- Listened: The Art and Science of Communism, Part 1 (ft. Nick Chavez, Phil Neel)
- More good stuff.
- Description of working in some distribution warehouse was pretty wild.
- They dislike The Ministry for the Future.
- Read: Mute Compulsion
- After recommendation in Forest and Factory, and Jathan Sadowski raving about it.
- In addition to coercion (violence) and consent (ideology), there is the mute compulsion of economic power.
- Listened: TMK BC5: Mute Compulsion, Introduction
- Very handy chat about Mute Compulsion.
- Social reproduction
- Read: Forest and Factory
- Finished it.
- Good stuff. Provocative.
- The suggestion to focus on hard science fiction for our utopias seems a good one.
- Though I don’t know if their piece really does that.
- They just combine a focus on production with handwaving, rather than reproduction with handwaving.
- Their salient point is really that we’ve stopped thinking about production, which I think is a good one.
- Also lots of nuggets of wisdom in the footnotes to be mined
- Listened: The Art and Science of Communism, Part 1 (ft. Nick Chavez, Phil Neel)
- Great discussion. Based around Forest and Factory. Loads of good stuff.
- Their insistence on starting from present conditions and working towards for me thinking about complex systems and chaos theory, sensitive dependence on initial conditions in particular. Is it logical to try and completely map the present to then try and cause the future? Maybe.
- Maybe an alternative is the utopian way of doing it. Think of elements of your desired future as attractors of sorts, then focus on how your can leverage the path of history towards those. Maybe that’s a combination of both. It obviously can’t hurt to know the present conditions, but to then assume you can trace a clear path from now to the future seems wrong.
- Yeah I think you need both. A clear understanding of present conditions. A clear idea of how you want society to function – your attractors. And then you nudge it from A to B, making use of shocks, leverage points, etc.
- They make the point that a lot of utopias focus on reproduction rather than production. (Superstructure rather than base?).
- Read: Talking to My Daughter About the Economy
- Finished it. Enjoyed it. Would recommend.
- Need to go back and note it up a bit.
- Read: Theories of International Politics and Zombies
- “How international relations theory can be applied to a zombie invasion”
- Fun.
- I remember some of Robert Biel‘s articles saying how international relations was a field that applied systems theory to politics, so was looking for something that is a bit of an easy primer – this seems like it!
- Shower thought.
- I want to make sure that I document at least the top two or three salient claims from every book and article that I read.
- Otherwise it seems like wasted effort.
- I’ll tag book files such that I can run a query that pulls out those that I’ve read but have no associated claims.
- To do so will be a positive act of knowledge commoning.
- Read: Talking to My Daughter About the Economy
- Nearly finished it now.
- Very good all in all. Very readable intro to some economics concepts, in particular through a critical lens of capitalism.
- Very easy to read. (As such not the most rigourous analysis, but thats fine)
- Interesting to note he uses ‘experiential’ value rather than use value.
- His brief suggestion of a solution to capitalism is that we need more democracy rather than more markets.
- In ownership of the means of production and in control over how we treat the environment
- Read: Forest and Factory
- Deep dive into the logistics of production of motors.
- Interesting, but still not convinced that this constitutes a scientific account of transition, in the language of their own critique.
- How repairable is a Vision Pro?
- “…you’ve more chance of walking to Venus than getting the Apple Vision Pro repaired if you damage it.” – Why Vision Pro is a repair nightmare | TechFinitive
- I’d like to add a ‘New connections‘ page to my garden.
- Flancian told me about Orgzly Revived.
- This is very good news to me.
- Volunteered at Ulverston Repair Cafe for the first time in a few months.
- Read: Forest and Factory
- So far: very interesting.
- But unnecessarily disdainful in tone to some of the other projects that it is critiquing. We’re all on the same side here!
- And, so far, while very interesting, the vision for the future they outline is just as lacking in scientific rigour as any of the projects that they are critiquing.
- Going to assume that the science bit is going to come later.
- Unflinching mentions of carbon capture and storage / direct air capture is a bit of a red flag.
- Read: Forest and Factory
- Subtitle: The Science and the Fiction of Communism.
- Heard about it from the This Machine Kills podcast.
- Very interesting. A modern day update on the topic of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.
- Critiques a bunch of things I’ve read recently as utopian, in the sense of lacking any practical route from the here and now to there.
- Fair comment – though I’ve appreciated them, I’ve thought similar.
- Not got to their own prescription for transformation yet.