Science, Technology & Society

Goals

Analyze how emerging technologies reshape society, work, and human relationships. Understand ethical frameworks for technology governance. Evaluate tensions between innovation, privacy, equity, and welfare. Develop critical perspectives on technological change.

Why these books

These four books share a common and important perspective: rather than asking what technology can do, they ask what technology is already doing — to marginalized communities, to democratic discourse, to social movements, and to the fabric of public life. Together they form one of the most critically rigorous reading lists in this curriculum, and students should approach them knowing they will be challenged to question assumptions about technological progress that much of mainstream culture treats as self-evident.

Virginia Eubanks's "Automating Inequality" examines how automated decision-making systems — algorithms designed to allocate welfare benefits, flag child abuse cases, and manage public housing — function in practice for the poor and vulnerable communities they purport to serve. Through meticulous fieldwork in Indiana, Los Angeles, and Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Eubanks demonstrates that these systems do not eliminate the bias and arbitrariness of human bureaucracies but frequently encode and accelerate them, while adding a veneer of algorithmic objectivity that makes them harder to challenge. The book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the promise of data-driven efficiency can mask and deepen existing inequalities, and it grounds the more theoretical concerns about AI governance in the concrete, documented experiences of people whose lives are shaped by these systems every day.

Ruha Benjamin's "Race After Technology" extends this analysis with a broader theoretical framework, introducing the concept of the "New Jim Code" — the way that ostensibly neutral technological systems can reproduce and reinforce racial hierarchy while concealing their discriminatory effects behind the authority of code. Benjamin moves across a wide range of examples, from facial recognition software that misidentifies dark-skinned faces, to predictive policing algorithms, to the racial biases embedded in medical devices and platforms. The book is more theoretically ambitious than Eubanks and draws heavily on critical race theory, which makes it more demanding but also more generative for students who want a framework that extends beyond individual case studies. Read alongside Automating Inequality, it builds a powerful cumulative argument that bias in technology is not a bug to be fixed but a feature of how these systems are designed and deployed.

Max Fisher's "The Chaos Machine" shifts the focus from algorithmic governance to the social and political consequences of social media platforms, and it is among the most disturbing books on this list. Fisher, a veteran journalist, draws on extensive interviews with platform insiders, researchers, and victims of online radicalization to argue that engagement-maximizing algorithms — the systems that decide what content to show users — systematically amplify outrage, division, and extremism because these emotions generate the most clicks, shares, and time on platform. The result, he argues, is not an accidental side effect but a structural consequence of optimizing for engagement above all else, with documented links to political polarization, ethnic violence, and the erosion of shared reality. It provides students with a framework for understanding social media not as a neutral tool that can be used well or badly, but as an environment with its own incentive architecture that shapes behavior in predictable and often destructive ways.

Zeynep Tufekci's "Twitter and Tear Gas" offers a necessary and sophisticated counterpoint to the more dystopian analyses surrounding it. Tufekci, a sociologist who has studied social movements for decades, argues that digital tools have genuinely transformed the capacity for collective action — lowering barriers to organizing, enabling rapid mobilization, and connecting activists across borders in historically unprecedented ways. But she also argues, with equal rigor, that these same tools create new vulnerabilities: movements that organize quickly online often lack the internal deliberation, organizational depth, and adaptive capacity that sustained political change requires. It is neither a celebration of digital activism nor a dismissal of it, but a careful structural analysis of how technology reshapes the dynamics of power between citizens and states. For students of this curriculum, it models exactly the kind of nuanced, framework-driven evaluation of technological change the learning goals demand.

Together these four books resist the twin temptations that dominate public conversation about technology — uncritical enthusiasm and paralyzing despair — in favor of something harder and more valuable: systematic analysis of how specific technologies interact with existing structures of power, inequality, and human psychology to produce outcomes that are neither inevitable nor accidental. A reader who works through all four will come away not only more skeptical of technological solutionism, but equipped with the conceptual tools to ask better questions about who designs these systems, whose interests they serve, and what governance frameworks might make them more accountable. Sonnet 4.6Extended