Issue #60
Five last minute stocking-fillers ✨
Thank you for subscribing to Sticks & Stones - exploring the real world impact of social media and AI. As always, I’m sharing my top 5 reads of the year. Enjoy! ✨
Sticks & Stones
1. Empire of AI
A great piece of investigative journalism from Silicon Valley insider, Karen Hao. Empire of AI draws on hundreds of interviews with everyone from AI board members in San Francisco to data-labelling shift workers in Nairobi. Hao shows in detail how AI’s rise concentrates power, exploits labour, and entrenches inequality - while still insisting that a better future is possible. (Allen Lane, 2025)
2. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
For years, author and activist Naomi Klein has been confused with Naomi Wolf, another prominent (and controversial) figure who champions very different values. Klein takes this “mirroring” as the starting point for Doppelganger, where she eloquently argues that social media and conspiracy culture are fracturing reality into two opposing worlds. (Penguin, 2024)
3. Careless People
An entertaining, often shocking memoir from Facebook’s first director of public policy, Sarah Wynn-Williams. Her former boss, Mark Zuckerberg, helped the book become a bestseller earlier this year - by trying to ban it. Wynn-Williams exposes a culture of power, sexism, and moral failure at the heart of the company now known as Meta. (Macmillan, 2025)
4. Imagination: A Manifesto
A short but inspirational guide to building creative, collective vision - essential for dismantling oppressive systems and prioritising communities, people and planet. Ruha Benjamin believes we’re at a time “between stories” - where the old cultural scripts are giving way to something new. She argues that those who best articulate the future will build it, so we all need to get involved. (Norton & Co, 2024)
5. Enshittification
Blogger and sci-fi author Cory Doctorow coined this provocative (but apt) term to describe how everything from apps to airlines keeps getting worse. With his usual combination of sharp humour and detailed research, Doctorow exposes how big tech companies deliberately degrade products for profit - then he maps real ways to fight back. The end result is rage-inducing but also empowering. (Verso, 2025)
Solid curation here. The Doctorow piece on enshittification gets at something most people feel but can't quite articulate: teh deliberate decay isn't accidental or incompetence, it's actually the business model. I saw this firsthand when a platform I used daily slowly stripped features to push premium tiers. What's interesting is how this process almost always follows the same arc: hook users, extract value from them, then extractvalue from suppliers too. Definetly adding this to my reading queue.