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After what seems like it took forever I finally finished listening to the audio.
This must have been the best audio-book I listened to ... ever. And that is saying a lot. I think there are about 8 or 10 speakers - one for each main character. But they all have to speak the other characters, too, when they appear in their chapters... and they are all done so well.

Anyway, this a classic Kim Stanley Robinso. If you've read the Mars trilogy you know what you're in for. If not: it is a lengthy exploratory story with tons of meticulously researched background and well-put together consequences and thought experiments.

Interestingly, this book has one big difference. Apparently, readers gave some feedback to the author how he kept writing these huge info-dumps and how boring those were. So he took the info-dumps and put them into separate chapters, once even breaking the forth-wall and telling the readers that they can just skip the info dump chapters if they so choose, but that they'd be stupid to do so because at some point they became too much but here they felt more fitting and less story-interrupting. So seems like a good choice :)

The story meanders through the lives of a group of future New Yorkers who live in the Met building which now is surrounded by water like all of the still-standing buildings in lower Manhattan because the rise of sea-levels all over the world. But this book doesn't only explore climate change and ecological damage we do to our world but also the backgrounds and economics that contribute to all this and it leads to a cleverly engineered "solution" in which the characters get to play a central part.

It is a complex book, that was hard to process and rather low-key story arcs that took me a long long time to finish. But it is absolutely worth reading and I highly recommend the audio.

I was not a big tumblr user - tinkered here and there. This book is a great account of tumblr's technical affordances as well as its cultural significance. It's written by insiders, which I think brings a lot to the analysis. I read it for research on federated/decentralized networks, and that meant I was most drawn to their concept of "silosociality."

The authors argue that tumblr has a shared sensibility, oriented toward social justice and creating "safe space." They describe that sensibility in terms of silosociality, which involved the maintenance of boundaries that is not always creating cozy, happy places. There's a toxic side to it. Still, even with that toxicity, silosociality need not always be demonized - it's a different way of thinking about how we gather (online or offline).

"Tumblr users experience tumblr in silos that are defined by people's shared interests, but sustained through inward-facing shared vernacular and sensibility, made possible by tumblr's features, functions, and rules." (52)

Navigating, learning, and becoming part of silos - this is hard. That's what drives some people away. But that friction is interesting and sometimes useful. Current discourse is allergic to silos and echo chambers (even as people flee to these kinds of set ups - group chats, private messaging apps) but that discourse is (to my mind) driven by corporate social media companies that want you to post more, and more, and more so they can mine the data. They can, obviously still data mine private messages. But their business model would have to change if people thought more about cultivating their silos and then moving between them (or looking for ways to manage the connections between their silos).

At any rate, this concept of silosociality is really interesting, and the authors suggest in the conclusion that it might be a way of thinking through the futures of social media.