awesome-critical-tech-reading-list

Tech reading list

A curated list of readings on the intersection of technology and societal issues, focusing on ethics, politics, and social responsibility.

A reading list for the modern critical programmer

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A Critical Reading list on Tech && (Politics × Society × Ethics) / AI

Algorithmic Accountability: On the Investigation of Black Boxes [2014]: general, high-level overview how algorithms influence our lives and how to investigate them
The Seven Deadly Sins of Predicting the Future of AI [2017]: illustrating the most common fallacies in predicting the future of tech
Weapons of Math Destruction : a practical critique of how algorithmic transparency is dealt with in our society. It explains how blind faith in data analysis is dangerous and how unfairness is reproduced through algorithms, that without transparency become a tool to reinforce the status quo
The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet : a purely technical critique of the existing AI narrative and how it's detached from the existing technology
Notes on AI Bias A, rather technical, explanation of where the bias in machine learning systems come from and how to deal with it
Technology Can't Fix Algorithmic Injustice [2020]
ChatGPT is bullshit : A paper arguing that the nature of content produced by ChatGPT and LLMs in general is to be considered bullshit
The ethics of algorithms: Mapping the debate [2016]
The Mythos of model interpretability [2017]
Counting the countless [2019] A short article illustrating the fundamental incompatibility between data science and Queerness
Algorithmic Realism [2020] This paper's thesis is that the gap between intents of algorithimic solutions for social goods and its impacts is due to a fundamental methodological limitation. The paper proposes a path forward to be able to better adapt algorithms to the complex reality they act upon
Manufacturing an Artificial Intelligence Revolution [2017]: great analysis of the existing narrative about the "AI Revolution", how it came to be, who profits from it and what's hidden underneath
Why AI is still waiting for its ethics transplant [2017]

A Critical Reading list on Tech && (Politics × Society × Ethics) / Labor

Coding is not ‘fun’, it’s technically and ethically complex [2016]: why the "coding is fun" narrative is dangerous and insulting to students and engineers
The Agile Labor Union [2014]: The Agile movement had ambitions to protect the interests of software engineers at work similiar to a craft union, however its fatal flaw was framing the purpose of the movement as wholly in service of business goals, which left it open to internal takeover by Lean methodologies, and to external challenges from specialized User-Centered Design that better understood software design as a socio-technical process (while also undermining user autonomy)
Freedom isn't free : why the open source movement should be considered a failure and how to turn it in a bolder plan to rethink how we produce information
Understanding Fair Labor Practices in a Networked Age [2014]
Programmers: Stop Calling Yourselves Engineers [2015]: this article explores the reasons why Programmers are rarely engineers and why they should be
Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work? [2019]: short article describing the rise of the hustle culture and how it's spearheaded by the IT industry, summarizing and pointing to other material about resistance to toxic working culture
Loomio Cooperative Handbook : extensive guide on how to create your democratic worker-owned cooperative to develop a software product
Agile Methods: Collaborative work culture or digital Taylorism? : Timo Daum summarizes the history of Agile and the role it played in the IT sector, tracing also its expansion to other industries, asking questions about the power structures it created
The Making of the Tech Worker Movement : Ben Tarnoff looks back at the last few years of tech work organizing and protests, trying to track the roots and the spirit behind tech workers coming together
Agile Methods : Timo Daum recaps and illustrates the broad changes brought to IT and the world by Agile Methods from a critical perspective
Agile and the Long Crisis of Software : Miriam Posner retells the history of Agile and the conflict between managers and workers in the software development industry pointing at the impending crisis of the Agile mindset
Data Workers Inquiry : A series of stories from data workers such as data labelers and content moderators from all over the world

A Critical Reading list on Tech && (Politics × Society × Ethics) / Meta

Resisting reduction [2017]: using the religion around Singularity, the author presents in a concise way what does it mean to deal with complex systems and why naive, reductionists views should be rejected when presented as solutions to social problems
Do Artifacts Have Politics? [1980]: in a single paper, the author highlights how both engineers and social scientists misinterpret the relationship between technology and society. In particular he attacks the narrative, widespread among engineers, that artifacts have no political properties in themselves and that function or efficiency are the only drivers of technological design and implementation
The Californian Ideology [1995]: a foundational paper that decades after its publication is still extremely actual. The paper covers the birth of the ideology that dominates the Silicon Valley, mixing hippie culture, right-wing libertarian values and unbounded techno-optimism. Extremely useful to frame the thinking of today's californian oligarchs
Calculating Empires - A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500 : A gigantic diagram tracing the history of the relationship between power and technology

A Critical Reading list on Tech && (Politics × Society × Ethics) / Privacy

Psychometric Profiling: Persuasion by Personality in Elections : this article presents the current methodologies used to extract psychological information about citizens and how they are used for political campaigns

A Critical Reading list on Tech && (Politics × Society × Ethics) / Other Reading Lists

Awful AI 6,982 7 months ago : a list of unethical usages of AI
Toward ethical, transparent and fair AI/ML: a critical reading list : a 360° reading list on AI and its impact on modern society. Great inspiration and source of content for the list you're reading
Labor & Tech Reading List This reading list serves as an introductory roadmap for exploring some of the emergent and pressing issues at the intersection of labor, technologies, and worker rights
Radical AI : There are many kinds of radical AI work. Here, they collect 11 radical AI tactics and present works that develop or exemplify the tactics

A Critical Reading list on Tech && (Politics × Society × Ethics) / Newsletters, magazines and periodical publications

Tech Worker Coalition Newsletter : newsletter of the Tech Worker Coalition, a modern labor union for American Tech Workers. Covers news on Technology, strikes in the IT sector and new high-quality content in the discourse
Logicmac : The Magazine about technological critique. Released in seasonal issues with a central topic and contributions from different authors and specialists
The Register : A news website reporting on tech news from a critical perspective
Skynet Today : critical perspectives about "AI", in the form of news digests, editorials and theory

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