Gift Guide: Making sense of surveillance capitalism & our new tech era

A future is coming at us fast - a mess of half baked tech, a general public that lacks the digital & media literacy to keep up with an evolving landscape and multinationals fighting tooth and nail to stall or quash any attempts to regulate their industry.

Curious to understand it all better for the season's dinner table arguments with chatGPT devotees? Here are some of the books our team has loved or rates highly on the subject!

Among them The New Age of Sexism by Laura Bates - A gripping and frightening look at the ways that unregulated AI, in the hands of silicon valley and social media companies, simply re-manufactures the worst misogynies and inequalities that already rule the real world. (Recommended by Noor, Peach and Mairi!)

One of Noor's Top Reads of 2025: Karen Hao's Empire of AI, as well as Doctorow's latest, the aptly nmed: Enshittification : Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It .

Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labour Powering AIby James Muldoon, Mark Graham and Callum Cant is a Christina pick, who had this to say: If you have seen me in the last month and a half there is a nonzero chance that I spoke to you about this book. Feeding the Machine illuminates how the problem with AI has been capitalism all along (imagine the Scooby Doo meme please) through following the human labour associated with AI along the supply chain. From data annotator to warehouse worker to venture capital investor, the book shows that so much about the exploitation and extraction related to AI labour isn't new, just using the old playbook with new tools. There are also chapters on labour organising, which is obviously vital. I wish the book had featured interviews with miners who extract the critical minerals needed for AI to function, so an essential companion to this book is the book Cobalt Red.