Nicholas Carr's Book Recommendations (Updated for 2026)

1

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

Tim Wu

4.2

In this age of an open Internet, it is easy to forget that every American information industry, beginning with the telephone, has eventually been taken captive by some ruthless monopoly or cartel. With all our media now traveling a single network, an unprecedented potential is building for centralized control over what Americans see and hear. Could history repeat itself with the next industrial co

Recommended by Andrew Chen, Seth Godin, Nicholas Carr, and 1 others.

Nicholas Carr

If The Information is a sprawling, sweeping story of how information has changed over time, one thing it doesn’t get into is the commercial nature of information as a good that is bought and sold. That’s the story Tim Wu tells in The Master Switch. His basic argument is that whenever a new communication medium arises, a similar pattern occurs. The technology starts off as a hobbyist’s passion, democratic and open. Then over time, as it becomes more popular, it starts to be dominated by corporate interests and becomes much more formalised, before eventually being displaced by a new technology. [source]

Andrew Chen

General Partner/Andreessen Horowitz

Now starting the section now these information empires eventually got dismantled, by the internet, cable, and the government antitrust efforts on the 1950s! Awesome book so far [source]

Seth Godin

Author, Marketer, Entrepreneur

This one really stuck with me--a top level analysis of how changes in media change the culture and change the structure of industry. [source]

2

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

Shoshana Zuboff

4.3

Preview Summary

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.

In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The sta

Recommended by Clive Lewis Mp, Dilip Cherian, John Tasioulas, and 3 others.

Nicholas Carr

Whatever its imperfections, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is an original and often brilliant work, and it arrives at a crucial moment, when the public and its elected representatives are at last grappling with the extraordinary power of digital media and the companies that control it. Like another recent masterwork of economic analysis, Thomas Piketty’s 2013 Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the book challenges assumptions, raises uncomfortable questions about the present and future, and stakes out ground for a necessary and overdue debate. Shoshana Zuboff has aimed an unsparing light onto the shadowy new landscape of our lives. The picture is not pretty. [source]

Clive Lewis Mp

Cant make the brilliant event below? Havent had a chance to read @shoshanazuboff groundbreaking book, ‘Surveillance Capitalism’? Then listen to this brilliant interview with the author as she explains the terrifying scale&ambition of Facebook/Google et al https://t.co/DCtNlFbmE0 https://t.co/ZX0YpW5pOo [source]

Dilip Cherian

Brave New World? Thanks @shoshanazuboff for that amazing book. It's compulsory reading for those trying to make sense of our world now. https://t.co/5nBJWoLS9p [source]

3

The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers

Tom Standage

4.2

The Victorian Internet tells the colorful story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from the eighteenth-century French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet to Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Edison. The electric telegraph nullified distance and shrank the world quicker and further than ever before or since, and its story mirr

Recommended by Nicholas Carr and Rafat Ali.

Nicholas Carr

The reason why I start with Tom Standage’s book is because we tend to think of the information age as something entirely new. In fact, people have been wrestling with information for many centuries. If I was going to say when the information age started, I would probably say the 15th century with the invention of the mechanical clock, which turned time into a measurable flow, and the printing press, which expanded our ability to tap into other kinds of thinking. The information age has been building ever since then. [source]

Rafat Ali

The not-Internet Internet of early 20th century and its effect on news/newspapers. From “The Victorian Internet” book, utterly fascinating. https://t.co/jP0C4cfkTc [source]

4

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

James Gleick

4.3

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.

The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soo

Recommended by Nicholas Carr.

Nicholas Carr

If Standage’s is a small book focused on a particular technology and moment in time, Gleick’s is extraordinarily broad and sweeping. It’s a very large book, in which he tries – and succeeds in many ways I think – to tell the story of information in human history. Information breaks down into two different things in essence. On the one hand it is messages – things with meaning to human beings – and on the other hand it is an abstract good without meaning which we have begun to industrialise, by which I mean figure out how to get more information across a distance more quickly and efficiently. [source]

5

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

Matthew B. Crawford

4.1

A philosopher/mechanic's wise (and sometimes funny) look at the challenges and pleasures of working with one's hands

Called "the sleeper hit of the publishing season" (The Boston Globe), Shop Class as Soulcraft became an instant bestseller, attracting readers with its radical (and timely) reappraisal of the merits of skilled manual labor. On both economic and psychological grounds, author Matthe

Recommended by Nicholas Carr.

Nicholas Carr

With the last two books I tried to move away from the historical and commercial side to the more personal consequences of the information age. Matthew Crawford’s book is a bit of a surprise in this list, because he doesn’t specifically talk about the Internet. But he does talk in a broad and philosophical way about things which are very important in the information age. That is, the way our technologies and our society increasingly encourage the abstract at the expense of the physical. [source]

6

Super Sad True Love Story

Gary Shteyngart

3.6

The author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart has risen to the top of the fiction world. Now, in his hilarious and heartfelt new novel, he envisions a deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming years—and the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink.

In a very near future—oh, let’s say ne

Recommended by Whitney Cummings, Jennifer M Harris, and Nicholas Carr.

Nicholas Carr

I think that novelists, and other artists, are only beginning to grapple with the implications of the Internet, smartphones and all of that. Literature provides a different and very valuable way of perceiving those implications, so I decided to end with a novel. This book is both funny and extremely horrifying. It’s set in a future that is very close in some ways to the present. Shteyngart takes phenomena and trends that are around us but we don’t even notice, pushes them a little more extreme, and suddenly it gives you a new way to think about not only where we’re heading but where we already are. [source]

Whitney Cummings

Super sad but very funny. Well, not super. It’s like a dystopian satire on the future. [source]

Jennifer M Harris

What I like about it is the way Shteyngart takes a pretty wonky concept in geoeconomics and makes it real. [source]