📚 Forty books that comprise the Vague Tech Canon, per Patrick Collison:

• The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce
• Seeing Like a State†
• The Dream Machine
• The Sovereign Individual
• The Beginning of Infinity†
• Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman*
• Softwar
• Ashlee Vance’s Elon biography
• The Mythical Man-Month
• Mindstorms
• Masters of Doom
• Skunk Works
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• Thinking in Systems‡
• Superintelligence
• The Whole Earth Catalog
• Zero to One
• The Hard Thing about Hard Things
• Founders at Work
• Showstopper
• Dealers of Lightning
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb
• PG’s essays
• The Rise and Fall of American Growth
• The Big Score
• Finite and Infinite Games*
• A Pattern Language*
• The Selfish Gene*
• The Lean Startup
• Marginal Revolution (if it has to be a book, Stubborn Attachments)
• Revolution in the Valley
• Uncanny Valley
• LessWrong
• Slate Star Codex(/ACT)
• The PayPal Wars
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar
• The Diamond Age
• What the Dormouse Said
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance*
• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt†
• Titan (on Rockefeller)
• The Power Broker*
• Gödel, Escher, Bach

Linked are those I wrote about, starred are the ones I’ve read, daggered are the ones already on my pile and double-daggered are the ones that got on it thanks to this list. There is a single ‡ entry — the list had too much navel gazing for my taste. (ᔥTyler Cowen)