Jasmine Sun: Ender, Counterculture, Charisma, Sontag, If You Do Everything

Welcome to a new issue of Words That Matter! Each week, we invite a guest curator to share the reading that matters most to them.

Our curator today is Jasmine Sun (@jasminewsun). Jasmine is an independent writer who publishes a Substack newsletter on AI and Silicon Valley culture — a project she calls an "anthropology of disruption." She spends her time interviewing AI researchers, eavesdropping at parties, and chronicling how frontier tech percolates across cultures and disciplines. Her recent piece on the Chinese peptides trend in Silicon Valley was the cover story of the New York Times Sunday Business edition. She lives in sunny San Francisco.

Please enjoy these works and words that have mattered to Jasmine!

Jasmine’s Picks

Ender’s Game

Orson Scott Card | 1985

My intellectual coming-of-age begins with Ender’s Game, a book that I read once a year, every year, from ages 10 to 20. It’s about the way technology is magical & the way it creates moral distance, about how an idealistic kid can change the world yet still end up exploited by systems much larger than them.

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Young Money

Kevin Roose | 2014

Reading this book my freshman year of college (and meeting Kevin after) single-handedly persuaded me not to go into finance, and to consider a career in journalism instead. It also expanded my view of what journalism could be: not a detached view-from-nowhere, but getting to know an industry by immersing oneself in its social world.

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From Counterculture to Cyberculture

Fred Turner | 2006

I wish modern Silicon Valley spent more time learning its lineage. This is the history of how Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog bridged the hippies and the hackers, giving rise to a particular intellectual-philosophical worldview that informs many tech daydreams to this day. It is also secondarily a story about how information is the most important technology of all.

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The Charisma of Leaders

Mills Baker | 2013

What makes a compelling founder, president, or leader? By looking at the legacy of Steve Jobs, Mills argues that it’s not any special talent, but rather the “unity of conscience and will” — the “unreasonable man” who seems to live fully in accordance with himself, free from the pedestrian anxieties that plague us mere mortals.

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Sontag

Benjamin Moser | 2019

If Jobs is tech’s favorite unreasonable man, Susan Sontag is literature’s unreasonable woman par excellence. In this biography of Sontag as both woman and writer, Moser reveals that she was petty, cruel, aloof, and insecure; image-obsessed and bedeviled by her own relentless high standards. I read it and felt somehow far less alone.

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For Argument’s Sake

Becca Rothfeld | 2022

I collect debate essays: Sally Rooney’s, Ben Lerner’s, and this by Becca Rothfeld. They’re all fantastic, but in the end I chose this. It’s easy to list all the ways that competitive debate makes you worse, but Rothfeld’s answers the hard question: why people do it anyway. It was like the closest thing to intellectual meritocracy in an irrational world, and offered the poetic justice of “slashing at a stupid argument until it bled to death at my feet.”

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The Case for Software Criticism

Sheon Han | 2023

By this point I’d moved on from the intellectual sandbox of a debate round to writing for the real world. Here, Sheon makes the case for the practice of “software criticism”: applying the rigor and attention devoted to other fine art forms to software — giving us the precise, well-reasoned, and impassioned language to describe why some tech products feel good and others rot our brains. If words matter, can they even shape our tech?

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The Great A.I. Awakening

Gideon Lewis-Kraus | 2016

I discovered this piece too late—not until last year—but it is the pinnacle of what I think technology journalism can be. It is equal parts futuristic and funny, rigorous and dramatized. It is a superhero story—a tiny Google team’s triumph over vast linguistic barriers!—grounded in a messy real-world context of technical and organizational progress. I keep a printout on my desk to refer to when I write.

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Working

Robert A. Caro | 2019

The most motivating thing to read for any writer refining their craft. “If you do everything, you’ll win.”

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Spotlight on Jasmine’s Work

A few pieces of note from Jasmine’s archive:

• Chinese Peptides Are the Latest Biohacking Trend in the Tech World — Jasmine’s first feature for the New York Times, and it landed the cover of the Sunday Business edition. A deep look at how unregulated peptides sourced from China have become the latest obsession in tech’s wellness scene.

• America Against China Against America — A sprawling, personal essay that weaves her grandparents’ journey from Indonesia to Fudan University into a broader reckoning with Chinese hypermodernity and what it means for American tech ambition. It sparked podcast appearances on Sinica and elsewhere.

• My Claude Code Psychosis — A self-aware and very funny account of what happens when a self-described nontechnical writer discovers AI coding tools. Jasmine got so deep into building apps with Claude Code that she delayed writing the piece about it by a week.

You can subscribe to her Substack at jasmi.news.

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