Over at CIGI, I’ve shared five books that I’ve found particularly useful for understanding the digital economy and tech policy. The first three books explore the basic fundamentals:

• Nick Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism, for his concise and incisive analysis of the dynamics of the platform/data economy.
• Shawn Powers and Michael Jablonski’s The Real Cyber War: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom, a book I’ve long championed for its focus on the interplay between state and market forces in constructing the digital economy and a particular view of internet freedom.
• Helen Nissenbaum’s Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy and the Integrity of Social Life, for how she complicates the discussion over the concept of privacy.

The thing about technology, of course, is that it is always a means to an end. If privacy can only be understood within particular social contexts, technology has to be understood within the particular spheres of social life in which it is deployed. Which brings us to my final two books:

Peter Drahos, Survival Governance: Energy and Climate in the Chinese Century, highlights the crucial role intellectual property and clean tech play in mitigating the climate disaster, and how nationalist responses, including the hoarding of IP and cleantech may doom us all.

John Kenneth Galbraith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria, the perfect read for our crypto/fintech moment: a reminder that when it comes to finance, there’s very little that’s new under the sun, and that if it looks like a bubble or a scam, it probably is.