Before Algorithms Ruined Everything

Before Algorithms Ruined Everything

Before Silicon Valley turned your attention span into a revenue stream, a handful of writers saw what was coming — and wrote the receipts. This round-up pulls together five preloved titles that interrogate media, technology, and the intellectual fashions that made both possible: Andrew Keen's 2015 takedown of internet utopianism, Sokal & Bricmont's 1998 demolition of postmodern academic nonsense, and Fukuyama's 2018 dissection of identity politics as the new tribal warfare. If you're exhausted by algorithmic everything and miss when critique had teeth, these are your people.
  • Andrew Keen's Internet is Not the Answer (Atlantic Books, 2015) argued Silicon Valley's business model depends on monetising loneliness and inequality.
  • Alan Sokal's 1996 hoax paper — published in Social Text — proved postmodern theorists would accept gibberish if it flattered their ideology; Intellectual Impostures (Profile Books, 1998) unpacked the stunt.
  • Francis Fukuyama's Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition (Profile Books, 2018) traces how Plato's thymos (the need for dignity) underpins everything from Brexit to Black Lives Matter.
  • Graeme Donald's When the Earth Was Flat (Michael O'Mara, 2007) catalogues scientific consensus failures — bloodletting, phrenology, the four humours — as a corrective to present-day certainty.
  • Ekstrom & Reynolds' Media and Culture (Pearson Australia, various editions) remains the go-to Australian media studies primer, updated through Netflix-era platform capitalism.

Internet is Not the Answer — Andrew Keen

Quick Verdict: The 2015 polemic that called surveillance capitalism before it had a catchy name — essential if you're tired of pretending tech billionaires are saving the world.

Andrew Keen wrote this before Cambridge Analytica, before Elon bought Twitter, before "AI alignment" became the new eschatology — which makes his cynicism feel almost quaint now, except he was right about all of it. The thesis is blunt: the internet didn't democratise knowledge; it built a rentier economy where five companies own your social life and a gig worker delivers your dinner. The prose has the bitter clarity of someone who watched the San Francisco he loved turn into a privatised campus for 23-year-old product managers. As of May 2026, reading Keen feels less like prophecy and more like an autopsy report filed early.

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Media and Culture — Ekstrom, Reynolds

Quick Verdict: The Australian media studies textbook that doesn't talk down to you — covers everything from Murdoch's empire to why your mum thinks TikTok is a Chinese spy operation.

This is the Pearson primer that actually survived the transition from broadcast TV to algorithmic feeds, updated through multiple editions to keep pace with platform rot. Ekstrom and Reynolds write like lecturers who remember what it's like to not know things: clear, structured, willing to define "hegemony" without making you feel stupid. The Australian focus means you get case studies on Media Watch, not just the BBC, and there's a whole chapter on how News Corp's federal coverage works as a political project. If you're trying to argue with a conspiracy theorist uncle and need actual media literacy frameworks, this is the book that'll give you the vocab.

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Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers' Abuse of Science — Sokal, Alan and Bricmont, Jean

Quick Verdict: Two physicists gleefully dismantle Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and the entire Parisian theory industry — the 1998 academic drive-by that still makes people furious.

Alan Sokal submitted a nonsense paper to Social Text in 1996, filled with fashionable jargon and scientific howlers, and they published it because it sounded sufficiently radical. This book is the extended remix: Sokal and Jean Bricmont work through Lacan's topology metaphors, Kristeva's set theory appropriations, and Baudrillard's Gulf War hot takes, demonstrating with physicist precision that none of it means anything. The tone is merciless but never smug — they're genuinely baffled that respected intellectuals built careers on misusing terms like "quantum non-locality." If you've ever suspected postmodern theory was a multilingual game of Bullshit, here's your proof, annotated in footnotes the length of short essays.

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When the Earth Was Flat: All the Bits of Science We Got Wrong — Graeme Donald

Quick Verdict: A delightfully snarky catalogue of science's greatest hits in wrongness — phrenology, bloodletting, the four humours — proof that consensus doesn't mean truth.

Graeme Donald wrote this in 2007, before anti-vax became a culture war and "do your own research" turned into a punchline, but the book's core argument still lands: expert consensus has been catastrophically wrong before and will be again. He walks through centuries of confidently held nonsense — doctors prescribing mercury for syphilis, Victorian anatomists measuring skull bumps to prove racial hierarchies, the British Admiralty rejecting citrus for scurvy because it didn't fit their theory. The prose is wry without being insufferable, and the implicit lesson is clear: humility in the face of uncertainty is not a bug, it's the whole point of science. If you're trying to explain epistemic modesty to someone who just discovered a substack, hand them this.

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Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition — Francis Fukuyama

Quick Verdict: Fukuyama's 2018 attempt to explain why everyone's so angry all the time — spoiler: it's Plato's thymos, and it's everywhere.

Francis Fukuyama — yes, the "end of history" guy — came back in 2018 to explain why history very much did not end. His argument hinges on thymos, Plato's concept of the spirited part of the soul that craves recognition and dignity, and how modern identity politics (left and right) is just thymos on steroids. He traces the line from Rousseau's amour-propre through Hegel's master-slave dialectic to Trump rallies and campus safe spaces, arguing both are responses to the same wound: people feel invisible. The book is determinedly centrist in a way that'll annoy partisans on both sides, but the conceptual framework is clarifying — it explains why "I see you" became the highest compliment and why every culture war is secretly about who gets to feel seen.

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These five books won't fix the internet, won't make your algorithm feed less depressing, and won't stop your uncle from sharing conspiracy memes — but they will give you the intellectual ammunition to understand why everything feels so broken, and maybe that's worth more than optimism right now.

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Where can I buy secondhand media critique books in Sydney?

Patina Paperbacks stocks rotating preloved copies of media theory, tech criticism, and philosophy titles — all shipped Australia-wide from our Sydney base. If you're Inner West-local, you're essentially shopping your neighbourhood's bookshelf, minus the awkward small talk.

Is Andrew Keen's Internet is Not the Answer still relevant in 2025?

Honestly, yes — painfully so. Keen called surveillance capitalism, gig economy exploitation, and Silicon Valley's wealth concentration in 2015, before those became standard critiques. If anything, the book reads more like a field guide now than a hot take.

What is the Sokal Hoax and why does it still matter?

In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal submitted a fake paper to the postmodern journal Social Text, filled with fashionable jargon and scientific nonsense. They published it. Intellectual Impostures (1998) is the full breakdown of why that mattered: it proved an entire intellectual tradition had stopped caring whether its claims were true, only whether they sounded radical enough.

Are these books suitable for someone new to media theory?

Ekstrom & Reynolds' Media and Culture is the gentlest on-ramp — it's literally a textbook, so it defines terms and builds scaffolding. Keen and Fukuyama are essayistic but readable if you've ever argued about the internet on Reddit. Sokal requires a bit more patience (and a tolerance for footnotes), but the core argument is simple: don't trust intellectuals who misuse science to sound clever.

Does Patina stock other books on technology and media criticism?

As of May 2026, Patina's collection rotates through media studies, philosophy, and cultural criticism titles as secondhand stock cycles in. If you're after Shoshana Zuboff, Cathy O'Neil, or Jaron Lanier, check back — preloved academic and tech critique books move through Sydney's secondhand circuit regularly.

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