A list of books, essays, papers, blog posts, tweets, etc. on tech and ethics that I have either read and found useful or plan to read because I think they might be useful. I’m not especially interested in ethics that doesn’t take power or structure into account, so most of the standard texts one would read in a course on ethics aren’t represented on my list.
Not strictly about either ethics or tech, but Claire Dederer’s What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men? verbalizes something that is wound up in how I think about ethics, and what I hear when people talk about ethics:
This, I think, is what happens to so many of us when we consider the work of the monster geniuses—we tell ourselves we’re having ethical thoughts when really what we’re having is moral feelings.
Dr. Robin James recommends Charles Mills’ Ideal Theory as Ideology. If you’re a fan of The Good Place, read Dr. James on its political philosophy.
Rancière’s Politics of Aesthetics
- Dr. Chandra Prescod-Weinstein recommended Dr. Alexis Shotwell’s Against Purity. interview
- Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is Not Abuse. (interview with many links worth following)
- Dr. Andrea Smith on privilege.
- Dr. Sara N. Ahmed’s work. Her in-progress thinking often appears on her blog.
- Dr. Eve Ewing interviews Mariame Kaba.
- Dr. Langdon Winner, Do Artifacts Have Politics?
- Dr. Lily Irani on tech ethics. (part of a much larger thread with some excellent discussion)
- Dr. Susan Silbey on MIT accepting money from Jeffrey Epstein
- Dr. Tara McPherson on Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? — the parts of this that make use of her argument from “Unix Operating Systems at Mid-Century” generally freak engineers out with lack of mechanism. If that is you, there’s a lot of work on the new history of capitalism that makes related arguments in ways that might feel less weird/daunting.
Dr. Jacqueline Wernimont, bibliography on ethics of care
Dr. Ada Palmer has written a good blog series on Machiavelli . Her related post about intellectual technology is also worth reading and thinking about in the context of tech ethics. Dr. Palmer is an intellectual historian, which is a discipline that I find interesting but that doesn’t necessarily fit with how I think about the world.