The No To Big Tech Recommended Reading List Five books (and one newsletter) for resisting Big Tech

This is usually the first book I recommend to people who are starting to question Big Tech. A few recognise the book's title - it was Google's motto until 2018, when the company removed the phrase from its Code of Conduct. It's this conduct - and that of the other FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Netflix) - that comes under fire in Don't Be Evil. Author Rana Foroohar is a business columnist and associate editor at the Financial Times and was one of the first journalists, back in the 90s, to consider the internet newsworthy. Her clear, witty writing makes for digestible reading, however upsetting the message: Google and others abandoned their consciences long before they ditched their catchphrases.

Adrian Daub, by his own admission, is not from the tech world. But he's no stranger to the way it thinks. In seven short but thorough essays with titles like "Disruption" and "Failure", What Tech Calls Thinking breaks down the philosophies that Silicon Valley pretends it came up with. While Big Tech may appear to deal in new ideas, Daub traces its ideals and innovations back to the 1960s counterculture and earlier.

Kara Swisher is a journalist and, like Foroohar, a tech news pioneer. Today, she uses grok as a verb and has turned down more jobs in Big Tech than you or I could ever apply for. It's this strange position, part of Silicon Valley but also opposed to much of it, that gives her the right to burn it all down if she wants to. Burn Book is part memoir, part chronicle of her industry. It is occasionally illuminating but often unputdownable and always sharp - perhaps even stinging in the fragile hands of an Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg character. If you're already shifting against Big Tech, Swisher's personal anecdotes of these founders probably won't surprise you. But they will prove your worst suspicions.

Of course, Silicon Valley doesn't stay in Silicon Valley. In Code Dependent, journalist Madhumita Murgia follows the spread of Artificial Intelligence around the world, tracking its effects on vulnerable or marginalised people and the emergence of data colonialism. Her reports - of content moderation teams in Kenya forced to watch violent imagery; of young people in the Netherlands, judged for crimes they're "likely" to commit; of gig economy workers around the world whose wages are obfuscated by the algorithm - are deeply unsettling and utterly essential to understanding the reach of Big Tech.

The process of enshittification, explains writer and activist Cory Doctorow, is not simply the things you like getting worse. It's more complex, calculated and, well, crap than that. Doctorow takes no issue with people using (or misusing) the word in this way. But the book he wrote two years after coining it is required reading for anyone who might themselves want to write, talk or act on how Big Tech has enshittified everything around us. It's also a good palate cleanser if you, like me, feel at times hopeless in the face of the harm Big Tech is doing. Not only is Doctorow a playful, energetic writer but he is also an optimist, dedicating a large section of the book not to what's gone wrong, but how we might fix it.