The most convincing exploration of ecology as power: water, myth, and logistics as the real weapons of empire.

Some gender politics and messianic vibes have aged awkwardly, but the systems-level world-building is still unmatched.

Great calibration for thinking about resource constraints, local knowledge, and long-horizon stewardship.

A left-accelerationist playbook: platform power, automation, post-work politics, and why movements need concrete demands.

Optimistic timelines and state capacity assumptions are debatable, but the strategy lens is clarifying.

Useful to contrast ‘build vs. lobby’: it argues you must do both, intentionally.

A tour of more-than-human intelligence—animals, plants, and machines—and the ethics that follow.

Occasionally hand-wavy and anecdotal, but it nudges builders to widen the design aperture beyond the human.

Pairs well with field work: read, then go sit with a forest sensor feed.

Semiotics in the rainforest: what if forests ‘mean’ things before humans interpret them?

Not a methods textbook; it’s a mind-expander that makes tech folk less anthropocentric.

Great antidote to dashboard reductionism when you’re deploying sensors in living systems.

Embodied, situated, and distributed cognition for everyday work and learning.

Some pop-psych repetition, but the applications to tool and workspace design are instantly useful.

Read it to structure teams, field kits, and note-taking so thinking actually extends outside heads.

A masterclass in why top-down ‘legibility’ breaks fragile systems and erases local know-how.

If you deploy tech into rural ecologies without reading this, prepare to re-learn painful lessons.

Sharp, humbling, and evergreen; pairs perfectly with on-the-ground co-design.

The canonical map of storage, streams, replication, consensus, and correctness under failure.

Every design review becomes crisper after this: you’ll stop arguing preferences and start trading properties.

Dense but pure signal—your off-grid video/telemetry stack will thank you.

Practical firmware craft: interrupts, power budgets, RTOS choices, testing in the messy real world.

Opinionated in the right places; it saves you months of avoidable edge-case pain.

If your device must survive rain, dust, and bad power, start here.

Survey-level reference on platforms, sensors, preprocessing, and interpretation.

Dry in parts, but indispensable when you’re stitching UAS, satellite, and ground truth.

Keep it on your shelf for band math and error budgets, not inspiration.

Borlaug vs. Vogt: abundance through tech vs. restraint through limits.

Balanced enough that both camps will complain—always a good sign.

A clean frame for energy, food, and water decisions you’ll actually make.

Indigenous pattern literacy as operating system: story, kinship, and stewardship.

Playful and nonlinear; some claims won’t land for empiricists, but the metaphors stick.

Read it to de-center yourself before designing with communities.

A sweeping, humane history of the DRC—from pre-colonial to present—with voices you rarely hear.

Long, yes; also the best context you can carry into fieldwork and storytelling.

Makes every policy hot-take feel under-informed (because it is).

Ethics and appropriate technology before those were cool.

Parts are stuck in 1970s battles, but the core demand—useful, repairable, contextual design—ages beautifully.

Sharp compass for building ‘beautiful things at scale’ without delusion.

A pro-abundance audit: energy density, policy drag, and why progress stalled.

Persuasive in diagnosing stagnation; cherry-picks in places and hand-waves social complexity.

Read for optimism fuel, not for program management.

Field science as memoir: grit, obsession, and the birth of a movement.

Dated methods and some ethical blind spots—useful to see how the discipline evolved.

Still a visceral reminder of what’s at stake in central Africa.

Time loops, lineages, and the weight of place—magical realism as systems thinking.

Not ‘practical,’ but it sharpens taste for narrative structure and symbolism.

If you build media, this is nutrition for your storytelling cortex.

Fast, mythic, and highly readable—also heavy on survivor bias and hero worship.

Great anecdotes on taste, focus, and end-to-end product control; thin on team cost accounting.

Controversial take: aspiring founders should pair this with books on systems and operations to avoid cosplay.

An operatic portrait of intensity, vertical integration, and chaos as method.

Instructive on manufacturing courage; ethically and interpersonally messy.

Read for lessons on execution under pressure—discard the nihilism.

Terse aphorisms about deception and terrain, endlessly misapplied to quarterly OKRs.

Better as a historical artifact than a business bible.

Controversial take: your org needs clear comms and real metrics, not koans.

A pragmatic product-and-org playbook from someone who shipped the future twice.

Some Apple-specific quirks don’t generalize, but the hiring, taste, and launch sections are gold.

Skimmable, quotable, and immediately actionable for early teams.