There was a quiet but serious shift in mainstream thought about technology underway this year, even before everything went to hell. Most years, the release schedule for tech books is brimming with startup hagiographies, founder profiles, tech guru memoirs, and business and management tomes, with a few “critical” titles thrown in — your exposés and polemics and kids-are-using-their-phones-too-much tirades.

This year, which I observed from my high and mighty perch as editor of OneZero’s books department, the ratio seemed to be firmly reversed — the blow-by-blow accounts of tech world goings-on, like Steven Levy’s Facebook: The Inside Story, were considerably…

Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, a ruminative and cutting memoir about tech startups in the 2010s, is officially one of the best books of the year—at least, according to the New York Times. On Monday, the paper placed the book on its always buzzy top-10 list.

Earlier this year, OneZero held a panel discussion with Wiener, Jessica Powell, and our senior editor Brian Merchant, touching on topics like sexism, power, and diversity in Silicon Valley. Wiener reflected on her decision to write Uncanny Valley as nonfiction.

“My reason for writing the book as memoir was I felt that — especially as…

Seemingly infinite branching futures lay before us, most of them bad-shaped. Will the pandemic and wildfires leave us in withered, blasted ruins? Will the new Supreme Court finally transform us into a full-blown theocracy? Will voter suppression continue unabated until election day? Will the militias show up? Will the election — I’ll just stop it there.

Who knows! About any of it! Now is a moment in which everything seems possible, especially crippling anxiety. But while we all wait with bated breath for our hoped-for outcomes, perhaps we can take some solace in considering a few of those infinite futures…

This piece is part of a series on visionary fiction we’re running on OneZero to examine how future culture can affect change now. In her companion feature about the growing genre, Walidah Imarisha, author, educator, and co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, explains how stories about the future are imperative to helping us build a better one. (Stories like Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild, which we also published in full.) Here, Imarisha gives us a reading and viewing list of works of visionary fiction that will help us get our minds into gear.

Visionary fiction is fantastical…

Hardly a week goes by without another Facebook scandal. Frustration with Facebook and criticism of it — even despair over it and outright hatred of it — seems constant, evergreen. It’s been this way since at least the 2016 election. …

Utopias are one of the earliest, most straightforward forms of speculative fiction. Beginning with Thomas More’s 1516 faux travelogue about the strange, egalitarian land of Utopia that gave the concept its name, telling stories whose chief aim is to describe what an ideal world might look like became an enduring art form. Yet critics don’t usually place the genesis of science fiction until the Industrial Revolution — Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often cited as the starting pistol of the genre.

Which, fair enough — utopias usually took the form of a travelogue; a visitor to a new fantastic and ostensibly…

The first self-driving vehicles were ships. After centuries of wrestling with wind and waves, ancient sailors devised contraptions that harnessed these forces of nature to fill in for man. They were simple but ingenious solutions, like the sheet-to-tiller system, which is still used today.

To rig it, you simply take the jib sheet (the rope that controls the smaller sail up front) and run it around a pulley and back across the deck. Finish by tying the bitter end to the tiller (the stick that steers the boat). …