What I've been reading

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Struggle To Get Inside Our Heads, by Tim Wu

An historical analysis that brings the reader right up to where we are now and too abruptly stops. Along the way we are taken through the different industries that rely on using up time in our life that we're never getting back. For younger readers there are footnotes to explain technologies such as a floppy disk or a cord telephone. The lessons from needy media and the novelty of new tech will never get old.

Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating The Deadliest Wave Of The Opioid Epidemic, by Ben Westhoff

As a teen I read an essay in The Economist on the cocaine industry which concluded that the profit margins were so great, nothing could stop it. Update: fentanyl could. Nothing is fun anymore, even the drugs. Fentanyl is Russian roulette with fewer possibilities: a quotidian headfuck with all the atmosphere and cultural richness of a Skinner box. Every generation gets the drugs it deserves. 

Facebook: The Inside Story, by Steven Levy

Levy's book is overlong in places and like Wu's comes up short because the story is not over yet but there is much to enjoy and learn from here. I deleted Facebook years ago and have never looked back. My line was that human beings are natural addicts and if you're going to be addicted to something, social media is better than cigarettes but it turns out social media is demonstrably as harmful as any substance addiction and the toll on greater society is much worse. If you don't believe me read this book, and also ...

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World, by Max Fisher

This. Fisher's book is the one that kicked off all this associated reading. His facts are cold and his analysis is hard. A lot of what he talks about overlaps with these other titles, in particular his observation that the US VC startup economy and digital scales of manufacturing set the bar for all other industries now, with harrowing results. One example is:

The Devil's Playbook : Big Tobacco, Jul, And The Addiction Of A New Generation, by Lauren Etter

... our old addiction of smoking. Lauren Etter's account of the clash between Big Tobacco's agrarian establishment and Silicon Valley's vaping culture does a good job of humanising the story, which does take the fun out of it (I am concerned to not align my values with all those Angry Concerned Parents – many characters in my novels smoke up a storm) but her deep detailing of government regulations, lobbying and corporate gamesmanship touches on all the above, weirdly: regulations, startup culture, viral marketing, more social media bullshit.