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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

The American people do not know the truth of slavery and have not finished reconciling the systemic inequity and racism American slavery causes. If you want to get closer to the truth of slavery through one man's explorations of historical sites, How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith (@ClintSmithIII) is worth your time.

Smith uses locations and beautiful prose to tell the story of American slavery, forced labor, and torture. Also, the audiobook is read by Smith.

Monticello (@TJMonticello)
Black men were dressed as slaves to give tours to people visiting the Monticello forced labor camp until 1951. Monticello has been trying to tell a more truthful story, but visitors reject it.

The Whitney Plantation (@WhitPlantation)
shows the contrast between a plantation reckoning with American myth and one that appropriately tells the story of American forced labor.

Angola (@angola_watchdog)
Smith then visits a forced labor camp (plantation) that is still a forced labor camp (prison) where slavery lives on. Smith's recounting of the execution chamber and Red Hat Cell Block are shocking.

Blanford Cemetery (https://www.petersburgva.gov/303/Blandford-Cemetery)
After visiting an active forced labor camp, Smith visits Blanford Cemetery, where Confederate traitors are still celebrated.


Galveston Juneteenth
In Galveston, Texas, Smith visits the root of Juneteenth (@J19Galveston) and explores the myth of Gen. Gordon Granger and General Order No. 3.

Wall Street (https://www.newyorkalmanack.com/2020/07/a-virtual-walking-tour-of-slavery-in-nyc/)
To help dispel the idea that slavery is a southern problem, Smith takes a walking tour of NYC's Wall Street and the many historic markers around America's second largest slave market.

Senegal House of Slaves (@MEsclaves)
To conclude the journey, Smith visits Senegal to explore the root of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

I just took a job teaching English to speakers of other languages as a bumbling mid-western American man who went to a school at night for two years. I don't really know what a refugee camp is. I don't know what it means to immigrate. I don't know what it means to live in the US as a non-native speaker or immigrant.

On my quest to become less ignorant, I read across Beyond the Sand and Sea by Ty McCormick (@TyMcCormick).

What started as a journalistic study of the Dadaab Somali Refugee Camp in Kenya for McCormick turned into a close relationship with young Asad Hussein (@asadhussein_).

Asad Hussein's resilience in the face of crushing bureaucracy, grift, and xenophobia while pursuing his education and supporting his family is astonishing.

The story of one determined survivor of Dadaab seems to be just pinprick of light in the darkness of my ignorance. If you know of other related books, I'd love to read them.