XI. Underground Empire by @henryfarrell and #AbrahamNewman

Two political scientists tell the story of how global networks were built through accidents of history, mostly by American corporations and/or the American state. The web was built by accident, but the spider at its center was always the USA. At various junctures since the Cold War, American presidents, spies and military leaders have noticed this web and tugged it. A tariff here, a sanction there, then an embargo.

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The NSA turns the internet into a surveillance grid and a weapon of war. The SWIFT system is turned into a way to project American political goals around the world – first by blocking transactions for things the US government disfavors, then to cut off access for people who do business with people who do things that the US wants stopped.

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Political science, done right, has the power to reframe your whole understanding of events around you. Farrell and Newman set out a compelling thesis, defend it well, and tell a fascinating tale.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

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XII. How Infrastructure Works by @debcha

A hopeful, lyrical – even beautiful – hymn to the systems of mutual aid we embed in our material world, from sewers to roads to the power grid. It's a book that will make you see the world in a different way – forever. It's a bold engineering vision, fusing Chachra's material science background, her work as an educator, her activism as an anti-colonialist feminist. The way she lays it out is just…breathtaking.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

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GRAPHIC NOVELS

I. Shubiek Lubiek by #DeenaMohamed

An intricate alternate history in which wishes are real, and must be refined from a kind of raw wish-stuff that has to be dug out of the earth. Naturally, this has been an important element of geopolitics and colonization, especially since the wish-stuff is concentrated in the global south, particularly Egypt, the setting for our tale.

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II. Ducks by #KateBeaton

In 2005, Beaton was a newly minted art-school grad facing a crushing load of student debt, a debt she would never be able to manage in the crumbling, post-boom economy of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Like so many Maritimers, she left the home that meant everything for her to travel to Alberta, where the tar sands oil boom promised unmatched riches for anyone willing to take them.

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Beaton's memoir describes the following four years, as she works her way into a series of oil industry jobs in isolated company towns where men outnumber women 50:1 and where whole communities marinate in a literally toxic brew of carcinogens, misogyny, economic desperation and environmental degradation. The story that follows is – naturally – wrenching, but it is also subtle and ambivalent.

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Beaton finds camaraderie with – and empathy for – the people she works alongside, even amidst unimaginable, grinding workplace harassment that manifests in both obvious and glancing ways.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/14/hark-an-oilpatch/#kate-beaton

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III. Justice Warriors by #MattBors

Justice Warriors is what you'd get if you put Judge Dredd in a blender with Transmetropolitan and set it to chunky. The setup: the elites of a wasted, tormented world have retreated into Bubble City, beneath a hermetically sealed zone.

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Within Bubble City, all is run on the priorities of the descendants of the most internet-poisoned freaks of the internet, click- and clout-chasing mushminds full of corporate-washed platitudes about self-care, diversity and equity, wrapped in come-ons for sugary drinks and dropshipper crapola. It's a cop buddy-story dreamed up by Very Online, very angry creators who live in a present-day world where reality is consistently stupider than satire.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/22/libras-assemble/#the-uz

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