There’s a book reading club in the database internals discord, on this book! We’re up to chapter 8, but a motivated reader can still easily catch up: https://databass.dev/discord
Reminded me of Bartebly the Scrivener and “I would prefer not to”, but also Byul-Chun Han and “Burnout Society”. A very short summary of the latter is that in our day and age we exploit ourselves on behalf of people who would in previous decades exploit us. But of course the author explores both reasons and consequences of this phenomena.