The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit

Turkle brought psychoanalytic method to computer culture in the early 1980s, interviewing children, hackers, hobbyists, and AI researchers about what they thought they were doing when they sat in front of a screen. The result is an ethnography of human-machine intimacy written before anyone had a reason to take the subject seriously. She found that computers functioned as "evocative objects" — things people used to think about thinking, identity, and control — and that different people projected radically different meanings onto the same technology. The book prefigured the entire contemporary debate about AI and subjectivity by four decades. It remains the sharpest account of what happens psychologically when people begin to treat machines as minds.