Not a bibliography - the book will carry one of those - but the books and talks I find myself recommending to other people, with a line on why.
Books
Albert-László Barabási, Linked (2003). Where networks became a subject in their own right. Some of its universals have not aged well - which is itself instructive about how young the field still is.
Tim Berners-Lee, This Is for Everyone (2025). The web’s inventor on what it was for, told with a generosity the web itself has not always kept.
Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, Connected (2009). How much of what we take to be individual choice actually travels through networks - habits, moods, even health.
Cory Doctorow, Enshittification (2025) and Chokepoint Capitalism (with Rebecca Giblin, 2022). The decay pattern everyone could already feel, named; and the mechanics of how middlemen lock both ends of a market.
Neil Johnson, Simple Complexity (2007). Complexity science without the mystification.
Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From (2010). The adjacent possible - why the same idea so often arrives in several places at once, and why that is not coincidence.
Jeremy Lent, The Web of Meaning (2022). A serious attempt to ground meaning in connectedness rather than in things.
Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems (2008). The book I would hand to anyone wanting to understand why systems drift regardless of the intentions of the people inside them.
George Monbiot, Regenesis (2022) and The Invisible Doctrine (with Peter Hutchison, 2024). The first applies systems thinking to the ground beneath our feet; the second names the ideology that succeeds by pretending not to be one.
Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics (2017). Economics redrawn with limits where they belong - in the frame, not the footnotes.
John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (2000). Twenty-five years old, and still the best corrective to the idea that information can be separated from the people and practices around it.
Carissa Véliz, Privacy is Power (2020). The clearest contemporary statement that privacy is a question of power, not preference.
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019). The long-form account of how behavioural data became the raw material of a new economic order.
Talks
Nicholas Christakis, The Hidden Influence of Social Networks. The evidence that networks shape us, in twenty minutes - a companion to Connected.
Jaron Lanier, How We Need to Remake the Internet. The fork in the road where advertising became the internet’s business model, from someone who watched it being taken.
Emilie Wapnick, Why Some of Us Don’t Have One True Calling. Included for personal reasons. A working life spent across anthropology, electronic data interchange, public services, and platform design occasionally needs the reminder that this is a feature.