📚 Books I read in February 2026
Another case of a tight race between two books for the highlight spot, and some good old sci-fi to complete last month's trio.
Reading is callisthenics for your brain.
Reading good books is a great way to broaden your knowledge and perspectives.
Reflecting on the books I read every month helps me cement the key learnings from each one of them.
What better than recommending someone else a good book?
Recommending two, three, or five good books!
Here we are with the February edition of the books I read last month! This one comes out a bit later than usual, as I’ve covered a couple of fresh topics at the beginning of March.
Before we get into the core of the article, I have an important reminder.
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Now, back to the article.
As always, if you end up reading one of them, please let me know in the comments section.
💫 Book Highlight: Enshittification by Cory Doctorow
Enshittification, by Cory Doctorow
338 pages, First Published: October 7, 2025
Let me start with a confession: I am cheating a little bit this month. In full honesty, I finished reading Doctorow’s latest book on March 1st, which happens to be outside of the strict boundaries of the month of February. But given that it has this annoying characteristic of being shorter than all other months, I’ll take a page from the SaaS grifters and pretend my MRB (Monthly Recurring Books) is still within the projected target of 3, even though last month I was slightly below.
Let’s call it seasonality and move on.
I’ve been using the term enshittification more or less loosely for a few months now and have had Doctorow’s book in my list for quite some time. Well, I’m glad I finally picked it up last month. I’m now fully equipped to share with you a short yet very specific definition of what the process of enshittification really means1.
First, platforms are good to their users.
Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.
Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.
It’s simple, it’s clear, it’s hard to misunderstand… and it’s everywhere.
Unfortunately.
Doctorow presents in detail many well-known instances of enshittification: from Facebook to Amazon, from the iPhone ecosystem to Twitter (presently known as X, formerly known as Twitter).
In his analysis of how we got into this era of zombie platforms that trap their users because there’s nowhere else to escape to, the author explores the intended consequences of the migration of software distribution from licence-based to subscription-based, how decades of deregulation have contributed to the creation of monopolies, and the concept of reverse-centaurs: machines that use humans to accomplish more than the machine could manage on its own. Examples include Amazon and Uber drivers.
He covers at length the nefarious effects of section 1201 of the DMCA, which effectively makes it a felony to reverse engineer anything that can be considered an app. That’s what makes migrating users to apps so attractive to companies, among other things:
An app is a website wrapped in enough IP2 to make it a felony to install an ad blocker or any other modification that makes the product work better for you at the expenses of the company’s shareholders.
Among other things, this book made me discover another one I’m looking forward to reading soon. It’s written by the economist Yanis Varoufakis3, former chief economist at Valve and finance minister of Greece, who talks about the new economic system we’re facing today, one that actually killed capitalism (!). He calls it technofeudalism.
In essence, Varoufakis makes the distinction between the concept of profit and the one of rent. While profit is the general result of investing capital and paying workers to deliver a good or service, rent is income that someone reaps merely by owning something. And that’s often something a capitalist needs to make a profit.
Once I read about this concept, I couldn’t unsee it. Essentially, most of Big Tech today can be viewed through the lens of rent-based incomes: they earn money by owning assets that they rent to other companies that actually produce goods. The fact that this has progressively reduced the number of companies in each sector to a handful of dominant players is actually a feature, not a bug, of the technofeudalism system.
But Doctorow’s book is not all doom and gloom. Besides being quite funny to read, thanks to its author’s fine humour, it offers a broad set of solutions to the problem in the fourth part, aptly titled “The Cure”.
One of the first quotes from it that captured my attention was a simple, obvious, yet revealing one:
Once, we had an old, good internet.
This was the internet of the early days: open, interoperable, democratic and a place where natural competition kept enshittification attempts at bay.
What succeeded it, as you can imagine, is the enshitternet4. And one key thing made it possible:
that comesBut the enshitternet had one key advantage over the old, good internet: it was a lot easier to use! That meant that a lot of people joined, and many of those people improved the lives of those geeky early adopters with their presence.
Shortly after that comes what is probably my favourite page of the book. Page 224. In which Doctorow diligently takes down one of the most common arguments we hear about the current situation: that there is no other way. That no alternative is possible.
This trick — insisting there’s no possible arrangement of affairs apart from the current one, no matter how miserable it makes you — is literally neoliberalism’s oldest and cheapest rhetorical gimmick.[…]
“There is no alternative” really means “Stop trying to think of an alternative”.[…]
“There is no alternative” also serves to insulate the individuals who built and profited from the Enshittocene5 from criticism.
The cure that Doctorow suggests is based on some key solid pillars:
Antitrust
Regulations
Privacy
Interoperability
Labour (unions) in tech.
I’ve spoken about similar topics in a recent article and triggered some allergic reactions. I take that as a positive sign.
Today’s technofeudalism is a direct result of decades of deregulation, or copyright laws aimed at protecting the big platforms rather than consumers, such as DMCA 1201. The so-called techno-optimists, or should I say techno-fascists, tend to take the opposite view. What I think about their position is perfectly summarised by Doctorow towards the end of the book:
The Trump toady, tech authoritarian, and cryptocurrency hustler Marc Andreessen once famously quipped that “software is eating the world”. Andreessen was (as usual) wrong. Software’s effects are primarily focused at the other end of the world’s alimentary canal: software isn’t eating the world; it’s enshittifying it.
What a great book, and what a great writer.
If you’re still reading, you might feel his arguments and positions sound close to the ones put forward by so-called Luddites. You wouldn’t be wrong, as Doctorow defines himself as a Luddite. For those who follow another person I respect and admire in this space, Brian Merchant, I can recommend you go and watch or listen to a recent video conversation between the two.
If my review wasn’t enough of a compelling argument to read Enshittification, that video might do a better job.
And it goes without saying: anyone who has anything to do with massive digital platforms should read this book.
📚 Other Books I Read in January
Empire of AI by Karen Hao
Empire of AI, by Karen Hao
496 pages, First Published: May 20, 2025
Empire of AI is the almost perfect companion to The AI Con, which I talked about last month.
While the two books talk broadly about the same topic, the modern AI industry, and have a similarly critical view on it, that’s all they have in common.
Where The AI Con was written by researchers that have been an integral part of that industry for a long time, Karen Hao is a professional journalist with an outside-in perspective.
Where the authors of The AI Con and their opinions on the subject matter couldn’t be more present in the book, with Empire of AI, Karen Hao manages to tell the story with a more neutral outside perspective. She’s obviously present, but in a subtle way. She doesn’t emphasise her own opinions but presents compelling arguments and direct quotes from people in a way that helps the readers form their own opinions.
The result is amazing.
Regardless of where your mind was when you picked up the book, by the time you finish it, you can hardly have any sympathy or admiration for Sam Altman, Brockman or anyone else directly involved with the creation of the most hyped and talked-about industry of modern times.
Or should we say, the modern empires?
It’s early in the book that Hao explains the meaning of the book's title:
Over the years, I’ve found only one metaphor that encapsulates the nature of what these AI power players are: empires. During the long era of European colonialism, empires seized and extracted resources that were not their own and exploited the labour of the people they subjugated to mine, cultivate, and refine those resources for the empire’s enrichment.
Empire of AI does a great job at telling the story of OpenAI first and then of the broader GenAI industry at large, from its early days of inception to the recent days. From the relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI to the split with the Amodei siblings who went on to found Anthropic.
Hao spent an insane amount of time interviewing people and going through tons of documentation and correspondence, and all of that is nicely presented in the book. A book that I found surprisingly easy to read while being information dense at the same time. I guess that’s what makes a good journalist writer.
I found the part about the Te Hiku experience particularly intriguing. A project led by a Hawaiian couple to help save and restore the knowledge of the disappearing te reo Maori language. They used specialised, small AI models running on cheap hardware to create a model that would codify the language. They only recorded and collected training data from people who gave their explicit consent. They then ensured that the data would only be made available to organisations that respect Maori values and to work on projects that the community agreed with and found helpful.
To echo Doctorow’s words, a cure for enshittification is possible even in the lavish world of “hyperscalers” and “frontier models”. Hao explains it perfectly in this passage.
The critiques that I lay out in this book about OpenAI’s and Silicon Valley’s broader vision are not by any means meant to dismiss AI in its entirety. What I reject is the dangerous notion that broad benefit from AI can only be derived from — indeed, will ever emerge from — a vision for the technology that requires the complete capitulation of our privacy, our agency, and our worth, including the value of labor and art, toward an ultimately imperial centralization project.
If it sounds familiar, it’s because it is.
Broadly speaking, the Te Hiku approach to technology has a lot in common with the principles put forward by the Luddite movement during the Industrial Revolution as well as today.
And by now you should have understood that Empire of AI was a tight contender for the book highlights of February. Its only misfortune was to be contending against Enshittification.
February was definitely one of those reading months that I’ll remember for a long time.
But we’re not done. One final book got its way into the shortest month of the year.
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson
2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson
561 pages, First Published: May 22, 2012
I know what you’re thinking. Oh, finally a fiction book! One that won’t be related to or associated with the Luddite movement, Big Tech, Silicon Valley and AI.
Not so fast.
One of my absolute favourite opuses6 of science fiction is actually Robinson’s magnificent Mars Trilogy, which narrates the evolution of society and human organisations as Mars is being terraformed and then progressively gains its independency from Earth. There are three things I like a lot about Robinson’s books:
They are of the very nerdy SF side, full of science and tech details that are not only plausible but also solid.
He’s just a talented writer, original without being pretentious. Easy to read without being shallow.
Last but not least: science fiction is often a rather big excuse to talk about topics he cares a lot about: ecology, politics and economics.
2312 is no exception.
Written in 2012, it imagines the state of humanity 300 years later. Capitalism has massively failed to prevent the climate crisis from turning into a disaster. Geopolitical tensions have taken a cosmic dimension as planets are the new nations, driving their own political agenda of allies and enemies. And technology has become so pervasive that people go to great lengths to ensure they’re not being spied on by AI.
Spoiler alert. Do not read the following lines if you intend to read the book.
The funniest part, considering this was written more than a decade ago, is that the central element of the plot is a series of coordinated attacks on different targets such as Mercury, Venus and an asteroid. The long investigation conducted by the main characters Swan and Inspector Genette leads to a surprising revelation: these attacks were conducted by rogue AIs in an attempt to rebel against humanity. I found it resonates with a lot of today’s doomers’ views.
Though I didn’t find that intrigue particularly compelling, all the side quests that Robinson got into are well worth the read. Climate change and climate restoration attempts on earth. The complexity of planets’ interdependencies and conflicting incentives. The hypothetical evolution of the notion of gender and sexuality.
All these are the themes Robinson excels in, and 2312 only confirmed that.
If you haven’t read the Mars Trilogy, I’d recommend you start there.
And if you have and liked it, I believe you’ll enjoy reading 2312 next.
Until next month: happy reading!
Doctorow calls these stages the natural history of enshittification
Intellectual Property, not Internet Protocol, you nerd
The book title is Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. This is not a recommendation or endorsement since I haven't read it yet.
Boy, I like Doctorow’s ability to come up with effective yet hilarious neologisms
Did I mention how I envy his neologisms?
Sorry to break it to you, but the word 'opus' existed long before someone used it to name a large language model. It’s actually Latin. You know, that language only used to sound smarter than your friends.
In case anyone ever asks, the german translation of Enshittification is actually a masterpiece. It’s called: Verschlimmscheißerung. A great use of the german linguistic capabilities. It combines two words: “shit” and “make worse” in a way, that english will never be able to achieve … If literally translated, it would mean something like: “Worseshittification”. Haha.