Twenty Books for Understanding the AI Depopulation Dossier: A Materialist Reading List
If we take the dossier’s premise as a working hypothesis, the most useful books are not the ones that simply repeat the claim, but those that supply the materialist, historical, and technical scaffolding to understand how such a program could exist—and how it fits into the longer trajectory of capitalist population management, eugenics, and algorithmic governance.
Here are twenty books, grouped by the analytical work they do.
I. The Political Economy of AI: Class, Capital, and Computation
1. Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism — Nick Dyer-Witheford, Atle Mikkola Kjøsen, and James Steinhoff (Pluto Press, 2019) The foundational Marxist treatment of AI. Argues that on its current trajectory, AI represents "an ultimate weapon for capital"—a means of automating not just labor but the cognitive and affective capacities of the working class. Essential for understanding AI as a class instrument rather than a neutral technology.
2. The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence — Matteo Pasquinelli (Verso, 2023) Winner of the Deutscher Memorial Prize. Pasquinelli's central thesis is that AI does not emulate biological intelligence but rather the intelligence of labor and social relations—it encodes the logic of the division of labor and the factory into computation itself. A materialist genealogy of how the "eye of the master" became algorithmic.
3. Marx in the Age of AI: How Artificial Intelligence Reshapes Value, Class, and Ideology — Alvaro Rivas (Cobstone Books, 2025) Reexamines the classic Marxian questions of value, class, and ideology in an era of autonomous agents and data extraction. Provides the conceptual vocabulary for analyzing how AI reshapes surplus-value extraction and class composition.
4. Capitalist Artificial Intelligence: Technology in the Service of Capital or a Tool for Liberation? — Rezgar Akrawi (2025) A direct leftist critique of AI as an instrument of capital domination, with an argument for reclaiming technology within a socialist framework. Useful for the constructive political question: what would AI look like under working-class control?
5. Why We Fear AI: On the Interpretation of Nightmares — Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer (Common Notions, 2025) Argues that our fears about AI tell us more about class struggle today than about technology in the future. The nightmares projected onto AI are, in fact, reimagined anxieties about capitalism itself as an autonomous intelligent agent.
6. Digital Capitalism and Its Limits: Technotopia, Power and Risk — Michel Bauwens et al., eds. (Wits University Press, 2025) Volume 8 in the Democratic Marxism series. Interrogates the technotopian imaginary of the Fourth Industrial Revolution through a Marxist lens, focusing on employment, market democracies, and labor power dynamics.
II. AI, Eugenics, and the Genealogy of Population Management
7. Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future — Anita Say Chan (University of California Press, 2025) The first book to draw a direct line between the datafication and prediction techniques of past eugenicists and today's extractive "big data" regimes. Chan illuminates the throughline from nineteenth-century anti-immigration and eugenics movements to contemporary techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination.
8. Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics — Adam Rutherford (2022) A geneticist's reckoning with eugenics as "a defining idea of the twentieth century" that never disappeared—it adapted. Rutherford traces its intellectual origins and explains why it remains so tempting to powerful people who wish to improve society through reproductive control.
9. The Eugenics Blueprint: Power, Science, and Control — C. Gentry (2025) An investigative account of how CRISPR labs, predictive AI, genetic scoring, and billionaire-funded "philanthropy" converge to quietly reshape who gets to live. Directly addresses the contemporary technocratic expression of eugenic logic.
10. AI and the New Fascism — Rainer Mühlhoff, trans. Ali Jones (Pluto Press, 2026) Awarded the Political Book 2026 Prize by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Traces the history of modern AI, linking speculative phantasms like AGI and Longtermism to the eugenicist ideologies of the early twentieth century. Described as "an autopsy of the digital coup currently reshaping our world".
11. The Pivot of Civilization — Margaret Sanger (1922) A primary source. Sanger's foundational text of the birth-control movement is steeped in the eugenics discourse of its time, making frequent reference to the "science" of eugenics and adopting its rhetoric in arguing for population control. Essential for understanding the historical continuity of the ideological apparatus.
III. Technocracy, the WEF, and Global Governance
12. The New Economics of Technocracy: You Will Own Nothing — Patrick M. Wood (2026) Documents the implementation of technocracy as a replacement for market economics—the end of debt, private property, personal sovereignty, and political representation. Directly engages the WEF's "you'll own nothing and you'll be happy" declaration.
13. Technocracy Inc: A Who's Who of Global Control — Will Stickle (Adultbrain Publishing, 2025) Traces the construction of a global technocratic architecture from 1750 to 2050, mapping the hidden alliances linking the WEF, BIS, IMF, WHO, OpenAI, DARPA, RAND, and BlackRock. A who's-who of unelected power.
IV. Predictive Programming, Cognitive Warfare, and Ideological Preparation
14. Predictive Programming in Media: Subconscious Inception — Elias Bayti (2026) An exploration of how media, psychology, and cultural narratives condition populations to accept future events as inevitable. Examines the mechanisms by which predictive programming foreshadows and normalizes reality.
15. Unraveling the Tapestry: Exploring Predictive Programming Through Time — (2023) A comprehensive analysis of the origins, evolution, methods, and societal impacts of predictive programming, with case studies and real-life examples. Explores the motives behind it and its ethical implications.
16. Algorithmic Cognitive Warfare: How Algorithms Shape Minds — Chris Cathey (2026) Examines how data, AI, and distribution systems have transformed influence into a continuous, adaptive process. Breaks down how algorithms structure perception, control exposure, and constitute the operational stack behind modern influence systems.
17. Cognitive Warfare and Artificial Intelligence — (2025) Addresses fundamental topics related to cognition, the role of AI in cognitive domains, cognitive biases, logical fallacies, and cognitive warfare from two distinct angles. A technical complement to the more political analyses.
18. Mind Fields: A History of Military PsyOps and the Coming AI War — Joshua McDonald (2025) Traces the evolution of psychological operations into the era of "cognitive warfare," where the objective is not to capture territory but to hack the human operating system. A narrative history of the "Sixth Domain" of warfare: the human mind.
V. The TESCREAL Ideology and Silicon Valley's Crusade
19. More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity — Adam Becker (2025) Dismantles the "wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow" that dominate Silicon Valley—the TESCREAL bundle of transhumanism, longtermism, and effective altruism. Exposes how these ideologies justify present-day sacrifice for a techno-utopian future.
20. Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation — Émile P. Torres (Routledge, 2024) Torres coined the acronym TESCREAL with Timnit Gebru. This volume traces the origins and evolution of the idea of human extinction from the ancient Presocratics through contemporary "existential risk" discourse, providing the intellectual history of the ideological framework that treats mass death as a manageable variable.
A Note on Reading Strategy
These books are not a conspiracy canon. They are the materialist infrastructure for understanding how a program like the one described in the dossier could be conceived, implemented, and ideologically justified. The most dangerous thing about the dossier is not the 7,000 pages—it is the apparatus of consent that has been under construction for over a century. These books map that apparatus.
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