Summer Reading List Time

Dear Citizens,

We’re taking a short summer break this week, hitting the beach and recharging our intellectual battery. The good news: Big Tech, authoritarianism, surveillance capitalism and billionaire influence operations have all agreed to pause while we’re away.

JK JK! Since techno-authoritarianism refuses to take a holiday, we’ve put together a little light summer reading list for you to reboot your brain along with us. Think of it as a Citizens-approved survival kit for the beach, the train, the hammock, or wherever you hide from notifications.

Crowd-sourced from our Brains Trust, members and friends… here are ten essential big tech beach reads. Some are urgent, some are infuriating, a few surprisingly hopeful. None require you to spend another minute listening to a podcast hosted by a venture capitalist.

Happy reading!

📚 Empire of AI by Karen Hao

If there is one AI book everyone should read this summer, it’s this one.

Hao argues that companies like OpenAI are best understood not as innovative startups but as a new kind of empire: extracting resources, labor, energy and data on a global scale while presenting themselves as inevitable agents of progress.

A devastating and deeply reported account of who is actually paying for the AI boom.

👀 Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Imagine spending years inside Facebook and then deciding to tell everyone what really happened.

Wynn-Williams’ account of her time at Meta is by turns funny, horrifying and astonishingly petty. It’s also one of the clearest portraits yet of what happens when a company acquires nation-state levels of power while maintaining the emotional maturity of a college dorm.

💡 3. The AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna

This is best described as a necessary antidote to AI hype.

Bender and Hanna carefully dismantle the claims surrounding artificial intelligence and ask a simple question: who benefits from us believing these systems are smarter, more capable and more inevitable than they really are?

Spoiler: it’s not you.

🌲 The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet by Yancey Strickler

Not a book, but one of the most influential essays of the last decade.

Strickler argues that many of us have retreated from public social media spaces into smaller, more meaningful communities. It’s a hopeful vision of what digital life might become after the attention economy.

Read it here, you’ll never look at social media the same way again.

⚖️ On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

Short enough to read in a single afternoon. Important enough to think about for years.

Snyder’s twenty lessons from the twentieth century have become required reading for anyone trying to understand democratic backsliding, authoritarian movements and the responsibilities of ordinary citizens.

🏭 “I Believe in One God, and It’s Not a Computer” by Mother Jones

One of the best long-form pieces we’ve read on the physical infrastructure behind AI. The story follows the enormous industrial projects being built to power artificial intelligence and asks who benefits, who pays and what happens to communities caught in the middle.

A reminder that “the cloud” is actually made of concrete, water, electricity and politics.

🎭 Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

Part memoir, part political theory, part journey through the internet’s hall of mirrors.

Klein begins with the strange experience of being mistaken online for another public figure and ends up exploring conspiracy theories, identity, disinformation and the bizarre realities of modern life online.

Smart, funny and unexpectedly moving.

🌎 The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

Let’s have at least one piece of fiction.

This climate novel isn’t really about technology, but it is about power: who has it, how systems change and what collective action might look like at planetary scale.

One of the few books about the future that left us feeling more energized than depressed.

🔒 Privacy Is Power by Carissa Véliz

One of the clearest explanations of why privacy matters and why losing it matters even more.

Véliz makes a compelling case that privacy isn’t simply a personal preference. It’s the foundation of freedom, democracy and human dignity.

The perfect book for anyone who has ever said, “I don’t have anything to hide.”

🌊 Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit

A Citizens reading list would be incomplete without at least one reason not to despair.

Solnit’s classic book is a reminder that history is full of victories that seemed impossible until they happened. Social movements matter. Organizing matters. Culture matters. People matter.

A good book to finish the summer with.

☀️ Bonus recommendation:

Turn off your phone for an afternoon. Seriously. Go for a walk. Read a physical book. Enjoy some time off.

We’ll see you in a week xoxo
Team Citizens

*PS - Join our Signal Chat if you haven’t already! 350+ people share practical advice on protecting your data, organising against Big Tech and staying ahead of what you need to know.