Seven technology books on attention, chips and who gains from new tools

The technology books that last are rarely about a gadget. If you want to understand what screens do to public conversation, start with Amusing Ourselves to Death. If you want the physical machinery under everything digital, read Chip War. And if your question is who actually gains when a new tool arrives, Power and Progress gives the most direct answer.

Those three stand for the questions this shelf is built around: attention, infrastructure and power. The other four go deeper into one question each. Artificial intelligence has its own reading list on AI, so I have left the chatbots out here and gone after the older, slower forces that any new tool has to pass through, AI included: the media habits it lands in, the factories that make its parts, and the companies that own the channels it travels along.

Most of these books are not new, and that is part of their value. A book about one product dates within a year or two. A book about how attention, supply chains and market power behave can be tested against everything that has happened since it was written, and these seven have survived that test better than most of the predictions made about the products they describe.

How we chose

I picked these seven for clarity for a general reader, for a range of viewpoints (a media critic, a technology writer, a historian, a law professor and three economists, one of them a former finance minister), and for how widely each is read and reviewed.

What our media do to attention

The first three books ask the oldest question on the shelf. Does a medium simply carry ideas, or does it change which ideas can travel at all?

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. Postman taught at New York University for decades, and this 1985 book opens with a contrast readers still repeat: George Orwell feared a state that would ban books, while Aldous Huxley feared a culture in which nobody would want to read them. Postman thought Huxley had the better forecast. His argument is that every medium favors some kinds of content over others, and that television, built for images and quick cuts, turned news, politics, religion and schooling into branches of entertainment. Against it he sets the print culture of nineteenth-century America, when crowds listened to political debates that ran for hours. Replace "television" with "the feed" and nearly every chapter still works, which is the best reason to read it first; its weakness is that Postman says little about what to do.

Technopoly by Neil Postman. Seven years later, in 1992, Postman widened the lens from one medium to technology as a whole. The book begins with a story from Plato's Phaedrus, in which an Egyptian king weighs the invention of writing and warns that it will give people the appearance of wisdom without the substance. Postman then describes three kinds of culture: those that use tools, those that are reorganized by them, and "technopoly", a culture that looks to technique for its authority and treats efficiency and measurement as goods in themselves. It is crankier and more sweeping than his earlier book, and some readers find it nostalgic. It still gives the clearest name to the habit of asking what a technology can do before asking what it is for.

The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. Carr expanded a 2008 essay in The Atlantic, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", into this book, which was published in 2010 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. He draws on research into the brain's plasticity and on the history of reading, from scrolls to the printed page, to argue that a web of links and alerts trains a skimming kind of attention at the expense of deep, linear reading. It suits anyone who has noticed their own concentration fraying and wants the case made carefully rather than as a lament. Critics, some of them cognitive scientists, answered that plasticity cuts both ways and that the evidence for lasting harm is thinner than Carr suggests. Read it beside Postman: Carr writes about the individual mind, Postman about the public one.

The hardware and the pipes

Talk of "the cloud" makes technology sound weightless. These two books put the weight back, first in the factories and then in the networks.

Chip War by Chris Miller. Miller, an economic historian at Tufts University's Fletcher School, tells the story of the semiconductor from the transistor and the first chip firms of what became Silicon Valley to a present in which the most advanced chips depend on a very short list of companies. Taiwan's TSMC manufactures the leading-edge designs, and the Dutch firm ASML builds the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines needed to print their smallest features. Along the way come the early military customers, Japan's challenge in memory chips in the 1980s and Washington's later campaign to keep the most advanced chipmaking out of China's reach. The book won the Financial Times business book of the year award for 2022 and reads like narrative history, not an engineering text. Its focus is the contest between states and firms, so readers who want the labor and environmental side of chipmaking will need another source.

The Master Switch by Tim Wu. Wu, a Columbia law professor known for coining the term "net neutrality", calls the pattern at the center of this 2010 book the Cycle: an information industry begins open and chaotic, then closes up around a single gatekeeper. He follows it through the Bell telephone monopoly, radio broadcasting, the Hollywood studio system and cable television, and then asks whether the internet will escape it. Read after a decade of fights over app stores, search and social platforms, it looks like an early warning. The same logic now reaches places Wu never wrote about, such as farm machinery, where control of the data and the repair software has become a competition question in its own right. His proposed remedy, a "separations principle" that keeps the makers of information apart from the owners of its channels, will interest readers who follow policy.

Who gains when new tools arrive

The last two books turn from how technology works to where its rewards end up.

Power and Progress by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson. The two MIT economists, who shared the 2024 Nobel memorial prize in economics with James Robinson, take aim at the comfortable belief that new technology lifts everyone sooner or later. They range across a thousand years, from medieval farming improvements that enriched lords and the church far more than peasants to the early British industrial revolution, when output climbed for decades before wages followed. Their claim is that gains are shared only when workers and citizens have enough power to insist on a share. Their most quotable modern idea is "so-so automation", machines that displace workers without raising productivity much, with self-checkout kiosks among their examples. Some economists find the history selective, but for a reader without equations it is the most thorough book here on who wins and who pays.

Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis. Varoufakis, Greece's finance minister during the 2015 debt crisis, frames the book as a long reply to a question his father once asked him about what networked computers would do to capitalism. His answer is that the owners of what he calls cloud capital, Amazon and the other big platforms, no longer earn profit in markets so much as collect rent from sellers and users who have nowhere else to go, more like feudal lords than capitalists. Users who post and search for free become, in his phrase, cloud serfs. The book is brisk and argues far more than it documents. Many economists reply that he is describing monopoly capitalism under a new name, and the useful exercise is to read it beside Power and Progress, which asks the same question with far more history behind it.

Choosing your first book

Where the seven disagree

Read together, these books share one conviction: a technology's effects are settled less by the device than by what surrounds it, whether that is a culture's reading habits, a supply chain or a legal regime. Beyond that they split, and the split is instructive. Postman is the gloomiest, convinced that a culture can lose the capacity to notice what it has given up. Wu believes policy can break his Cycle if it acts early. Acemoglu and Johnson think technology can be steered, but only by organized pressure. Varoufakis thinks the system has already changed into something else.

What none of them can supply is the institution that would act on their warnings before a technology is entrenched. That gap is why I have argued for bringing back technology assessment, a public and independent body whose job is to ask these questions while the answers can still change things. Until one exists, reading across these disagreements is the next best thing.

Questions

What is a good technology book for beginners?

Amusing Ourselves to Death is short, plainly written and needs no technical background. Chip War is longer, but it reads as a story with characters, and it explains the industry from first principles.

Is Amusing Ourselves to Death still relevant?

Its examples come from 1980s television, so some references will feel distant. Its main claim, that the form of a medium shapes what can be said through it, is now routinely applied to social media and streaming, and it holds up well under that use.

What is the best book on the semiconductor industry?

For a general reader, Chip War is the most widely read account. It is a history of the industry and its geopolitics rather than a technical manual, so engineers looking for how chips are designed will want something more specialized.