Reviews and Comments

Neal Stephenson's (@nealstephenson) #TerminationShock is just the fun romp through the psychology of future technologies and problems that we should expect. Stephenson's central question for the work seems to be: when consequences from human alteration of the atmosphere finally catch up with us, how will we deal with it?

Stephenson's answer to that question is interesting. He starts with invasive species (anti-aircraft feral hogs), discusses the wet bulb over 98.6F problem with earth suits, moves to persistent disease (COVID-23 and COVID-27), and addresses the elephant in the room: climate engineering.

Overall, while climate change is at the center if this piece of speculative fiction, the mood is just so absurdist and full of pulpy fun that every page and new idea is interwoven and compelling. If you have been caught in the doom-and-gloom contemporary discourse of climate-induced global collapse, Termination Shock helps you to see a future without reflexively shutting out horrible truths.

Termination Shock is what happens when climate engineering is no longer maintained and climate shifts even more rapidly. However, because an actual termination shock never occurs in the book, I must conclude that Stephenson's title refers the mental shock of the termination of the status quo as neoliberal structures fall and everything becomes weird.

Also, does anyone remember mention of the Zone of Actual Control in #KimStanleyRobinson's #MinistryoftheFuture?

If your first introduction to Satanism was at a metal show or through South Park, you may have made the conclusion that Satanism is a religion that people put on to be edgy or to provoke Christians. Speak of the Devil by Joseph P. Laycock (@joe_laycock) is an overview of the American Satanic movement starting with The Satanic Temple's (@satanic_temple_ | TST) challenge of a 10 Commandments statue on Oklahoma's state capital grounds.

Deftly weaving between different American Satanic traditions, Laycock explains the challenges that TST has made against creeping Christian theocracy in the United States and the benefits that Satanists gain from TST chapters.

At Awaken America, on November 11th, 2021, Michael Flynn said "If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God.”

It seems that Satanism is needed more than ever. Hail Satan.

[Note] Speak of the Devil is on sale from the TST store and is biased towards TST perspectives.

If you are American and listen to the same antiauthoritarian music that I do, you know that train hopping is a common theme. The romance of a gutter punk jumping a train to get a free ride to a new place is sung from Woody Guthrie to Pat the Bunny (Patrick Schneeweis). After reading The Beast by Óscar Martínez (@CronistaOscar), American train hopping shifts from the romance of Christopher McCandless into the harsh light of day where the romantic veneer peels away to illuminate the horrors within immigrants traveling to El Norte on La Bestia[A].

Óscar Martínez is a phenomenal journalist. To document the trips that immigrants take to the US border through Mexico, he made the trip many times while interviewing migrants, coyotes, police, priests, and members of the Los Zeta cartel. His literary journalism covers the horrors of rape, mutilation, kidnapping, exploitation, solidarity and hope on the migrant's trail.

Photography of migrants on La Bestia: www.theguardian.com/us-news/gallery/2017/dec/13/mexico-central-american-migrants-la-bestia-pictures

[A]en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Bestia

I have a book pairing to suggest if you are interested in anti-authoritarian action and horizontal organizations: A Country of Ghosts by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy) and The Democracy Project by David Graeber (@davidgraeber).

A Country of Ghosts, a novel by Margaret Killjoy, employs a journalist protagonist who is required to report back to the Borolian Empire about their recent attempted acquisition: Hron. Like many early European invaders of the American continent, Dimos Horacki finds himself taken from colonialist forces and experiences a better, more interesting and fulfilling life with people practicing direct democracy and horizontal consensus.

Killjoy's plot is full of beautiful fantasy and keeps you engaged and inspired from cover to cover.

A line that just keeps coming back to me from the novel is "freedom is a relationship between people, not an absolute and static state for an individual."

A fictional romp through Hron before diving into the Occupy Movement grounds Killjoy's philosophy into the direct democracy and consensus building that you can start doing around you right now.

Like all of Graeber's work, The Democracy Project is a somewhat disjointed collection of effective arguments. Much of it shows a potential facilitator how to start thinking about running a general assembly. Graeber suggests readers study Starhawk's guide to consensus facilitation: starhawk.org/short-consensus-summary/

A line that I just can stop thinking about is: "the system itself was undemocratic—having been reduced to a system of open institutionalized bribery, backed up by coercive force. We wanted to make that fact evident to everyone, in the United States and elsewhere."

Reading this back-to-back in any order is valuable and worth your time.

I must admit I have an obsession. I can't stop listening to Roman Mars' voice. I'm not proud of it, but I'm not sure what kind of 12-step-program exists for my problem.

While listening to the podcast (@99piorg) while doing dishes, I learned that Roman Mars (@romanmars) and Kurt Kohlstedt (@KurtKohlstedt) were taking their research into the design of cities and turning it into a field guide. I opted to listen to the book. When I started the first chapter, I was somehow surprised to hear that Mars was reading it: sweet sweet heroin. I was listening to the final chapters and the discussion of the methodology in creating the book in just a couple days. It was glorious.

On a very cursory level, The 99% Invisible City covers the 99% Invisible podcast episodes that relate to the design of the built environment in cities. However, the book organizes the podcast's wondering focus into chapters covering the large themes of city design. It is also clear that Mars and Kohlstedt took a great deal of time to update and broaden the information originally recorded on the podcast. Unlike most audiobooks, this one contains a score that adds that designed touch you'd expect.

I can't recommend that you partake in my addiction, but if you are already hooked on the 99%, you should really listen to the book.

One of the earliest recollections I have about thinking about ancient peoples was while playing Age of Empires (@AgeOfEmpires): as an omniscient god, I commanded villagers to build and farm until buildings of the army and university created scientific breakthroughs I could use to make better dudes to kill other civilizations.

Graeber (@DavidGraeber) and Wengrow (@DavidWengrow) show that the myth of prehistory doesn't really stray far from the gameplay of Age of Empires in #TheDawnOfEverything: after humanity fell from the "eden" of egalitarian hunters and gathers, agriculture required individuals to give up autonomy to brutal rulers to avoid returning the Hobbesian horrors of an "eden" that is both paradise and hell. According to the myth, the continued progress of humanity requires the social contract because humans are incapable of organizing without the threat of violence.

In the Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow demolish the myths of prehistory with modern scholarship on the people of prehistory and their inclusion in recent works of anthropology like Harari's (@harari_yuval) Sapiens.

In the place of prehistoric myth, Graeber and Wengrow provide evidence of "bold social experiments representing a carnival parade of political forms" including seasonal monarchy and despots, ceremonial kings, civilizations taking up and abandoning agriculture, and the egalitarian and complex structures of Nebelivka and the Huron.

If you haven't visited "precivilizational", "prehistorial", or early human history since high school, Age of Empires, or Sapiens, Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything should help you demolish ideas now unsupported by archaeology and research so you can imagine and work toward a more liberated future.

If you are looking at what is wrong with the world from the left, you'll hear #Neoliberalism thrown around a lot. David Harvey's (@profdavidharvey) Brief History of Neoliberalism helped me to understand the ideology that is as ubiquitous as water to a fish in the west.

Harvey lays out the roots and modern iterations of Neoliberalism, the practical impact of the ideology, the shift to Neoconservatism, and the cracks in the ideology that could be exploited.

If the neoliberal definitions for freedom continue to define our conceptions of freedom, those ‘whose income, leisure and security need no enhancing' will continue to control resources.

Definitions:

"Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices" (Harvey 2).

"The neoconservatives therefore emphasize militarization as an antidote to the chaos of individual interests. For this reason, they are far more likely to highlight threats, real or imagined, both at home and abroad, to the integrity and stability of the nation. In the US this entails triggering what Hofstadter refers to as ‘the paranoid style of American politics’ in which the nation
is depicted as besieged and threatened by enemies from within and without" (Harvey 82).

PDF: www.proglocode.unam.mx/sites/proglocode.unam.mx/files/ABriefHistoryNeoliberalism.pdf

If you were paying attention to the missing toilet paper last year and supply chain problems today, you might have thought "what if I can't get my food at the store?" or "what do I do when food prices spike?"

If we are in @iwriteok's (@HappenHerePod) crumbles or u/koryjon's (@collapsepod) collapse, learning about and experimenting with a less complex lifestyle is important. As a strictly grocery store fed human, I needed take a peek at what it was like through urban homesteading and farming.

Novella Carpenter's (@novellacarpentr) Oaklandian #FarmCity is a perfect memoir to understand what a less complex lifestyle might be like while you are planning to grow your first vegetables. Carpenter's prose is beautiful. The story is paced well. Her attention to detail and research was enlightening. I couldn't put it down.

Farm City is just littered with interesting follow up books:

How to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K. Fisher
The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition by William J. Rorabaugh
Stalking the Wild Asparagus by Euell Gibbons
The Primal Feast: Food, Sex, Foraging, and Love by Susan Allport
Alternative Urban Futures by Raquel Pinderhughes

Farm City is worth your time.

I read three books to understand what I thought was significant about Doctorow's philosophical arguments in Walkaway: Walkaway, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and Debt: the first 5000 years by Graeber.

I haven't looked into economics much since my AP econ. class in High school. I must say, I don't like the discipline much. However, I do understand its power to shape the world.

As far as I can tell, Graeber makes these points in Debt: the First 5000 Years

1) The barter economy used to justify the existence of money and by extension, capitalism, never existed. This mythic barter economy is the origin story of economics.

2) Credit economies are far more common in history. These credit economies were sometimes used as a kind of mutual aid in communities.

3) Much of the time, currency was summoned into existence by monarchs to fund wars. This forced the lower classes to sell their goods for the currency on threat of violence.

4) Money is three things at the same time: a token of value, a reciept for debt, and a measure of value.

5) The combination of honor economies and money lead the the monetization of women that lead to the power of the patriarchy. Also, slavery was not wide spread until human economies and monetary economies collided.

6) Honor is the ability to tear other people away from their contexts.

7) The ideas of greed and charity are complementary. Those who realize this practice mutual aid.

8) Impersonal, commercial markets turn love into debt and violence into valuable widgets torn from their contexts.

Walkaway appeals to me because it is finally an imagining outside of the system of capitalist violence toward mutual aid. Finally, a story that doesn't assume that love becomes debt and violence becomes wealth.

PDF: warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/special/statesofdamage/syllabus201516/graeber-debt_the_first_5000_years.pdf

You decided to build a raised bed to grow some tomatoes this season. As you collect your supplies and start cutting the wood you use a pencil to mark your cuts. You take a closer look at that pencil. What if you wanted to build the pencil instead of the garden bed? Could you?

Not easily. Where would you mine the graphite? Cut the lumber? Harvest the rubber? You likely specialized in field that would help you pay for rent and groceries. You probably only have deep knowledge in that field. If that job disappeared, you would find it difficult to recreate the knowledge required for crop rotation, metallurgy, processing grains, or making a printing press.

In #TheKnowledge, @lewis_dartnell explains how a civilization that collapsed could regain complexity. Reading through his simplified explanations of the processes our complex, precarious world is built on is worth your time.

Interesting Stuff in The Knowledge:

Gingery Lathe: gingerybookstore.com/MetalWorkingShopFromScrap.html

Baby incubator from car parts: blogs.scientificamerican.com/news-blog/babys-hot-wheels-an-incubator-made-2008-12-16/

Global Village Construction Set: wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Construction_Set