Ramesh Srinivasan's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Ramesh Srinivasan recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Ramesh Srinivasan's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
The enormous scope of the Internet can lead us to assume that as the online community grows, our world grows smaller and more cosmopolitan. In Digital Cosmopolitans, Ethan Zuckerman explains why the technological ability to communicate with someone does not guarantee human interaction or the healthy exchange of information and ideas. Combining the latest psychological and sociological research with current trends both online and off, Digital Cosmopolitans highlights the challenges we face and the headway being made in creating a world that is truly connected. less
Recommended by Ramesh Srinivasan, and 1 others.

Ramesh SrinivasanThis is a manifesto from Ethan Zuckerman, a great colleague of mine, calling for a global communication system, where people really have power to tell their own stories and do their own journalism based on who and where they are. (Source)

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2
The award-winning author of The Net Delusion shows how the radical transparency we've become accustomed to online may threaten the spirit of real-life democracy.

In the very near future, technological systems will allow us to make large-scale and sophisticated interventions into many more areas of public life: politics, culture, public debate, even our definitions of morality and human values. But how will these be affected once we delegate much of the responsibility for them to technology? The temptation of the digital age is to fix everything—from crime to...
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Recommended by Ramesh Srinivasan, and 1 others.

Ramesh SrinivasanThis book…identifies a key intellectual flaw that exists in tech bubbles which is the idea that everything can be solved by a few dudes in Silicon Valley, because they’re just going to build better tech. (Source)

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3

Sorting Things Out

Classification and Its Consequences

A revealing and surprising look at how classification systems can shape both worldviews and social interactions.

What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include fainted in a bath, frighted, and itch); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification--the scaffolding of information infrastructures.

In Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of...
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Recommended by Ramesh Srinivasan, and 1 others.

Ramesh SrinivasanWhat Bowker and Star argue is that how knowledge and information is organized and classified actually ends up defining what counts as knowledge and what we understand to be true or not true. (Source)

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4
Longlisted for the National Book Award
New York Times Bestseller


A former Wall Street quant sounds an alarm on the mathematical models that pervade modern life -- and threaten to rip apart our social fabric

We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives--where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance--are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is...
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Recommended by Paula Boddington, Ramesh Srinivasan, and 2 others.

Paula BoddingtonHow the use of algorithms has affected people’s lives and occasionally ruined them. (Source)

Ramesh SrinivasanThis book is a really fantastic analysis of how quantification, the collection of data, the modelling around data, the predictions made by using data, the algorithmic and quantifiable ways of predicting behaviour based on data, are all built by elites for elites and end up, quite frankly, screwing over everybody else. (Source)

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5

Team Human

Team Human is a manifesto—a fiery distillation of preeminent digital theorist Douglas Rushkoff’s most urgent thoughts on civilization and human nature. In one hundred lean and incisive statements, he argues that we are essentially social creatures, and that we achieve our greatest aspirations when we work together—not as individuals. Yet today society is threatened by a vast antihuman infrastructure that undermines our ability to connect. Money, once a means of exchange, is now a means of exploitation; education, conceived as way to elevate the working class, has become another... more
Recommended by Seth Godin, Ramesh Srinivasan, and 2 others.

Seth GodinA vivid thinker, Rushkoff is an insightful and acerbic antidote to Facebook, cultural hegemony, and the corporatization of everything. (Source)

Ramesh SrinivasanThe book and his podcasts are focused on one major theme: reminding us—and this is his motto, so I’m just going to quote it—that being human is a team sport. (Source)

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