A living library: books and texts that shaped how Dr Wip thinks — attended to as physical copies, with notes from the margins and the ideas they seeded.
Timothy Snyder · May 2026
Defines positive freedom as the value of values and identifies five forms of freedom: sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility, factuality and solidarity. Each enabling and enabled by the others, all of them necessary to sustain and expand freedom.
Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers
Instrumental in shaping my thinking during my PhD (2018–2022).
N. J. Enfield and Jack Sidnell
Intersubjectivity is actively produced through sequences of interaction: signs, grammar, artifacts, conventions and social position let people coordinate across differing experiences, while norms make action intelligible and accountable, and agency both constrains and opens possibilities within that structure. Tacit anticipation (“subprehension”) keeps interaction flowing, breakdowns in expectation prompt people to infer purposes and demand accounts, and the design challenge is building digital infrastructure that supports these processes without letting accountability and constraint become tyrannical.
Reetika Khera (ed.)
The impact and consequences of the Indian Government's Aadhaar biometric identification system, told through a series of essays from scholars and activists across the spectrum. A powerful example of how well-meaning technology can cause people to fall through the cracks.
Ludwik Fleck
Instrumental in shaping my thinking during my PhD (2018–2022).
Bruce Schneier
The impossibility of eliminating defectors, and the tyranny of systems that try. Outliers break rules and drive change. Social mechanisms for inducing trustworthy behaviour, and the scales at which they are effective. The goal is to keep behaviour within acceptable limits.
Helen Nissenbaum
Defined privacy as contextual integrity, the appropriate flows of information as determined against social norms of a context.
David Vincent
An eloquent and insightful presentation of the shifting dimensions of privacy from the 1600s to our present day. Privacy has always been desired, but never complete. Changing environments, social structures and technologies created new possibilities for privacy, but also intrusion and surveillance. As these leant, individual and social expectations of privacy adapted.
Gregory Bateson
A rich and dense compilation of the work of Gregory Bateson throughout his varied and interdisciplinary career, spanning anthropology, information, psychology and cybernetics.
Luciano Floridi
Depicts our current information age as the fourth revolution of humanity: the transition to a hyperhistorical society heavily reliant on third-order technologies that both act and act upon other technologies, creating information and action networks across time and space.
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Instrumental in shaping my thinking during my PhD (2018–2022).
Erving Goffman
A classic. Goffman analyses the different ways in which we construct and present ourselves within social interactions through the lens of actors in a play, and our mutual collaboration in maintaining these constructed masks.
Herbert A. Simon
A science studying the synthesis of artefacts, distinct from the natural world.
Niklas Luhmann
Analyses trust and power through the lens of complexity. Increased trust increases the complexity of experience and of the structured possibilities that can be perceived within it, giving greater action selection. Trust and distrust. Over fifty years old.