The best books, films and TV about AI + tech in 2025

Greetings everyone -

The year is drawing to an end, and that means every other link you click is a Best of 2025 list. And you know what, that’s just fine; if you’re at all like me, you just keep on clicking. Give me more of the best stuff, show me what all the best stuff was, I can’t get enough of it. And I’ll tell you what, I’m even going to contribute to this benevolent plague of listmaking, because I haven’t yet seen what I want, and what dear readers of this newsletter might want: A guide to the media that critically examined the role of technology in politics, culture, and society.

Speaking of those readers: Permit me to embrace the season of sentimentality and get real with you all for a minute here before we get onto the lists. I want to say thank you for reading, discussing, and supporting this work through what was a particularly dark year. When I went all in on this thing back in February, I really had no idea whether it could become a monetarily viable long-term undertaking aka a job. As I recently discussed at (much) greater length, you’ve all shown me it can be. I still have a lot of work to do and goals to meet. But I count myself as beyond fortunate to be able to do this work, on my terms: to try make sense of the world of AI and its impact on the working class, to document the rise of the tech oligarchy, and to write long-winded reviews of Frankenstein.

There are now 33,000 beautiful machine breaking subscribers here, many more than I would have predicted this time last year. Cheers to you all, with an extra emphatic thanks to those of you who support this work with your hard-earned cash—it’s you who quite actually make all of this materially possible, and I would not have been able to do any of this without you. There would be no AI Killed My Job stories, no investigations into LA’s torched Waymos of LA, no dispatches from the frontlines of the Luddite renaissance. Thanks again everyone.

I’m going to take a couple weeks off for the holidays here, though hopefully this ~8 million word edition will help tide you over, and I’ve scheduled another special post or two to help fill the gap. ...