Before every app started pretending it cared about your wellbeing, Christian Rudder was already doing something much more interesting; using vast pools of online behaviour to show what people are actually like when nobody is performing for the room.

Coming out of the OkCupid world, Dataclysm sits in that very specific early-2010s moment when the internet still felt chaotic, revealing, vaguely sinister, yet totally honest.

Rudder writes about desire, race, beauty, sex, self-presentation, and the gap between what people say and what they do, with a tone that is more curious than sanctimonious. Part pop social science, part internet artifact, part accidental time capsule from the data-optimist era, this is one of those books that now reads both as argument and as evidence. The world it describes hasn’t vanished; it just got better at lying about itself.

Signed hardback edition. Crown, 2014. First published 2014. No dust jacket. Near fine condition.