Reviews and Comments

I don't recommend this book. I read it for research purposes because it's written by Frank McCourt, a billionaire investing in a decentralized protocol called "Project Liberty." The book is invested in giving people "ownership" of their own data through decentralized structures and blockchain technology. The argument is built on the idea that a new internet should be built with the same ethos as the "American Project." It cites Paine's Common Sense throughout, and it has no real self-reflexive moments about what the "American Project" required (land theft and slavery). Their vision is an internet of individual rights in which you control your data and you have ownership of your data. The audience is likely libertarians who are ready for technosolutionism.

It's worth reading only if you want to see how billionaires want to fix the problem of a broken internet, even when those billionaires (and you have to give them a bit of credit for this at least) aren't necessarily trying to make more billions with that new internet (though, one should be skeptical).

This is a quick read and an interesting argument. Uber arrived in D.C. to some initial resistance, but that resistance quickly dissipated. The authors argue that the company was successfully able to shift the "common sense" of D.C. That shift was both in the sense of "plain wisdom" and everyday habits (taking an Uber and not a taxi or a train became the sensible, practical thing to do) and in the sense of a significant shift in the political terrain - Uber was able to shape what people expected from cities and government. Or, better, it was able to radical reduce those expectations, to convince everyone (politicians, citizens, everyone) that cities are bad at providing basic services and we should just "let Uber do it."

One interesting idea that emerges from the authors' analysis is that Uber succeeds in reducing complicated problems to a simple solution that doesn't actually address the problem, ostensibly solving that more minor/misleading problem, and then considering it all done and dusted. It's not surprising if you follow Silicon Valley discourse. Reduce a problem to one that a computer can solve (even if that computable solution doesn't actually solve the problem), write software, profit.

A solid analysis of the gig economy that goes beyond "mere" critique and gets at some of the bigger complexities. The strong parts of the book are where they interview drivers and find out about how drivers try to resist Uber or game the system. There's also really good stuff about how Uber's model prevents labor organizing by preventing spaces of gathering (spaces for workers to commiserate, organize, plan). A section on the D.C. Airport is especially interesting.

This book is a lot of things (poetry, prose, fiction, metafiction), and it is an honest and well-written account of parenting. I haven't experienced motherhood, but I have experienced parenthood and have been adjacent to motherhood. I feel like this book is unflinching and honest.

It also reflects on the difficulties and sometimes impossibilities of parenting and writing (one seems to always get in the way of the other). Perhaps this goes with any work, but it might feel more acute when it comes to writing?

There are tons of passages I'd love to quote, but here's one:

"It was not through housekeeping but through writing that she wished to approach all the objects of the world. Was writing in that case a form of housekeeping? A way of bringing things into order? When Adam names everything in the Garden of Eden, was he in fact doing the work of a housewife?" (67)

This book dares to ask whether we've moved beyond capital (and capitalism) into something else. It spends a good bit of time defending its approach. Those portions of the book seem to be mostly for Marxist theorists who are resistant to thinking about whether what we are now experience is capitalism with a new modifier (disaster-, etc.). But if you are just interested in the experiment that Wark is engaging in, there's plenty for you here.

She argues that the new class antagonism is between the hacker class (those tasked with creating new information) and the vectoralist class (those with the power to operationalize that information). There's a fundamental asymmetry, thus the antagonism. The hacker class receives "free" things (set up a social network) and exchanges information for those things. If the hacker class attempts to get the 10,000-foot view that the Vectoralists get, they will almost always fail.

This book is short and engaging and worth a read, especially if you're interesting in thinking beyond Fisher's Capitalist Realism.

This is a canonical book in sociology, but many of it's arguments have been refuted or called into question by later research. I'm still trying to figure out why it holds so much weight - perhaps because it makes big claims that match with our common sense. It "feels" right to say that large groups are hard or impossible to organize and small groups are easier to organize, which is (an overly simplified version of) what he argues.

The basic idea is that large groups attempting to organize collective action suffer from the "free loader" problem. People will benefit from some public good whether or not they join the collective effort to gain or keep that good, and if they operate in their own self interest (Olson argues that mostly will) they have no motivation to join up. He argues that smaller groups can be more effective in this regard because there are social costs to not contributing to the collective effort. For Olson, large organizations like labor unions can only survive with some kind of compulsory participation.

I read this as part of my research on federation, and he does say that federations offer a kind of middle way. Small union locals can organize on the ground while also benefiting from the resources of a national union.

Olson's blanket arguments about size have mostly been refuted, but I was interested in his framing of federations as a middle way, an argument I'm trying to make about federated social media. Federated networks can allow for small groups to organize while also allowing those groups to negotiate connections to other groups.

I was lucky to get an early look at this (it's out in April) for a review I'm writing. A number of interesting key ideas in the book, which aims to offer a broad account of "the secret life of data" without falling prey to the many "bullshit" accounts from the tech press industry. The authors succeed in this regard.

The secret life of data is premised on this idea:

“There is no limit to the amount and variety of data - and ultimately, knowledge - that may be produced from an object, event, or interaction, given enough time, distance, and computational power” (xii).

They also develop the idea of "algo-vision":

“The widespread and disorienting experience of seeing oneself through the ‘eyes’ of the algorithm” (xx)

Finally, they offer the notion of "triangulation" as an ethical approach to tech development

“A model for artificial intelligence and machine learning systems…based on a multiperspectival approach to knowledge creation as a more equitable and accurate alternative to the single-point perspectives presented by many platforms.” (xx)

My favorite part of the book is its argument that collective approaches will have to beat out individualized ones if we are to actually deal with how much data is out there and how many nefarious actors are champing at the bit to use it, aggregate it, make money from it, etc.

This book documents a horrific system set up to hold horror at bay...monsters to guard against the monstrous, a policing system that stands in the way of thinking and building a new world. It does so through an analysis of policing procedures, technologies, and narrative ("police stories.")

Why does such a horrific system/network remain in place? What does it hide and hold at bay, and what stops any process to imagine a world without police?

"What is hidden from view - or, rather, what provisions have we made to shelter our own minds from that which is too terrifying to confront?" (4)

"The ongoing and perpetual hunt for the monster - in the mind and on the streets - calls forth and reproduces the police power." (49)

"Rather than diagnosing a personal preference or even political ideology, the widespread unwillingness to soberly confront just what the police are and what we ask them to do is rooted in our subjective experiences of living in and actively crafting this world-for-us. Collectively, we have not yet let the police go, because to do so would require that we let this world go. And so, we endorse, adopt, and reproduce an ontology where a never-ending war between good and evil is determined by savior, hero, God." (71)

"Despite what we are taught to believe, we must face the horrifying fact that the police offer no real protection. Even when positioned to do so, police are under no legal obligation to save the proverbial cat from the tree. Quite often, in fact, they just turn and walk away...police have the best of both worlds, able to invoke the gift of fear to excuse both overreaction and inaction. This contradiction, revealing yet again that police are not the faithful protectors they claim to be, lies at the heart of our shuddering ontological schism, the horror of police." (163)