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Misha (on Bookwyrm)

misha@bookrastinating.com

Joined 3 years, 2 months ago

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Misha (on Bookwyrm)'s books

Currently Reading (View all 7)

Naomi Klein: Doppelganger (2023, Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who …

This is what happens when we allow so many of our previously private actions to be enclosed by corporate tech platforms whose founders said they were about connecting us but were always about extracting from us. The process of enclosure, of carrying out our activities within these private platforms, changes us, including how we relate to one another and the underlying purpose of those relations. This goes back to early forms of enclosure, beginning in the Middle Ages. When common lands in England were transformed into privately held commodities surrounded by hedges and fences, the land became something else: its role was no longer to benefit the community—with shared access to communal grazing, food, and firewood—but to increase crop yields and therefore profits for individual landowners. Once physically and legally enclosed, the soil began to be treated as a machine, whose role was to be as productive as possible.

So, too, with our online activities, where our relationships and conversations are our modern-day yields, designed to harvest ever more data. As with corn and soy grown in great monocrops, quality and individuality are sacrificed in favor of standardization and homogenization,even when homogenization takes the form of individuals all competing to stand out as quirky and utterly unique.

Doppelganger by 

George Orwell: Burmese Days (1973, Victor Gollancz)

Burmese Days is the first novel by English writer George Orwell, published in 1934. Set …

Some vile racist language. The ugliness of (British) colonialism. The pettiness of it. How it (sometimes) didn't just destroy the colonized, but also the colonizer.

Alvaro Tirado Mejía: El estado y la política en el siglo XIX (Spanish language, 1981, El Ancora Editores) No rating

La oligarquía temía las revoluciones y las guerras, más que por los daños materiales o por las muertes producidas, por la movilidad social resultante, que la aterraba. En el prólogo a sus Apuntaciones criticas, don Rufino José Cuervo se dolía de los "levantamientos revolucionarios" que producían "el roce con la gente zafia" y traían como deplorable consecuencia que esta pudiera "aplebeyar el lenguaje generalizando giros antigramaticales y términos bajos".

El estado y la política en el siglo XIX by  (Page 67)

Robin Wall Kimmerer: Braiding Sweetgrass (2020, Penguin Books, Limited)

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with …

We have enjoyed the feast generously laid out for us by Mother Earth, but now the plates are empty and the dining room is a mess. It’s time we started doing the dishes in Mother Earth’s kitchen. Doing dishes has gotten a bad rap, but everyone who migrates to the kitchen after a meal knows that that’s where the laughter happens, the good conversations, the friendships. Doing dishes, like doing restoration, forms relationships.

Braiding Sweetgrass by  (83%)