The Best Tech Books of All Time According to The Verge

Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents

"Not only does Ullman tell us what it was like to be an engineer during the dot-com bubble, but she does it in prose that many professional writers envy. The programmers in her milieu live in a strange place, longing to slip the bounds of humanity through their code... For better or worse, we’ve all gotten closer to the machine since Ullman first wrote, but this memoir is perhaps the most powerful book ever written about technology." — Liz Lopatto

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

"Postman lays out the case that America is a “totalitarian technopoly,” with humans getting squashed beneath the thumb of Big Tech... With social institutions shaken from their mooring, people trust themselves so little that they are always looking for the authorization from their technological toys — doctors who won’t treat symptoms but will treat blood tests, for instance. Darkly funny, Postman argues that we have made ourselves subservient to our tools." — Liz Lopatto

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

"A heartbreakingly personal story about what it’s like for a woman who isn’t a developer to work at tech startups that worship bros with engineering prowess and the ability to code. It’s also a story about change — the change that comes from moving across the country, getting a new job with new co-workers, or the creeping realization that the relentless optimism that the world had about the tech industry in the early 2010s may not actually be warranted." — Mitchell Clark

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers

"This is a swashbuckling thriller filled with hackers, whistleblowers, idealists, and some truly reprehensible people. From Daniel Ellsberg to WikiLeaks, the book connects the lesser-known elements that blew up geopolitics and continue to warp our society today. The stories of the cypherpunks mailing list and the ’90s “crypto wars” (that’s cryptography and not monkey jpegs) are woven through riveting portraits of charismatic villains and flawed heroes." — Sarah Jeong

Hamlet on the Holodeck, Updated Edition: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace

"It’s a treatise on the potential of computer storytelling from a moment that’s both strikingly similar and remarkably different from our own, as memorable for its descriptions of now-forgotten experiments as its prescient attention to forms like chatbots and multiplayer social worlds." — Adi Robertson

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

"Super Pumped, the thrilling portrait of Uber under the reign of its aggro bro CEO Travis Kalanick, is unsparing in its detail and delicious in its office drama. The startup Isaac paints is one that is guided by growth rather than any direction from a moral compass. But it’s Kalanick’s conflation of ego and ambition that eventually led to his employees turning on him. In the end, Kalanick saw himself and Uber as singular — and I don’t think he was wrong." — Kevin Nguyen

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet

"I’ve read many, many books about computer history at this point, and still, most of the stories in Broad Band were new to me. In some ways, that’s the point... It’s a book about missing pieces, the silent or underappreciated systems and people that made it so technology could continue to leap forward and that made the internet we call home worth using in the first place." — Mitchell Clark

Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network

"Part memoir, part company portrait, The Boy Kings occupies an era of Facebook long before Cambridge Analytica... The enduring heart of the book is Losse’s access to a younger, more naive Zuckerberg. Here, the CEO is revealed to be entitled, un-self-aware, and vague in his vision for the future. While other Facebook employees hail him as an emperor, Losse instead figures out quickly how he pretends to be one." — Kevin Nguyen

Common As Air

"Common as Air is one of the most eloquent and rousing defenses of the public domain you’ll ever read. On top of a thoughtful argument about a powerful organizing principle of modern media, it’s a book that can make you excited about the prospect of artists building off each other’s ideas. If watching corporate juggernauts reduce every book, game, and movie in existence to eternally “exploitable IP” makes you a little queasy, it’s the perfect antidote." — Adi Robertson

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside Youtube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination

"Among the very best books of its kind. Yes, it is a tumultuous history of YouTube, from its shaky startup days through to its dominating position as an institution of both the internet and the global cultural economy, but it is importantly also a history of the YouTube creator and how the platform’s shifting goals and metrics have built and destroyed entire content empires in the blink of an eye." — Nilay Patel