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Recommended summer reading for faculty and staff during summer 2020 included White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo.[DiAngelo, Robin, and Alex Tatusian. White Fragility. Public Science, 2018.]

During the course of the term, the class reads shorter works dealing with the societal issues—some quite old—that have taken on substantial new dimensions with the rise of computing. For instance, for the last couple of centuries, countries have used control of the copying process to compensate creative work. Computers' ability to make error-free copies of information in huge volumes at nearly zero cost has upended this approach, leading to all kinds of legal and technical stopgaps. Two of the articles recommended to the class on this topic were Richard Stallman's "The GNU Manifesto"[Stallman, Richard. “The GNU Manifesto - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation.” [A GNU Head], https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html.] and Robert Boynton's "The Tyranny of Copyright".[Boynton, Robert S. “The Tyranny of Copyright?” The New York Times, The New York Times, 25 Jan. 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/the-tyranny-of-copyright.html.]

Other societal issues are discussed as well, although the exact list of issues changes somewhat from year to year. One article that has been assigned in the past is been Nolan Bushnell's article "Relationships between fun and the computer business",[Bushnell, Nolan. "Relationships between fun and the computer business: playing games can have serious consequences." Communications of the ACM, vol. 39, no. 8, Aug. 1996, pp. 31+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A18667823/AONE?u=anon~15158552&sid=googleScholar&xid=5338b58b. Accessed 18 Nov. 2021.] which sets out to discuss gamification and (possibly inadvertently) raises some fascinating questions about animal (and, by extension, human) identity. Another article used in the past is "When discrimination is baked into algorithms", by Lauren Kirchner,[citation needed] which considers the effects of computer programs that are based on (sometimes unconscious) discriminatory assumptions.