Join authors Joanne McNeil and Sarah Jaffe for a conversation about the rise of big tech and how COVID-19 will shape the future of the internet.  Los Angeles indie bookstore Skylight Books is the official bookseller for this event.

Joanne McNeil is the author of Lurking: How a Person Became a User, a wide-ranging personal history of the internet from -- for the first time -- the point of view of the user. McNeil identifies the primary (if sometimes contradictory) concerns of people online: searching, safety, privacy, identity, community, anonymity, and visibility. Long one of the most incisive and widely respected cultural critics online, McNeil establishes in Lurking a singular vision of who we are now, tells the stories of how we became us, and helps us start to figure out what we do now.

McNeil was the inaugural winner of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation’s Arts Writing Award for an emerging writer. She has been a resident at Eyebeam, a Logan Nonfiction Program fellow, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation. Lurking is her first book.

Sarah Jaffe is a Type Media Center fellow and an independent journalist covering labor, economic justice, social movements, politics, gender, and pop culture. Jaffe is the author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt and the forthcoming Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and many others. She is the co-host, with Michelle Chen, of Dissent magazine’s Belabored podcast, as well as a columnist at the New Republic and New Labor Forum.  She lives in Philadelphia.

Order your copies of Lurking and Necessary Trouble from Skylight Books. And pre-order Work Won't Love You Back here.

In Conversation: Sarah Jaffe & Joanne McNeil