Matthew Sperling's first novel, Astroturf, was published by riverrun in August 2018, and was longlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize 2019. His second novel, Viral, is out this month. His writing has also been published in 3:AM, Best British Short Stories 2015, The Guardian, The Junket, The Literateur, the New Statesman, The White Review, and elsewhere.
At the Guardian, Sperling tagged ten books that "trace the development of social media across the last decade, explore its effects in everyday life, and place it in its wider context. They share a sense of its enormous dynamism and power, as well as its vertiginous capacity for harm." One title on the list:
Read about the other entries on the list.The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
If [The Twittering Machine by Richard] Seymour doesn’t convince you to delete, Zuboff just might. Her study of how private experience has been colonised by data-harvesting tech firms (not just social media platforms but also Google), expropriating and monetising every aspect of our thoughts, choices and bodily lives, reveals how easily we as citizens have connived at the process.
--Marshal Zeringue
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