awesome-critical-tech-reading-list

[2014]: general, high-level overview how algorithms influence our lives and how to investigate them

[2017]: illustrating the most common fallacies in predicting the future of tech

: 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

: a purely technical critique of the existing AI narrative and how it's detached from the existing technology

A, rather technical, explanation of where the bias in machine learning systems come from and how to deal with it

[2020]

: A paper arguing that the nature of content produced by ChatGPT and LLMs in general is to be considered bullshit

[2016]

[2017]

[2019] A short article illustrating the fundamental incompatibility between data science and Queerness

[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

[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

[2017]

[2016]: why the "coding is fun" narrative is dangerous and insulting to students and engineers

[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)

: 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

[2014]

[2015]: this article explores the reasons why Programmers are rarely engineers and why they should be

[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

: extensive guide on how to create your democratic worker-owned cooperative to develop a software product

: 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

: 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

: Timo Daum recaps and illustrates the broad changes brought to IT and the world by Agile Methods from a critical perspective

: 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

: A series of stories from data workers such as data labelers and content moderators from all over the world

[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

[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

[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

: A gigantic diagram tracing the history of the relationship between power and technology

: this article presents the current methodologies used to extract psychological information about citizens and how they are used for political campaigns

Awful AI

: a list of unethical usages of AI

: a 360° reading list on AI and its impact on modern society. Great inspiration and source of content for the list you're reading

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

: There are many kinds of radical AI work. Here, they collect 11 radical AI tactics and present works that develop or exemplify the tactics

: 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

: The Magazine about technological critique. Released in seasonal issues with a central topic and contributions from different authors and specialists

: A news website reporting on tech news from a critical perspective

: critical perspectives about "AI", in the form of news digests, editorials and theory