward and uninvolved in technology.” And so Nakamura spotlights on the lowest forms of internet usage, the realm of activity researchers had so far overlooked, such as AIM Buddies and joke websites—visual forms through which users go out of their way to make their race and gender apparent.

It took me over a year to read this entire book and it’s probably not the obvious choice if you’re just casually interested in learning about this stuff. But each chapter is sufficiently self-contained that you can read only those that cover the topics you are interested in: The introduction covers the transition from text-based interfaces to a more visual internet. Chapters one and four are relevant if you’re curious about the early days of mommy blogs, pregnancy forums and other women-centered online spaces. Chapter three focuses on representations of race and technology in The Matrix and other films.

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

I am always frustrated by people who cry about how the internet is making people forget how to write in cursive or exposing them to anti-imperialist politics. These grumps never talk about what today’s technology actually endangers while bemoaning what little there is to celebrate. James Bridle’s New Dark Age actually lays out all the ways in which technology today is being expanded as a proxy for monopolization and unfettered extraction: “Smart or dumb, emergent or intentional, such programs and their usefulness as attack vectors are escaping the black boxes of stock exchange and online marketplaces and entering everyday life.”

Dark Age begins (🔗) with a critique of the cloud metaphor before moving on to incisive critiques of trade algorithms, meteorological technologies and the traps of computational thinking (the idea that every problem can be solved with computation). Bridle measures the promises of technology's Enlightenment ideals against our current reality of misinformation and black-boxed devices: “Over the last century, technological acceleration has transformed our planet, our societies, and ourselves, but it has failed to transform our understanding of these things.”

It’s rare to see such deep insight into things like financial and military technology from an anti-imperialist lens, one that knows that “a simple functional understanding of systems is insufficient; one needs to be able to think about histories and consequences too.” My biggest takeaway was how obscurity and complexity are themselves strategies used to shield motives and protect economic interests.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

This is one of the most accessible and straight-forwardly informative books on this list. Noble defines algorithmic oppression as “driven data failures that are specific to people of color and women.” It touches on history, policy, the role of equity and inclusion in the tech world, the flaws in computer science educations and how even the library sciences are “implicated in the algorithmic process of sorting and classifying information and records.”

Noble argues that Google is “an advertising company”that produces “advertising algorithms, not information algorithms.” The book homes in on Google’s role of displacing and depleting non-commercial information and research resources and its deleterious effects on young Black girls, specifically: Until far too recently, Google results for “gorillas” used to display images of Black children and searched for “Black girls'“ mostly yielded links to porn sites.

Companies like Google keep getting away with the harm they cause, always brushing it off as bad apples or malfunctions. In either case, Noble calls it a “corporate logic of either willful neglect or a profit imperative that makes money from racism and sexism.” Her research refuses to mystify or deify algorithms. They aren’t magical, they don’t know us better than we do, they’re just marketed that way. Algorithms are “mathematical formulations that drive automated decisions” that are, at the end of the day, “made by human beings.” As such, it should come to no surprise that “racism and sexism are part of the architecture and language of technology.”

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne

Read together, Dark Matters and Algorithms of Oppression tell the story of how knowledge-production is itself the foundation for race-based oppression and even the political, economic and “scientific” constructions of race itself. Dark Matters takes a closer look at how surveillance formed and defined itself as a means of racialization and argues that this relationship between race and surveillance is fundamental to understanding our increasingly surveilled world of today. “Racializing surveillance is a technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise a ‘power to define what is in or out of place’.” To a degree, technology creates race.

Browne reads into the archives of slavery and the Middle Passage. The book surveys documents such as slave ship layouts, fugitive slave advertisements and the Book of Negroes, “the first government-issued document for state-regulated migration […] that explicitly linked corporeal markers to the right to travel.” Browne positions objects like lamps and branding irons as precursors to contemporary biometric information technologies and airport security rituals. But the point of choosing this moment in history is to highlight how people subverted, counteracted and defied surveillance through “certain acts of cultural production we can find performances of freedom and suggestions of alternatives to ways of living.”

This book is written for an academic audience, but it is short enough to not overwhelm a non-expert reader (like us!). If you are more of a visual learner, there are artists like American Artist, who have worked with Browne or cite this book specifically as a cornerstone of their practice. So if you want to see Browne’s ideas in action or learn about how people relate to them, I suggest looking at these links to their work.

Girl Online: A User Manual by Joanna Walsh

New technologies change how we relate to old technologies and books and writing are among the latter group whose role and purpose are reinvented by the newest inventions. Writing today, especially writing about technology, should work towards stretching and morphing itself into a form that can move and grow with the world around it. How am I supposed to trust what you say about the way the internet changed everything if how you think and write shows no signs of it?

Girl Online: A User Manual is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. This is the most formally-inventive book of the bunch. Easier to read because it is not academic and requires little background aside from a first-person experience of using the internet. It embodies the experience being online without crumbling under the weight of its own aesthetic ambitions. Walsh perfectly depicts the dual role of subject and object, consumer and product we are forced to inhabit as users of the internet. It has phenomenal passages about Pinterest, work and Sex and the City. A mixed ode to programming language, internet diaries, confessional and confessional tweets, at its most hopeful, Girl Online suggests that “only the Young-Girl practitioner dares to inhabit her own language–a mimesis, a meme, a performance of what she already is.”