Reviews and Comments

That book irritated me and I could not wait to be done with it. It's mercifully short. The premise is that we all believe in some conspiracy theories and most are believed by few people (according to opinion polls) so what's the big deal. We all need to calm down. After all, Trump accused Hillary of a lot of conspiratorial stuff but she did too. And a lot of Democrats believed that Trump conspired with Putin to win the 2016 election and it was totally a conspiracy theory and Bill Barr and Matt Taibbi showed it was nonsense. I mean, wtf. I don't have to explain how using opinion polls showing only 5% of respondents believing in Q shows it's nothing is misguided. What the authors completely miss is structural power. Not all conspiracy theories are created equal. There is no Democratic equivalent of Q and while there might be some conspiracy theories on the left, they have nowhere near the level of influence that conspiracy theorists have on the right, nor the media structure to amplify those conspiracy theories, not the actual elected officials to propagate them. I have read much better work on this from either other scholars (Meme Wars by Joan Donovan and others) or journalists who have done this work for a long time (David Neiwert), or even Cultish on the type of thinking that is pervasive in cult-like environments. Don't waste your time with this book.

The book explores the minds of the libertarian movement that have tried to crack up the nation-states in the name of capitalism without democracy and without national / legal oversight. The book starts with an exploration of Uncle Miltie's fondness for pre-reunification Hong Kong as well as the case of Singapore. As an aside, the book shows three generations of Friedmans, all with the same unoriginal ideas. More generally then, the book is about zones, export processing zones, economic development zones, free trade zones, all these areas carved out of national territories, exempt from regulations, labor laws, and (heaven forbid) taxation. This is the dream of libertarians: to crack up the nation-states, and create thousands of zones, governed by libertarian principles. It's entirely coincidental (snark) that these libertarian thinkers almost always end up bedfellows with white supremacists (see the case of Ciskei as "voluntary segregation"). For them, racial separatism and segregation is ok as long as it "chosen" from the bottom up, rather than imposed. Out of this type of thinking also came the idea of seasteading, entities existing in international waters, therefore either not subject to any national laws, or choosing which ones to navigate to. In all the cases presented in the book, the common thread is a disdain for democracy and popular governance, and a solid dose of old-fashioned social darwinism, with the libertarians seeing themselves as superior beings, able to win against the Westphalian order, by sheer force of how much better the zones are, compared to messy democracy. In the end, all the different projects that have been tried, have largely been failures, but that never stops these self-proclaimed geniuses from moving on from one failure to the next, while claiming to go galt. And there is always seems to be deep-pocketed funders for these projects (the Koch brother are mentioned multiple times). The book is rich in examples of attempts at creating these libertarian paradises, from, again, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the docks of London, all the way to Dubai, Honduras, and, of course, the metaverse. In meatware or virtual reality, the wealthy can't wait to get away from the rest of us, and certainly away from any idea of the common good. And yet, as the book notes, "From Honduras to Dubai, the waged service class is the easiest for the visionaries to forget and the hardest for them to live without. (...) The cloud floats because the underclass holds it up." (222). Never mind the environmental toll of maintaining a "cloud country", funded through, of course, cryptocurrency. It is totally dystopian, of course, but there are some powerful backers behind this movement, like Peter Thiel. We should pay attention.

This book is based on Karen Levy's research on the integration of electronic logging devices (ELDs) in trucks, supposedly to ensure better compliance with work hours rules and other regulations. Levy shows the actual impact of the devices (used mostly by large trucking companies initially, since then made mandatory by federal transportation authorities). This is where #sociology of #labor meets the #surveillance society. Levy explores the truckers' culture and ethos, based on rugged individualist values and not a small dose of machismo and how this culture conflates with increased surveillance, leading to various forms of deviance and ways to "hack" electronic surveillance. All the while, Levy explores the underlying structure of the trucking industry, its winners and losers, where exploitation is located and how the ELDs are positioned within the web of power relationships within this industry. This may all seem complicated (it is!) but Levy's writing is relatively jargon-free and clear. This a is a book that is perfectly appropriate for undergraduates. I should note that there is a really good methodological appendix at the end.

Trust the Plan, by Daily Beast's Will Sommer, covers some of the same territory Van Badham's QAnon and On does, but because the former is more recent, it almost picks up where Badham leaves off. Sommer goes through some of the history of QAnon, starting all the way back to 4Chan and Gamergate, all the way to now. Some of this is already well known, and there is a certain amount of fatalism in Sommer's view that our current system cannot deal with QAnon, now that it's been welcome into the GOP. At the same time, Sommer's book clearly shows that QAnon is dangerous. The only quibble I'll have with the book is the repetition of the false frame of "America's political polarization". We're not polarized: one party decided to embrace a conspiracy theory and make it its core ideology, on a path to fascism via local and state-level authoritarianism. Sommer sees no solution to this as he seems to think it's already too late.