A Reading List for Aspiring “Unoptimizers”

50+ Works and Counting

Created from my ongoing reading in life and work, built on a foundation of undergraduate work in gender, race, sociology, philosophy, religion, and economics -and- augmented by Wikipedia + Google Searches, branching from Bibliographies of books cited; and use of ChatGPT5 with human spot-checking (but not yet full fact checking)

For those interested in this topic:

• What / who should I add to the list?

• Anyone writing / creating content now on the topic beyond Eugene Healy, Cory Doctorow, and me (Leslie Bradshaw) that I should have on my radar?

NB: I am working on my Bookshop.org Affiliate links for as many of these as possible, will update in a time frame that’s reasonable for the approval team at Bookshop and for my ability to insert the correct hyperlinks (disclosure: I’ll automate where ai can)

Industrial and Technological Critiques

Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Translated by John Wilkinson. New York: Vintage, 1964.

Hayek, F. A. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944.

Hirschman, Albert O. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970.

Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.

Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934.

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001. First published 1944.

Schumacher, E.F. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. New York: Harper Perennial, 2010. First published 1973.

Literary and Philosophical Foundations

Astell, Mary. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. Edited by Patricia Springborg. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002. First published 1694.

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977.

Chesterton, G. K. What’s Wrong with the World. London: Cassell and Company, 1910.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Edited by David W. Blight. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. First published 1845.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Edited by Brent Hayes Edwards. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. First published 1903.

Goldman, Emma. Anarchism and Other Essays. New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910.

Hildegard of Bingen. Scivias. Translated by Columba Hart and Jane Bishop. New York: Paulist Press, 1990. First published c. 1151.

Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love. Translated by Elizabeth Spearing. London: Penguin Classics, 1998. First published c. 1395.

Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe. Edited by Barry Windeatt. London: Penguin Classics, 1985. First published c. 1438.

Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979.

Maritain, Jacques. Integral Humanism: Temporal and Spiritual Problems of a New Christendom. Translated by Joseph W. Evans. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968.

Montaigne, Michel de. Essays. Translated by M. A. Screech. London: Penguin Classics, 1991. First published 1580.

Orwell, George. Essays. Edited by John Carey. London: Penguin Classics, 2000.

Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Translated by A. J. Krailsheimer. London: Penguin Classics, 1995. First published 1670.

Sappho. Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments. Translated by Aaron Poochigian. New York: Penguin Classics, 2009. First published 7th–6th century BCE.

Scruton, Roger. How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Selected Works. Edited and translated by Edith Grossman. New York: Norton, 2004. Includes “Respuesta a Sor Filotea,” 1691.

Strauss, William, and Neil Howe. The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy. New York: Broadway Books, 1997.

Teresa of Ávila. The Interior Castle. Translated by E. Allison Peers. New York: Image Books, 1961. First published 1577.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854.

Truth, Sojourner. “Ain’t I a Woman?” Speech delivered at the Women’s Rights Convention, Akron, Ohio, May 1851. In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, 314–15. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Craufurd; with additional material by Mario von der Ruhr. London: Routledge Classics, 2002. First published 1952.

Wheatley, Phillis. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. London: A. Bell, 1773.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Edited by Miriam Brody. London: Penguin Classics, 1992. First published 1792.

Indigenous and Decolonial Perspectives

Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera. Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization. Translated by Molly Geidel, with a prologue by Véronica Gago. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

LaDuke, Winona. Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.

Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Black and Queer Resistance

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. 
 — — — . Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso, 2009.

Delany, Samuel R. Dhalgren. New York: Bantam Books, 1975.

Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books, 1998.

Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W.W. Norton, 2019.

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

Spade, Dean. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). London: Verso, 2020.

Womack, Ytasha L. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books (Chicago Review Press), 2013.

Dery, Mark. “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose.” In Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, edited by Mark Dery. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.

Decolonial and Global South Voices

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004. First published 1961.

Galeano, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Translated by Cedric Belfrage. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997. First published 1971.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey, 1986.

Nelson, Alondra, ed. “Special Issue: Afrofuturism.” Social Text 20, no. 2 (Summer 2002). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Okorafor, Nnedi. Binti. New York: Tor.com (Tor Publishing Group), 2015.

Contemporary Catalysts

Doctorow, Cory. The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. London: Verso, 2023.
 — — — . “Billionaireism.” Pluralistic, August 20, 2025. https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/billionaireism/#surveillance-infantilism.
 — — — . “Friction Cannot Be Reduced, It Can Only Be Redistributed.” Pluralistic, August 23, 2025. https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/23/become-unoptimizable/#downward-redistribution.

Gibson, Richard Hughes. “An Appeal for Friction Writing.” The Hedgehog Review, February 1, 2021. https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/an-appeal-for-friction-writing.

Guirat, Iness Ben, and Jan Tobias Mühlberg. Resistance Technologies: Moving Beyond Alternative Designs. arXiv preprint, August 7, 2025.

Healey, Eugene. The Importance of Friction. Three-part TikTok video series, August 2025.

• Part 1 of 3: https://www.tiktok.com/@eugbrandstrat/video/7540484297841528082

• Part 2 of 3: https://www.tiktok.com/@eugbrandstrat/video/7541236716200365320

• Part 3 of 3: https://www.tiktok.com/@eugbrandstrat/video/7542709470921608455

Ng, Alexandria. “The Essential Role of ‘Friction’ in Student-Facing Artificial Intelligence Products.” EdWeek Market Brief, June 27, 2025.

Strange Loop Canon. “Silicon Valley’s Quest to Remove Friction from Our Lives.” June 9, 2025.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. New York: Random House, 2012.

Movements and Manifestos

Binfield, Kevin, ed. Writings of the Luddites. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

[A collection of anonymous letters, proclamations, petitions, trial transcripts, and cultural texts produced during the Luddite uprisings (1811–1816). These documents were often signed in the name of the mythical “Ned Ludd” or “General Ludd,” a symbolic figure rather than an individual author.]

Bradshaw, Leslie. “Unoptimized.” Turtle Adventures, May 18, 2025. https://www.trtladventures.com/p/unoptimized.

Brand, Stewart, ed. Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, Fall 1968.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994. First published 1967.

Francis, Pope. Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2015.

Gandhi, Mohandas K. Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1938. First published 1909.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–181. New York: Routledge, 1991. First published 1985.

International Slow Food Movement. Slow Food Manifesto. Paris: 1989. https://www.slowfood.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/slow-food-manifesto.pdf.

Levine, Rick, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger. The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual. New York: Perseus Books, 2000.

Morris, William. News from Nowhere and Other Writings. Edited by Clive Wilmer. London: Penguin Classics, 1993.