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I read this because it informed Jenny Odell's wonderful talk how to do nothing.

I got a pretty distasteful primitivist, psuedosciency vibe from lots of it. But setting that aside I think there's still a lot of interesting stuff in here. Abram dives deep into the effects of language, especially phonetically written language, on how we abstract the world around us. To me the valuable thing is the act of investigating language and other tools for abstraction, as opposed to the specific analysis & evidence he gives for his points. Peripherally there's also lots of fun stuff about the reciprocity of perception and the conceptual barriers between the senses.

I can definitely see how this book can read as anti-progress, anti-abstraction, or anti-civilization. However if you take him at his word that it is not these things maybe you'll have a better time with the book. In my view he is arguing that we are living too much in our own constructed worlds, but that the way forward is not to reject abstraction but to learn to have it coexist with direct sensory perception.

If I were to read it again, or recommend someone else read it, I would say the beginning and end are quite good but the middle is eminently skimmable, filled with kind of cringey Noble Savage stuff. All the points he makes in the middle get summarized at the beginning and the end anyways.

Super super short. So there's a lot of places where Frase simplifies or skips things, not least in the framing of "there are Two Crises, automation and climate change, and I'm gonna analyze them along these two axes." But given the limitations/focus I think this book does a pretty good job of imagining and contrasting different societies we could be living in.

Some of the key assumptions that the book rests on:
- automation will dramatically reduce the need for human labor
- capitalism will end, in the sense that it will stop being the basis for a functional society
Which I find mostly compelling, though I'm not sure how much our automation trajectory will be affected by ecological collapse (which are two crises he treats as orthogonal).

There's also some pretty fun stuff that's basically like, "hey, realistically we are kind of far away from seizing the state & the means of production. So in the meantime we can build strength by 'building alternatives to capitalism' and help people exist without depending quite so much on wage labor." Which is a kind of hopeful message, I think. In addition to avoiding the trap of "all we need is revolution," he also avoids a few others:
- ending capitalism will end sexism & racism
- ending capitalism will end hierarchies in general
- automation will mean people work less

And one final note: the four futures he envisions aren't end-points but different states that we can transition between. One could imagine a "rentist" future, with abundance and hierarchy, sliding into an "exterminist" future which then eventually transitions into "communism" for the surviving elite. Room for hope...?

I'm between jobs right now so I figured I might as well read this. I came into it having heard that it was the book about how it's more important to be good at what you do than to like what you do.

I came into it with the following mindset:
- It makes sense that, to have a job that is good, you should yourself be good at doing stuff. So getting good at doing stuff should be your top priority!
- However, it seems important to believe in the mission of your work. Shouldn't this be your top priority, too?

So one big question for me was how to reconcile those two points. I think Cal Newport does it fairly nicely. The basic argument is that desirable job traits such as mission alignment and creative control are things you need to buy with "career capital" i.e. being good at something useful. I buy it. The rest of the book has a bunch of examples and tips, as well as various stories about people who've succeeded or failed. They flesh out the argument, but also are easily skimmable - part of the reason this is such a quick read :)

Another question I had while reading this book was: is this idea, that all you need to do to succeed is to build skills, appealing because it seems simple? As I read, my answer to this is two-fold:
- Yes, it is appealing because it seems simple. The alternative that I can think of, that introspection is the key, seems very difficult. Especially introspection from a relatively unskilled perspective.
- The idea put forth in the book is a little more nuanced than how I just framed the question; I think the point is that skill-building is the foundational work for all the other stuff you might want out of your working life.

Lastly, this book is full of advice on how to actually put the ideas in it into practice. I don't think the advice is easy to take, but it's there, for what it's worth.

This book is so goofy! On one hand, it's a short story collection with consistent characters and something close to resembling a plot that ties everything together. On the other, it's an entire book of unapologetic technobabble.

Billed as a book of fables, and as such the morals of the stories are pretty heavy-handed. But since we have a lot of them with the same two folks there's a surprising amount of character development, even if there's an infinitesimal amount in each individual story.

The technobabble is great. You can dip in and out of it as you read - if you're feeling like reading some clever nonsense it's fun, and if you're not, you can skim through it knowing that most of it is just for flavor anyways.

In many ways this reminds me of Labyrinths by Borges, but I liked this book and didn't like that one. I think the difference was this: when reading Labyrinths I felt like the author was so proud of how clever the ideas in his stories were, and the Cyberiad is mercilessly skewering cleverness at every turn.