Hackers
1984 · 659 pages
Levy found the hacker ethic among MIT students who monopolized the university's computers all night: all information should be free, mistrust authority, judge a person by the code. Silicon Valley still recites it.
★ 4.7
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Medium is the Massage
1967 · 159 pages
Working with the designer Quentin Fiore, McLuhan turned media theory into a paperback collage of aphorisms and pages printed backwards. Every technology remakes your senses before you notice what it carries.
★ 5.3
Neuromancer
1984 · 276 pages
Case, a burned-out hacker in Chiba City, has his nervous system rebuilt in exchange for one last job. Gibson gave cyberspace its look and its slang, and programmers spent decades building toward it.
★ 5.3
Understanding Media
The Extensions of Man
1964 · 365 pages
The medium is the message, McLuhan wrote in 1964: a technology reshapes perception regardless of what it carries. Everyone arguing about what screens do to us is working inside the frame he built.
★ 6.3
The Soul of a New Machine
1981 · 320 pages
Working nights in a Massachusetts basement, a crew of young engineers races to build a new computer in a year, and Kidder catches every argument. Nobody had made engineering a literary subject.
★ 6.8
Fahrenheit 451
1953 · 256 pages
Montag burns books for a living until a neighbor's questions and a woman who chooses to burn with her library break him open. Bradbury's target is a public that stopped wanting to read.
★ 6.8
Brave New World
1932 · 281 pages
Babies are decanted from bottles into castes, everyone takes a drug called soma, and nobody is unhappy. Huxley saw that a tyranny of pleasure would hold better than one of fear.
★ 8.5