A Reading List for Troubled Times

Whether we hit a recession in 2019 or election season forces the issue of economic inequality, you’ll want these heavy hitters on your nightstand

Photo by Daniel Frank on Unsplash

2018 was the year I left San Francisco and moved back home to Los Angeles. I left the city Kara Swisher amusingly calls “assisted living for millennials,” where meals magically arrive on doorsteps, laundry is rarely washed by the wearer, and it only takes one TaskRabbit to screw in a lightbulb.

I left San Francisco for personal reasons. But once I left the city of gadgets and hope and hype, the distrust of big tech that was seeping into the zeitgeist became more clear to me.

There were are a few obvious reasons for the distrust: Theranos, Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, to name a few.

Others were less clear. Should Uber, Lyft, Amazon, and others capitalizing on the gig economy be required to treat their distributed and ad-hoc workforce as full time workers with benefits, versus independent contractors? Is the great bargain of the Internet age — trading personal data and privacy for free services — actually unethical? Is big tech simply too big?

These are thorny questions with political ramifications for labor laws, privacy and security, and…