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An Online Book Club Across Our Own Websites

I am listening to Cory Doctorow’s Attack Surface as an audiobook while I keep Neuromancer in print—two surveillance stories with very different temperatures. Attack Surface follows someone who helped build monitoring machinery and then has to live with what those tools do when protest and policing collide. That premise sits closer to the software world I work in than most cyberpunk nostalgia does, which is why I wanted it in my ears during ordinary days. The audiobook pace suits the book I expect: long stretches where plot and policy argument keep trading places without treating either as decoration.

Attack Surface

Mike Pepi’s Against Platforms is waiting behind the books I am actively reading because I want a critique of platform culture that digs into ideology, not just product complaints. The claim that stuck with me is simple and hard: platforms are not neutral pipes, and the stories we tell about connection often hide extractive design. That matters for anyone trying to publish, build, or simply live without treating megaplatforms as the default operating system for public life. I queued it next to Doctorow and my open-web notes so I can argue with the book properly instead of nodding along from blurbs. Until I start it, this paragraph is the hold music—and the reason it earned a slot on the list.

Against Platforms

I am rereading William Gibson’s Neuromancer the way I usually do every few years: slowly enough to notice how much of cyberpunk’s vocabulary still starts here. Case, Molly, Wintermute, and the Sprawl are familiar names, but the book is denser and colder than the adaptations and references that borrowed them. I care about the atmosphere—the speed, the dread, the corporate weather—more than any checklist of tropes people now call cyberpunk by default. Apple’s series on the horizon makes the reread sharper, because I want the novel intact in my head before someone else’s version tries to replace it. That is why it is marked currently reading on this site instead of sitting as a vague classic on a shelf.

Neuromancer

I keep Chris Minnick’s A Developer’s Guide to Integrating Generative AI into Applications on this shelf because most books in the category never leave the demo room. They show you a clever prompt, a shiny chat widget, or a slide about strategy, and then stop before the boring parts that decide whether a feature survives. Chris wrote toward the work I recognize from shipping software: users who come back, budgets that bite, latency that shows up in support tickets, and failure modes that do not look like clean API errors. I read the book more than once after he sent me a copy, and I still pull it when someone wants to “just add AI” without asking what happens when the model is wrong, slow, or expensive. That is why it stays here even after the formal review is done.

The longer review lives on [Methodical Function](https://methodicalfunction.com/nerd-approved/books/a-developers-guide-to-integrating-generative-ai-into-applications/), and that is where the score, chapter notes, and product-by-product recommendations belong. On this site I only want a selection note that does not rehash that piece. What matters for joshuamorris.info is simpler: the book treats generative features as ordinary software with unusual failure shapes, which matches how I try to judge tools in these notes. Useful beats magical. Bounded beats unbounded. Honest tradeoffs beat launch-day theater. If you want the deep cut, follow that Methodical Function link; if you want to know why the title remains on my personal reading list, this is it.

A Developer’s Guide to Integrating Generative AI into Applications

I queued Deb Chachra’s How Infrastructure Works because I am tired of talking about “the cloud” and “the stack” as if they float above weather, concrete, and maintenance crews. Chachra writes about energy, water, transport, and materials as systems people actually live inside, not as diagrams that only matter to engineers. That framing feels overdue in a tech culture that treats physical infrastructure as someone else’s problem until something breaks. I want the book’s patience with the unglamorous parts—the pipes, grids, and upkeep that make ordinary days possible. Until I finish it, this note is simply the reason it is waiting on the shelf.

How Infrastructure Works

Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft is on my queue because so much of my week still happens through screens, tickets, and abstractions that never talk back. Crawford writes from workshops and repair bays about skill, attention, and the dignity of fixing things that fail loudly when you get them wrong. I am not looking for nostalgia for shop class or a lecture against laptops. I want sharper language for why concrete craft still matters when a career can drift into pure symbol-pushing. That question keeps showing up in my own work, so the book stays queued until I give it a proper read.

Shop Class as Soulcraft

Cory Doctorow’s The Internet Con is queued because interoperability is one of the few open-web fights that still feels like a lever instead of a eulogy. Doctorow argues for forcing platforms to open up—not as a slogan about vibes, but as a practical attack on lock-in. That sits next to the work I already try to do by publishing on my own domain, keeping feeds, and preferring tools that do not require renting a timeline. I want to see where his program matches those habits and where it asks for more than personal publishing can deliver. The book stays on this list until I finish that argument with the text in hand.

The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation

Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future is queued as the climate novel I keep meaning to meet on its own terms instead of through other people’s summaries. I want the long experiment: institutions under pressure, finance games that feel too clever, politics that swing between hope and coercion, and plot that refuses to treat the crisis as background weather. Speculative fiction earns a place on this list when it argues with the present rather than offering a clean escape hatch. Robinson’s sprawl is part of the point for me—the uneven hope, the parts that feel neat, and the parts that feel uncomfortably plausible. I will know better what I think after I finish it; for now it sits here because that argument is worth my attention.

The Ministry for the Future

Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine is queued because I refuse to keep citing computing-history folklore without reading the field report myself. Kidder follows a team racing a machine under impossible deadlines, and the story still feels like a document of ambition, burnout, and the romance people attach to “one more push.” Today’s shipping culture borrows that intensity all the time, often without noticing the people and politics underneath the milestone. I want the book’s texture—the late nights, the egos, the cost of making hardware actually work—not a TED-talk version of the legend. Until then it waits here as required reading for anyone who talks about shipping like it is only a mindset.

An Online Book Club Across Our Own Websites

Attack Surface — Cory Doctorow

Against Platforms — Mike Pepi

Neuromancer — William Gibson

A Developer’s Guide to Integrating Generative AI into Applications — Chris Minnick

How Infrastructure Works — Deb Chachra

Shop Class as Soulcraft — Matthew B. Crawford

The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation — Cory Doctorow

The Ministry for the Future — Kim Stanley Robinson

The Soul of a New Machine — Tracy Kidder

Topics · online book club

Notes and reading tagged online book club

An Online Book Club Across Our Own Websites

Attack Surface — Cory Doctorow

Against Platforms — Mike Pepi

Neuromancer — William Gibson

A Developer’s Guide to Integrating Generative AI into Applications — Chris Minnick

How Infrastructure Works — Deb Chachra

Shop Class as Soulcraft — Matthew B. Crawford

The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation — Cory Doctorow

The Ministry for the Future — Kim Stanley Robinson

The Soul of a New Machine — Tracy Kidder

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