Books like The Hype Machine by Sinan Aral

Digital Minimalism shows how reducing everyday technology use can improve well‑being, offering a practical strategy to reclaim free time and focus on meaningful activities.

Shoshana Zuboff explains how digital data is turned into a new market form—surveillance capitalism—where corporations predict and shape behavior for profit, reshaping power, privacy, and democracy in the digital age.

Tim Wu examines the evolution of attention harvesting—from early advertising to digital algorithms—exploring how the pursuit of human focus reshapes society, culture, and commerce.

Eli Pariser explains how the rise of personalization on the Web limits the information we consume, turning search engines into invisible filters that shape our news, opinions, and online experiences.

"If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine respectable journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, you would make something a lot like Facebook. Of course, none of that was part of the plan. In Antisocial Media, Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from an innocent social site hacked together by Harvard students into a force that, while it may make personal life just a little more pleasurable, makes democracy a lot more challenging. It's an account of the hubris of good intentions, a missionary spirit, and an ideology that sees computer code as the universal solvent for all human problems...Both authoritative and trenchant, Antisocial Media shows how Facebook's mission went so wrong."--Book description, Amazon.com.