Books shelved under “Technology”

Back in my day, the internet used to be better. I feel old saying that—I only just turned thirty-four—but it is true. When I first started using the internet in the early 2000s, the web had become functional enough to be fun, the walled gardens of nineties CompuServe and AOL had come down, and anyone (including fourteen-year-old Kara) could make a website for free on a place like Geocities.

And then it…

Often people ask me what I would recommend if I am no longer recommending Invisible Women. Usually my response is the unhelpful, “Dunno, figure it out.” But really, the amount of books I read? There must be more books about technology and bias out there, especially in the four years since that one was published. So when I heard about More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech, I…

Money is kind of a big deal. I don’t particularly like this fact, but I would be a fool not to acknowledge it. For the majority of my life, money has been more digital than paper-based, even though a fully qualified digital currency in Canadian or US dollars still has yet to materialize. I have never owned a paper chequebook in my name, and almost all of my payments are online or through a chip-and-pin…

Cryptocurrency has long fascinated me because it’s mathematics made manifest. Although our economy has long been digital, the rise of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies codified a cashless digital economy through arcane mathematical precepts that nevertheless gave rise to trillions of dollars of worth—even if that value is volatile at the best of times. It’s not surprising that enterprising criminal minds would try to use cryptocurrency for their dealings, and it’s not surprising that others would…

Shout out to CBC Radio’s Spark for their episode on protecting our intimate data, which interviewed Danielle Keats Citron. That’s how I learned about The Fight for Privacy just ahead of its release date and managed to snag an eARC courtesy of NetGalley and W.W. Norton Company.

This book is primarily US-focused, which probably shouldn’t be surprising. That being said, Citron references South Korean examples quite a bit, along with a smattering of other…

Machine learning is a hot topic. You have probably seen those social media posts that start with, “I made an AI watch …” and then proceeded to share a script “written” by the AI? Those are almost entirely fake, of course—as Janelle Shane explains in You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place, artificial intelligence is just not there yet.…

If there’s anything I love, it’s discussing futurism and technology! This is the kind of book I could totally see myself learning about from CBC’s Spark (but in this case, I actually found it on NetGalley and received an e-ARC from Elliott & Thompson Limited in exchange for a review). The Future of You is an overview of various technologies that are complicating, problematizing, mutating, and perhaps rescuing our concept of identity as a legal…

Every year my dad buys me the CBC Massey Lectures book, and last year was no exception! Reading Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society after the events of January 6, in which white supremacist and fascist Americans, incited by their own president, stormed their own Capitol Building, was a trip. As Ronald J. Deibert unpacked the problematic aspects of our reliance upon social media, all I could think about was the role social media…

I’ve been watching a lot of Dragons’ Den lately. It’s good TV, and it’s easy to watch bits and pieces of an episode at a time while eating breakfast or taking a break from other tasks. As entertaining and soapy as the show can be, it’s also a disturbing reflection of how capitalism pervades our society. In an episode I recently watched, the Dragons went gaga over a chiropractor peddling a spray that purportedly improved…

I love reading science fiction, and you might expect me to open this review with an encomium of how science fiction helps us imagine a way into a better future. But no. One of the reasons I love science fiction is for how it asks us to truly confront our assumptions about the way things are, and whether that’s inevitable.

So many science fiction stories involving artificial intelligence place that intelligence into humanoid or human-like…

I love behind-the-scenes looks at industries that we don’t often think about. Whether you’re buying a game in the store or downloading it from Steam, chances are you aren’t that knowledgeable about what the game development industry is actually like. Oh, you might have read some horror stories on Reddit, heard some of the gossip going back and forth on gaming blogs. Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are…

Algorithms are increasingly an important part of our lives, yet even as more of us become aware of this, how much do we actually stop to consider what that means? How much do we stop to consider who is designing these algorithms and how they actually work? And why are we willing to give up so much control to them in the first place? Hello World is a short tour through the various ways in…

Self-driving cars, or more broadly, autonomous vehicles (AVs) are really cool. I’m excited to see them become a reality. Nevertheless, there is a lot of hype around this topic. It seems like most of what I read about the subject comes from someone connected to the tech industry or the auto industry (or both), and that always makes me suspicious. No One at the Wheel: Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future is a…

Every so often, you read a non-fiction book that just speaks to you, that sticks with you because it’s not just informative but because it fits your level of background knowledge and expands your understanding of a topic perfectly. Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet is such a book for me. Claire L. Evans traces the development of the modern Internet from its precursors, the earliest mechanical and electronic…

This was a birthday gift, along with A Criminal Magic, from my friend Amanda, and I’m just now getting to it—which, especially when it comes to my non-fiction backlog, isn’t actually that bad of a delay! Amanda was just getting to know me at the time, so she picked two books off my to-read list. I’m not sure why I had Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety…

The profile of the term “Big Data” has risen recently. Yet, like so many buzzwords, people often don’t fully grasp the significance of the term. “Big Data” is more than the nebulous connotation of corporations collecting our information, and perhaps packaging and selling it—although it is that. It is, in fact, about how corporations quantify everything we do, even the information we don’t realize we’re leaking out into the world, and then use that data…

So you read So You Want to Talk About Race and now you have more questions. Specifically, you’re wondering how privilege affects your life online. Surely the Internet is the libertarian cyber-utopia we were all promised, right? It’s totally free of bias and discrimina—sorry, I can’t even write that with a straight face.

Of course the Internet is a flaming cesspool of racism and misogyny. We can’t have good things.

What Safiya Umoja Noble sets…

Watching GamerGate unfold from the outside and listening to Zoë Quinn describe it in her own words are two very different things. Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate is more than a memoir; it’s a comprehensive dissection of a flawed facet of the Internet. I read it not just because I wanted to hear Quinn’s account of what happened but understand, from the…

I really loved James Kakalios’ The Physics of Superheroes, so I jumped at the chance to get his new book, The Physics of Everyday Things, when it became available on NetGalley. The Physics of Superheroes was such an engaging way to look at physics! I was intrigued by this new concept, the idea that Kakalios would teach us physics while stepping through a single person’s ordinary daily activities. However, the tone and conceptual…

No, but seriously, did you expect anything less of a rating from me? This book is kickass. It is literally everything I have wanted in a science history book for a while.

Hidden Figures details the lives and achievements of the Black women who worked first as computers, then as mathematicians and engineers, for NACA (the National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics) and its successor, NASA. Margot Lee Shetterly pulls back the curtain on an aspect…