A revealing, forward-looking examination of the outsize influence Google has had on the changing media landscape, telling the story of how it formed and crashed into traditional media businesses--from newspapers to books, to television, to movies, to telephones, to advertising, to Microsoft.

Caleb, a coder at the world's largest Internet company, wins a competition to spend a week at a retreat belonging to the company's reclusive CEO, Nathan. But when Caleb arrives he finds that he will have to participate in a fascinating experiment with the world's first true artificial intelligence, housed in the body of a beautiful robot woman, Ava. Truths, emotions, and motives are blurred as the relationship between Caleb, Ava, and Nathan intensifies....

How did a nineteen-year-old Harvard student create a company that has transformed the Internet and how did he grow it to its current enormous size? In half a decade, Facebook has gone from a dorm-room novelty to a company with 500 million users. It is one of the fastest growing companies in history, an essential part of the social life not only of teenagers but millions of adults worldwide. As Facebook spreads around the globe, it creates surprising...

When Mae is hired to work for the world's largest and most powerful tech and social media company, she sees it as an opportunity. As she rises through the ranks, she is encouraged by the company's founder, Eamon Bailey, to engage in a groundbreaking experiment that pushes the boundaries of privacy, ethics and ultimately her personal freedom. Her participation in the experiment, and every decision she makes begin to affect the lives and future of her...

When Mae is hired to work for the world's largest and most powerful tech and social media company, she sees it as an opportunity. As she rises through the ranks, she is encouraged by the company's founder, Eamon Bailey, to engage in a groundbreaking experiment that pushes the boundaries of privacy, ethics and ultimately her personal freedom. Her participation in the experiment, and every decision she makes begin to affect the lives and future of her...

Douglas Edwards wasn't an engineer or a twentysomething fresh out of school when he received a job offer from a small but growing search engine company at the tail end of the 1990s. But founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin needed staff to develop the brand identity of their brainchild, and Edwards fit the bill with his journalistic background at the San Jose Mercury News, the newspaper of Silicon Valley. It was a change of pace for Edwards, to say...

The Internet stock bubble wasn't just about goggle-eyed day traderstrying to get rich on the Nasdaq and goateed twenty-five-year-olds playing wannabe Bill Gates. It was also about an America that believed it had discovered the secret of eternal prosperity: it said something about all of us, and what we thought about ourselves, as the twenty-first century dawned. John Cassidy's Dot.con brings this tumultuous episode to life. Moving from the Cold War...

"Perhaps we were too distracted by the pandemic, or the endless financial crises, or the rise of TikTok. But under cover of them all, a new and more exploitative system has been taking hold. Insane sums of money that were supposed to re-float our economies after the crash of 2008 went to big tech instead. With it they funded the construction of their private cloud fiefdoms and privatized the internet. Technofeudalism says Yanis Varoufakis, is the...

"The Internet of today is a far cry from its early promise of a decentralized, democratic network of creativity and innovation. In the past decade, the Internet has fallen under the control of a tiny group of massive companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook. In Read Write Own, tech visionary Chris Dixon argues that the dream of an open network for fostering creativity and entrepreneurship doesn't have to die, and that in fact it can, and must, be...

"The origin story of the Age of Disinformation: the candid inside tale of two online media rivals, Jonah Peretti of HuffPost and Buzzfeed and Nick Denton of Gawker Media, whose delirious pursuit of attention at scale in the first two decades of the 21st century helped release the dark forces that would overtake the internet and American society. If attention is the new oil, Ben Smith's Traffic is the story of the time between the first gusher and...