Cybernews reads: 5 books we thoroughly enjoyed in 2024

Finding gems of knowledge is our basic requirement for a book worth reading and reviewing. Here are five books we found useful and interesting this year. I hope they help.

So many books about technology have been published in 2024 that we couldn’t pick up and review all of them – so we tried to selectively guess which ones to read.

Alas, not all of them were very good – to no one’s surprise, really. But some surprised and deepened our knowledge of certain issues. Here’s a list of five books we have deemed worthy of your attention in 2024.

1. Eric Berger, Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age

We all have an opinion about Elon Musk – to some, he’s a genius, to others, he’s a nutty techno-fascist. But Berger has an interesting angle – in Reentry, he chronicles Musk's odyssey and wonders how his obsession with his social media platform X threatens SpaceX and his dreams of settling on Mars.

One could argue with the following statement but it was Musk, after all, who brought us the second space age and closer to multi-planetary life, and Berger, a space journalism pioneer, is worried whether Musk’s shift towards far-right conservatism might affect his space company.

But hey, soon after Reentry was published, Donald Trump was once again elected as US president. Musk is close to him, so SpaceX might be safe. Still, huge challenges lie ahead – read the book and find out what they are.

2. Luis Elizondo, Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt For UFOs

As far-fetched as this may sound, here’s what Elizondo, a former senior intelligence officer at the Pentagon, thinks: aliens are real, and every UFO sighting in the last 100 years might have been a prelude to invasion.

According to Elizondo, we’re only now starting to sound the alarm bells about this threat to national security and humanity. He does indeed reveal profound secrets in the book – but only those he can because a lot is still classified.

And when someone like Elizondo is pointing you to some hard facts not only about aliens being real but speculating about their motivation for visiting Earth so often, we must listen. It’s him and a few others we have to thank for the fact that it’s no longer taboo to talk about aliens or even alien abductions.

3. Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

Fallout, a TV series adapted from the cult post-apocalyptic video game, was released this year on Amazon Prime Video (Season 2 is happening). In the show, a nuclear war is devastating, of course, but humanity doesn’t end – even on the planet’s surface.

But Jacobsen has worse news from real life – the true fallout would be even worse, and the so-called vaults would definitely not help. A long, nightmarish nuclear winter would follow.

The scenario that the author of the book depicts is a bit too mad, but she convincingly shows us how a nuclear war would end the world as we know it in a matter of hours. So maybe let’s not, ok?

4. Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

It’s a sort of a truism nowadays to claim to understand how impactful algorithms are. Who hasn’t ever doomscrolled? Who isn’t aware of how our Facebook and Instagram feeds have changed?

The motivation for the switch to algorithmic prioritization is, of course, profit. The tech companies need to keep us hooked and active on the platforms as long as possible, user experience be damned.

But Chayka’s book touches on something else, something even more pervasive. It talks – convincingly – about how algorithms have actually been changing our personalities, the concept of cultural taste, and even our physical surroundings.

5. Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert, The Secret Life of Data

Most smartphone owners with a bit of spare cash and an unhealthy addiction to social media don’t even stop to think about what they give up when they arm themselves with smartwatches, home internet appliances, apps, games, and streaming devices.

On the outside, not much, really. We buy, consume, and then get bored and look for a new shiny gadget. Even when we know that our data goes somewhere, is sold, traded, crunched, or whatever, we sort of hope for the best and presume nothing too bad can happen.

Well, Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert have some bad news. In their book, they convincingly demonstrate that someone is always going to use our data for one purpose or another. The good news is that, even though we, yes, we, are constantly for sale, it’s still on us to change things for the better.