I heard about this book through an event Data & Society
held with Jill Lepore and danah boyd
. As an unashamed danah boyd fangirl, I pay attention to anything danah says is worth paying attention to. I'd been meaning to dig into Jill Lepore's work for a while. I have a number of intense history nerds in my family who love her writing. I've also had a copy of one of Jill's other books sitting on my shelf for too long; The Mansion of Happiness
: A History of Life and Death (still unread).
Once I saw it was a social and historical investigation of how we ended up in our current data surveillance dystopia, it was an easy instabuy.