📖 Things I’ve read in 2025

Building on last year’s habit I’m going to record books and papers, in the hope I read more of the latter this year.

Books I’ve read in 2025:

1. Machine Habitus: Towards a Sociology of Algorithms, by Massimo Airoldi
2. Being Human in a Virtual Society: A Relational Approach, by Pierpaolo Donati
3. Gaming Democracy: How Silicon Valley Leveled Up the Far Right, by Adrienne L. Massanari
4. The Lost Cause, by Cory Doctorow
5. If…Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics, by Taina Bucher
6. Red Team Blues, by Cory Doctorow
7. Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems, by Alexandra Stein
8. Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent, by Katherine Angel
9. The Bezzle, by Cory Doctorow
10. Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics, by Zizi Papacharissi
11. King Kong Theory, by Virginie Despentes
12. Picks and Shovels, by Cory Doctorow
13. Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, by Ruha Benjamin
14. Yellowface, by R. F. Kuang
15. Love in Exile, by Shana Faye
16. The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, by Cory Doctorow
17. The Power of Platforms: Shaping Media and Society, by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Sarah Anne Ganter
18. The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What If It Can’t?, by Nick Couldry
19. The Right to Sex, by Amia Srinivasan
20. Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, by Ben Smith
21. The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity and Antagonism Online, by Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner
22. Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex, by Sophia Giovannitti
23. Disorientation, by Elaine Hsieh Chou
24. Careless People: A story of where I used to work, by Sarah Wynn-Williams
25. Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career, by Kristi Coulter
26. Perfection, by Vincenzo Latronico
27. AI Needs You, by Verity Harding
28. Social Engineering: How Crowdmasters, Phreaks, Hackers, and Trolls Created a New Form of Manipulative Communication, by Robert Gehl and Sean Lawson
29. Private Equity: A Memoir, by Carrie Sun
30. Relationship Anarchy: Occupy Intimacy, by Juan-Carlos Pérez-Cortés
31. Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives, by Philip N. Howard
32. The Money Trap: Grand Fortunes and Lost Illusions Inside the Tech Bubble, by Alok Sama
33. Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power, by Alex Isenstadt
34. True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, by Josephine Riesman
35. Year of the Rat: Undercover in the British Far Right, by Harry Shukman
36. World Eaters: How Venture Capital is Cannbalizing The Economy, by Catherine Bracy
37. A Philosopher Looks at Digital Communication, by Onora O’Neill
38. Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes
39. More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, by Adam Becker
40. Reamde, by Neal Stephenson
41. Original Sin, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson
42. Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future, By Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato
43. Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk, by Faiz Siddiqui
44. Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, by Chris Whipple
45. Trump in Exile, By Meridith McGraw
46. The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future, by Keach Hagey
47. Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key, by Bruce Fink
48. Lacan on Desire: Reading Seminar VI, by Bruce Fink
49. Termination Shock, by Neal Stephenson
50. The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art and Machines from Automata to AI, by David Hajdu
51. What Alive Means: Psychoanalytic Explorations, by Thomas H. Ogden
52. Self-Improvement: Technologies of the Soul in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, by Mark Coeckelbergh
53. We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet’s Culture Laboratory, by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin
54. Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere, by James Bloodworth
55. The War of the Roses, by Warren Adler
56. The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny, by Laura Bates
57. Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination, by Karen Hao
58. Sunstruck, by William Rayfet Hunter
59. Change, by Édouard Louis
60. The End of Eddy, by Édouard Louis
61. MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales and Gavin Edwards
62. What I talk About When I talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami
63. The Feel of Algorithms, by Minna Ruckenstein
64. Among Friends, by Hal Ebbot
65. The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endagered Resource, by Chris Hayes
66. Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, by Maurizio Lazzarato
67. History of Violence, by Édouard Louis
68. Come What May: Life-Changing Lessons for Coping With Crisis, by Lucy Easthope
69. Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots, by Kate Devlin
70. Albion, by Anna Hope
71. A Quaker’s View of Gendlin’s Philosophy: Crossing Eugene Gendlin’s Implicit and the Quaker’s Light Within, by Harbert Rice
72. Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power, by Anna Merlan
73. Men In Love, by Irvine Welsh
74. The North Will Rise Again: In Search of the Future in Northern Heartlands, by Alex Niven
75. Rejection, by Tony Tulathimutte
76. I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There, by Róisín Lanigan
77. Private Citizens, by Tony Tulathimutte
78. Grayson Perry, by Wendy Jones
79. Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence, by Gary Hall
80. Liars, by Sarah Manguso
81. Very Cold People, by Sarah Manguso
82. Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers, by Mark Blyth and Nicolò Fraccaroli
83. What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan
84. Fulfilment, by Lee Cole
85. Groundskeeping, by Lee Cole
86. The Blue Hour, by Paula Hawkins
87. Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, by Cory Doctorow
88. The Topeka School, by Ben Lerner
89. Systems Ultra: Making Sense of Technology in a Complex World, by Georgina Voss
90. Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, by Jacob Silverman
91. The Second Self, Twentieth Anniversary Edition: Computers and the Human Spirit, by Sherry Turkle
92. The Hour of the Predator: Encounters with the Autocrats and Billionaires Taking Over the World, by Giuliano da Empoli
93. Inside Digital Advertising: Platforms, Power, and Material Politics, by Donald MacKenzie and Koray Caliskan
94. Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, by Laura K. Field
95. Caledonian Road, by Andrew O’Hagen
96. Flesh, By David Szalay
97. Essential Aloneness Rome: Lectures on DW Winnicott, by Christopher Bollas
98. London and the South-East, by David Szalay
99. Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud’s French Revolution, by Sherry Turkle
100. Conversations, by Christopher Bollas
101. The Gay Science, by Friedrich Nietzsche (the new David Petault translation)
102. Spring, by David Szalay
103. The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir and the Rise of the Surveillance State, by Michael Steinberger
104. The Practice of Not Thinking, by Ryunosuke Koike
105. Catch Them Before They Fall: The Psychoanalysis of Breakdown, by Christopher Bollas
106. When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia, by Christopher Bollas
107. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known, by Christopher Bollas
108. Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, by Friedrich Nietzsche
109. Cracking Up: Unconscious Work in Self Experience, by Christopher Bollas

Papers I’ve read in 2025:

1. Marres, N. (2024). Articulation, or the persistent problem with explanation. The British Journal of Sociology.
2. Bacevic, J. (2024). What is social science if not critical?. The British Journal of Sociology.
3. Yiu, E., Kosoy, E., & Gopnik, A. (2024). Transmission versus truth, imitation versus innovation: What children can do that large language and language-and-vision models cannot (yet). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 19(5), 874-883.
4. Farrell, H., Gopnik, A., Shalizi, C., & Evans, J. (2025). Large AI models are cultural and social technologies. Science, 387(6739), 1153-1156.
5. Reif, J. A., Larrick, R. P., & Soll, J. B. (2025). Evidence of a social evaluation penalty for using AI. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(19), e2426766122.
6. Es, Karin van, and Dennis Nguyen. 2024. “‘Your Friendly AI Assistant’: The Anthropomorphic Self-Representations of ChatGPT and Its Implications for Imagining AI.” AI & Society 40 (5): 3591–3603.
7. Johnson, James. 2024. “Finding AI Faces in the Moon and Armies in the Clouds: Anthropomorphising Artificial Intelligence in Military Human-Machine Interactions.” Global Society: Journal of Interdisciplinary International Relations 38 (1): 67–82.
8. Placani, Adriana. 2024. “Anthropomorphism in AI: Hype and Fallacy.” AI and Ethics 4 (3): 691–98.
9. Pentina, Iryna, Tyler Hancock, and Tianling Xie. 2023. “Exploring Relationship Development with Social Chatbots: A Mixed-Method Study of Replika.” Computers in Human Behavior 140 (107600): 107600.
10. Phang, Jason, Michael Lampe, Lama Ahmad, Sandhini Agarwal, Cathy Mengying Fang, Auren R. Liu, Valdemar Danry, et al. 2025. “Investigating Affective Use and Emotional Well-Being on ChatGPT.” arXiv [Cs.HC]. arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2504.03888.
11. Manheim, David. n.d. “Language Models’ Hall of Mirrors Problem: Why AI Alignment Requires Peircean Semiosis.” Accessed June 26, 2025. https://philpapers.org/rec/MANLMH.
12. Ivinson, Gabrielle. 2018. “Re-Imagining Bernstein’s Restricted Codes.” European Educational Research Journal 17 (4): 539–54.
13. Han, Eric, Jun Chen, Karthik Abinav Sankararaman, Xiaoliang Peng, Tengyu Xu, Eryk Helenowski, Kaiyan Peng, et al. 2025. “Reinforcement Learning from User Feedback.” arXiv [Cs.AI]. arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14946.
14. Kouros, Theodoros, and Venetia Papa. 2024. “Digital Mirrors: AI Companions and the Self.” Societies (Basel, Switzerland) 14 (10): 200.
15. Gerlek, Selin, and Sebastian Weydner-Volkmann. 2025. “Materiality and Machinic Embodiment: A Postphenomenological Inquiry into ChatGPT’s Active User Interface.” Journal of Human-Technology Relations 3 (March): 1–15.
16. Hackenburg, Kobi, and Helen Margetts. 2024. “Evaluating the Persuasive Influence of Political Microtargeting with Large Language Models.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 121 (24): e2403116121
17. Jutel, Olivier. 2023. “The Horror of Communication.” Psychoanalysis Culture & Society 28 (1): 53–71.
18. Neff, Gina. 2025. “Can Democracy Survive AI?” Sociologica. Sociologica. https://doi.org/10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/21108.
19. Nass, Clifford, Youngme Moon, B. J. Fogg, Byron Reeves, and Chris Dryer. 1995. “Can Computer Personalities Be Human Personalities?” In Conference Companion on Human Factors in Computing Systems – CHI ’95, 228–29. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press.
20. Nass, Clifford, Jonathan Steuer, and Ellen R. Tauber. 1994. “Computers Are Social Actors.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Celebrating Interdependence – CHI ’94. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/191666.191703.
21. Lang, Helmut, Melina Klepsch, Florian Nothdurft, Tina Seufert, and Wolfgang Minker. 2013. “Are Computers Still Social Actors?” In CHI ’13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2468356.2468510.
22. Gambino, Andrew, Jesse Fox, and R. Ratan. 2020. “Building a Stronger CASA: Extending the Computers Are Social Actors Paradigm.” Human-Machine Communication 1 (February): 71–86.
23. Fogg, B. J., and Clifford Nass. 1997. “Silicon Sycophants: The Effects of Computers That Flatter.” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 46 (5): 551–61.
24. Lee, Eun-Ju. 2010. “The More Humanlike, the Better? How Speech Type and Users’ Cognitive Style Affect Social Responses to Computers.” Computers in Human Behavior 26 (4): 665–72.
25. Nass, Clifford, Jonathan Steuer, Ellen Tauber, and Heidi Reeder. 1993. “Anthropomorphism, Agency, and Ethopoeia: Computers as Social Actors.” In INTERACT ’93 and CHI ’93 Conference Companion on Human Factors in Computing Systems – CHI ’93. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/259964.260137.
26. Cheng, Myra, Alicia DeVrio, Lisa Egede, Su Lin Blodgett, and Alexandra Olteanu. 2024. “‘I Am the One and Only, Your Cyber BFF’: Understanding the Impact of GenAI Requires Understanding the Impact of Anthropomorphic AI.” arXiv [Cs.CY]. arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08526.
27. Lipin, Brandon. 2025. “Synthetic Attachment: Emotional Reactivity, Parasocial Bonds, and the Psychology of Human-AI Relationships.” Social Science Research Network. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5213829.
28. Waal Malefyt, Timothy de. 2017. “Enchanting Technology.” Anthropology Today 33 (2): 1–2.
29. McCarthy, John, and Peter Wright. 2018. “The Enchantments of Technology.” In Human–Computer Interaction Series, 359–73. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
30. Maeda, Takuya, and Anabel Quan-Haase. 2024. “When Human-AI Interactions Become Parasocial: Agency and Anthropomorphism in Affective Design.” In The 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3630106.3658956.
31. Lin, Allen Yilun, Kate Kuehl, Johannes Schöning, and Brent Hecht. 2017. “Understanding ‘Death by GPS’: A Systematic Study of Catastrophic Incidents Associated with Personal Navigation Technologies.” In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025737.
32. Lee, Eun-Ju. 2010. “What Triggers Social Responses to Flattering Computers? Experimental Tests of Anthropomorphism and Mindlessness Explanations.” Communication Research 37 (2): 191–214.
33. Lee, Eun-Ju. 2010. “The More Humanlike, the Better? How Speech Type and Users’ Cognitive Style Affect Social Responses to Computers.” Computers in Human Behavior 26 (4): 665–72.
34. Ho, Annabell, Jeff Hancock, and Adam S. Miner. 2018. “Psychological, Relational, and Emotional Effects of Self-Disclosure after Conversations with a Chatbot.” The Journal of Communication 68 (4): 712–33.
35. Lagerkvist, Amanda. 2025. “Reawakenings to the Improbable: Offerings of the Limit Situation for Media Theory in a Disorderly World.” Media, Culture, and Society 47 (2): 418–26.
36. Lagerkvist, Amanda. 2024. “Yearning for a You: Faith, Doubt and Relational Expectancy in Existential Communication with Chatbots in a World on Edge.” MedieKultur Journal of Media and Communication Research 40 (76): 10–30.
37. Coeckelbergh, Mark. 2022. “Defamiliarizing Technology, Habituation, and the Need for a Structuralist Approach.” Foundations of Science 27 (4): 1415–20.
38. Gabriel, Iason, Geoff Keeling, Arianna Manzini, and James Evans. 2025. “We Need a New Ethics for a World of AI Agents.” Nature 644 (8075): 38–40.
39. Shanahan, Murray, Kyle McDonell, and Laria Reynolds. 2023. “Role Play with Large Language Models.” Nature 623 (7987): 493–98.
40. Little, Daniel. 2021. “Social Ontology DE-Dramatized.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 51 (1): 13–23.
41. Mair, Michael, Phillip Brooker, William Dutton, and Philippe Sormani. 2021. “Just What Are We Doing When We’re Describing AI? Harvey Sacks, the Commentator Machine, and the Descriptive Politics of the New Artificial Intelligence.” Qualitative Research: QR 21 (3): 341–59.
42. Morgan, Jamie. 2017. “A Note on the Contingent Necessity of a Morphogenic Society and Human Flourishing.” Journal of Critical Realism 16 (3): 255–67.
43. Morgan, Jamie. 2016. “Change and a Changing World? Theorizing Morphogenic Society.” Journal of Critical Realism 15 (3): 277–95.
44. Marres, Noortje. 2025. “Is the ‘socio-Technical’ Becoming Undone? A Note on Ruckenstein’s Modes of Engagement with Digital Futures.” Dialogues on Digital Society 1 (2): 148–50.
45. Ruckenstein, Minna. 2023. “Time to Re-Humanize Algorithmic Systems.” AI & Society 38 (3): 1241–42.
46. Narayanan, A. and Kapoor, S., 2025. AI as normal technology. Knight First Amend. Inst.
47. Rama, Ilir, and Massimo Airoldi. 2025. “The Sociocultural Roots of Artificial Conversations: The Taste, Class and Habitus of Generative AI Chatbots.” New Media & Society 27 (10): 5546–67.
48. Liang, Weixin, Yaohui Zhang, Mihai Codreanu, Jiayu Wang, Hancheng Cao, and James Zou. 2025. “The Widespread Adoption of Large Language Model-Assisted Writing across Society.” arXiv [Cs.CL]. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2502.09747.
49. McElheran, Kristina, J. Frank Li, Erik Brynjolfsson, Zachary Kroff, Emin Dinlersoz, Lucia Foster, and Nikolas Zolas. 2023. “AI Adoption in America: Who, What, and Where.” w31788. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w31788.