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LuisVilla

LuisVilla@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 years, 8 months ago

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Elizabeth L. Eisenstein: The printing press as an agent of change (1997, Cambridge University Press)

Review of 'The printing press as an agent of change' on 'Goodreads'

back to the 90s, in a good way

People in tech sometimes say we overestimate change in the short run and underestimate it in the long run. On page after page of this, I kept repeatedly thinking "oh, I've underestimated the impact of the internet on humanity" — because the book does an amazing job showing how much we underestimate the many impacts of the printing press.

(It's also long, and snarky, and yet maybe too short. I can't do it justice in this space.)

Gavin Mueller: Breaking Things at Work (2021, Verso Books)

"In the nineteenth century, English textile workers responded to the introduction of new technologies on …

Review of 'Breaking Things at Work' on 'Goodreads'

This book deserves a better review than I can give right now, but here goes nothing.

Suffice to say that while I was reading the book, I thought of a lot of people who I wanted to send copies to, because it touches on problems of human autonomy in a digitally mediated and increasingly digitally constrained age. In other words, it is relevant to pretty much all of us (including a lot of us who don’t think that automation and AI will come for them). It builds a compelling argument that (if nothing else) we should be thinking hard about why and how people actively break technology. I was less convinced by the book’s ultimate conclusion that we should be going substantially backwards in technology, for a variety of reasons—but those reasons deserve, and might even get, a whole essay. And that ultimately feels like quibbling—the core thrust of …

Review of 'Making the Mission' on 'Goodreads'

Continuity over a much longer time than is usually told

This is a rich and deep book on my neighborhood, drawing a nuanced and thoughtful line from the pro-commercial neighborhood activism of immediate post-earthquake Mission to the anti-commercial - but still very neighborhood - activism of today. Really helps contextualize why the place has such a rich sense of Neighborhood, and (not unrelated) gives context to anything you'll read in one of the neighborhood's three papers.

It is fairly readable as academic books go, but still very much an academic text (almost 1/2 citations, by page count) which is the only reason I can't wholeheartedly recommend it to all of my San Francisco friends.

John Lewis: March (2016)

Welcome to the stunning conclusion of the award-winning and best-selling MARCH trilogy. Congressman John Lewis, …

Review of 'March' on 'Goodreads'

Wish someone had assigned this in middle school.

Of course, this wasn’t written until I already had a law degree, but my point stands. Critical American history that we’re barely taught, concisely and movingly. Well worth a few weekend hours for any Gen X/Millenial who knows there was a civil rights movement but can’t say much past “MLK did some things”, which, lets be honest, is most of us.