Social Technology

Through clear-eyed essays and vibrant conversations, infused with data and poetry, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson guides us through solutions and possibilities at the nexus of science, policy, culture, and justice. Visionary farmers and financiers, architects and advocates, help us conjure a flourishing future, one worth the effort it will take—from every one of us, with whatever we have to offer—to create.

Early True Believers: The Untold Story of Silicon Alley is a 1990s saga of ambition and innovation set in Manhattan’s Silicon Alley, a swath of downtown that served as New York City’s nerve center of tech entrepreneurship. The series features the stories of a forgotten cohort of early internet visionaries, countercultural social networks, the digital gold rush, and the lavish events that came with it, including one held in an underground Tribeca bunker that abruptly ended in a police raid—a harbinger of the upheaval to come.

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their 12 children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins—aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the 10 Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic.

Before John Glenn orbited the Earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as "human computers" used pencils, slide rules, and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets and astronauts into space. Among these problem solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation.

In November 2022, a webpage was posted online with a simple text box. It was ChatGPT, and was unlike any app people had used before. It was more human than a customer service agent, more convenient than a Google search. Behind the scenes, battles for control and prestige between the world’s two leading AI firms, OpenAI and DeepMind, who now steers Google's AI efforts, has remained elusive—until now.

We live in a world full of shiny distractions, faced with an onslaught of viral media constantly competing for our attention and demanding our affections. These ever-present visual "spectacles" can quickly erode our hearts, making it more difficult than ever to walk through life actively treasuring that which is most important and yet invisible: Jesus Christ. In a journalistic style, Tony Reinke shows us just how distracting these spectacles in our lives have become, and calls us to ask critical questions about what we're focusing on.

Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein, author of Disaster Capitalism, uncovers a largely hidden world in a global investigation with secret documents, revealing interviews and on-the-ground reporting. This book shows in-depth, for the first time, how Palestine has become the perfect laboratory for the Israeli military-techno complex: surveillance, home demolitions, indefinite incarceration and brutality to the hi-tech tools that drive the 'Start-up Nation'.

Are you struggling to stand out in the crowded world of social media? Do you want to grow your platforms, engage your audience, and generate income effortlessly? The solution is here: ChatGPT Social Media Empire. This comprehensive guide reveals how to harness the revolutionary power of AI to build and scale your social media presence like a pro. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, content creator, or influencer, this book is your ultimate roadmap to success. It’s time to stop guessing and start growing your social media empire with precision and confidence.

Merchants of Doubt has been praised—and attacked—around the world, for reasons easy to understand. This book tells, with “brutal clarity” (Huffington Post), the disquieting story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades.

The grid is an accident of history and of culture, in no way intrinsic to how we produce, deliver and consume electrical power. Yet this is the system the United States ended up with, a jerry-built structure now so rickety and near collapse that a strong wind or a hot day can bring it to a grinding halt. The grid is now under threat from a new source: renewable and variable energy, which puts stress on its logics as much as its components.

The Guide to Going Viral is like a director’s manual for social media. It provides a step-by-step approach to crafting content with the impact of a classic film. Brendan Kane leverages his expertise in social media, entrepreneurship, and the film industry to blend the art of filmmaking with strategies for viral content creation.

Even leading capitalists admit that capitalism is broken. Green Swans is a manifesto for system change designed to serve people, planet, and prosperity. In his 20th book, John Elkington - dubbed the "Godfather of Sustainability" - explores new forms of capitalism fit for the 21st century.

Social Selling Mastery provides a key resource for sales and marketing professionals seeking a better way to connect with today's customer. Author Jamie Shanks has personally built Social Selling solutions in nearly every industry, and in this book he shows you how to capture the mindshare of business leadership and turn relationships into sales. The key is to reach the buyer where they're conducting due diligence - online.

Supertrends: 50 Things You Need to Know About the Future is about how efficient futurists work and how we can expect the world to evolve in terms of demographics, general economics, technologies, business models, resources, environment, and lifestyles. This audiobook addresses how to predict the future, what we can expect from it, and how companies and government should adapt to the accelerating change.

What part of memory is reliable fact, what part creative embellishment? Which favorite presuppositions are unfounded, which statistically biased? By conjoining two opposing mind-sets - the suspension of disbelief required in storytelling and the skepticism inherent in the scientific method - best-selling mathematician John Allen Paulos has created an unusual hybrid, a composite of personal memories and mathematical approaches to reevaluating them.

Earth is not well. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away—no climate change, no war, no Twitter—beckons, and settling the stars finally seems within our grasp. Or is it? Critically acclaimed, bestselling authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith set out to write the essential guide to a glorious future of space settlements, but after years of research, they aren’t so sure it’s a good idea.

In Survival of the Richest, Rushkoff traces the origins of The Mindset in science and technology through its current expression in missions to Mars, island bunkers, AI futurism, and the metaverse. In a dozen urgent, electrifying chapters, he confronts tech utopianism, the datafication of all human interaction, and the exploitation of that data by corporations. Through fascinating characters, Rushkoff explains why those with the most power to change our current trajectory have no interest in doing so.

Leading futurist and OneShared.World founder Jamie Metzl explores how genome sequencing, gene editing, artificial intelligence, and other technologies are not only changing our lives, but catalyzing each other in radical and accelerating ways. These technologies have the potential to improve our health, feed billions of people, supercharge our economies, and store essential information for millions of years, but can also—if we are not careful—do immeasurable harm.

Everywhere we turn, a new device promises to transfigure our lives. But at what cost? In this urgent and revelatory excavation of our Information Age, leading technology thinker Adam Greenfield forces us to reconsider our relationship with the networked objects, services, and spaces that define us. It is time to re-evaluate the Silicon Valley consensus determining the future. We're told that innovations - from augmented - reality interfaces and virtual assistants to autonomous delivery drones and self-driving cars - will make life easier, more convenient, and more productive.

As the chief strategy officer at Jive Software, Christopher Morace was one of the first people to arrive at the intersection of social technology and business strategy. He has overseen more than 800 deployments of social technology in major corporations. A true pioneer of what is arguably the most important development in business today, Morace knows better than anyone how social technology is changing the way businesses operate and how successful companies are leveraging it to their advantage. Now, in this groundbreaking guide, Morace reveals all his secrets.