Robin Berjon

2020 readings! This year in going to try to remember to 1) put most of my reading in this permathread, and 2) give a bit more detail about what I read than previously.

#1 "The Engineers and the Price System", by Thorstein Veblen. Mostly a rant (from 1921) about how industry is being mismanaged (he says "sabotaged") by people who run businesses to make money instead of being run by engineers who would do it optimally, because they know how.

(Note: this is one of those autoscanned editions, and is therefore full of typos and poorly typeset.) His thesis has problems, chief amongst which assuming that engineers are naturally good. I'm mostly interested because I want to understand modern technocracy.

One of the first interesting things to note: he sees the industrial world as having linked everything together. That's therefore a feeling that predates the Internet by decades.

He sees the world as becoming too complex for anyone other than "technological experts" to run, and business people are really making a hash of it. The captains of industry have become lieutenants of finance. 🔥🔥1473000173571-ENP9gw9WkAAQT8V.jpg" width="954" height="1024">1473000173571-ENP9gd7WwAAZYdh.jpg" width="1024" height="897">lME

He thinks technologists were getting class-conscious, a century ago! They are few, but they could organise! Oh and by the way business people really suck at running things. (He rambles a fair bit, though with nicely flowery language.) 1500430913536-ENP9iW-WsAArNL5.jpg" width="998" height="1024">1500430913536-ENP9iItXsAIQJeA.jpg" width="1024" height="397">

Sidebar: In 1921 ads were seen as a nuisance and any time soon people will do something to curtail them.

So where is this going? Well, a _Soviet of Technicians_, of course! This sounds funny but it's the reason I'm reading this: I believe we have reached a point at which we *do* have something similar to a Soviet of Technicians. (And it's not great.)

He thinks it's unlikely to happen because, geeks man, you give them free food and a ping-pong table and they won't even unionise. Yeah yeah, you know who you are.

But! On the off chance that it might happen, he concludes with details about how to organise this in a "MEMORANDUM ON A PRACTICABLE SOVIET OF TECHNICIANS". YMMV but IMHO totally worth reading a book just for that heading.

(I almost forgot: many thanks to @benharnett for recommending Veblen!)

#2 "Poorlier Drawn Lines", by @PDLComics. I find this whole book (in fact all three books) of wacky everyday bollixed up absurdity not just hilarious but also soothing.

I mean... This just makes everything better.

#3 "Incompleteness, Nonlocality, and Realism: A Prolegomenon to the Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics", by Michael Redhead. Does pretty much what it says on the tin, a good coursebook introducing the topic. Technical but I could muddle through with my hodgepodge of understanding.

#4 "Quantum Entanglement and Information", by Jeffrey Bub (SEP). plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-ent… A clear intro (Bub does clarity well) but I thought it fell short on providing deeper pointers across the field as the SEP normally does. All the meat is in the last short paragraph!

#5 "Quantum causal modelling", by Fabio Costa & Sally Shrapnel. Had me confused for a bit as I thought they were out to recover quantum formalism from a view of causality; instead they show how causal models work for quantum events. I need more digesting. arxiv.org/abs/1512.07106

#6 "Killing Commendatore", by Haruki Murakami. This is very Murakami, a continued exploration of his themes and style, and not at all a departure from what he's done before. A good specimen all the same.

I've been wondering why I enjoy Murakami. Slow, meandering fiction is usually really not my vibe. But I think his sense of the weirdness of the world is very close to mine.

Whenever I spend extended time alone, or wake up with a start in the dead of night, one of his supernatural characters, neither threatening nor safe, could be there and I wouldn't be surprised. Think it weird but still just strike up a conversation.

It's not a belief in the supernatural at all, more of an animate pareidolia that projects life and personality onto the world. I think it's tied to solitude, with the social brain spinning its wheels. I felt it strongly in childhood. I enjoy reading that feeling in Murakami.

#7 "Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy", by @sivavaid. A really good read! I won't do it justice over a few tweets but a few random thoughts spring to mind.

This is not a Facebook hate-fest. Siva is very clear on the value in using Facebook. Unlike many, he does not think that Zuck is hopelessly stupid. If anything however, his analysis is all the more damning for being balanced and sober.

It is not a major theme of the book but he has read @HNissenbaum and probes a few new avenues with notions of (loss of) contextual integrity that go outside the realm of just privacy. I think there is something to that line of thinking. (I'm trying to look at agency that way.)

The line Siva draws between Bentham's felicific calculus and engagement-optimising machine learning hit me like a ton of bricks. Then my brain reminded me that Bentham *also* gave us the Panopticon and that was a second ton of bricks. Is there a link? I need to find out.

The "Cryptopticon" is a good word and indeed a more accurate description for the world we occupy online and, increasingly, offline.

I am not yet convinced that we are dealing with a "technopoly", I rather tend to feel like Google and Facebook have established a technocracy. The two are not mutually exclusive but I think we have some more falling to do before we get to a deification of technology.

By contrast technocracy is "just" what Aristotle might have called the degenerate form of rationalist/Enlightenment government. All the data in the world but not enough politics to ask the right questions. I could be wrong of course! I'll go read Postman to help dig further.

Anyway, this book left me with more to think about after than before, which is what books are for. Thank you @sivavaid!

#8 "Technics and Human Development (The Myth of the Machine, vol I)", by Lewis Mumford. Some interesting ideas on the primacy of cultural gadgets over just tooling in advancing civilisation, but overall too long and fuzzy in its speculations.

#9 "Paper Machines: About Card Catalogs, 1548-1928", by Markus Krajewski. A nice short monograph on paper catalogues. I often feel that we don't have a good digital equivalent of cards, relying too much on unstructured text and search, which limits discovery and organisation.

#10 "Why We're Polarized", by @ezraklein. A tour of illuminating research on polarisation (mostly US, but applicable elsewhere), tied together by fluid writing.

#11 "Mastering Ethereum", by @aantonop & @gavofyork. Clear, technical, thorough, no bullshit.

#12 "Caliban's War", by James S. A. Corey. Space. Grit. Politics. Weird alien shit. Straight into my veins.

#13 "An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation", by Jeremy Bentham. I read this because I am interested in links between Bentham's utilitarianism and today's technocracy. Unless you're looking for that too, I wouldn't recommend this book. Some early notes:

His definition of utility isn't exactly subtle. It's very much an absolute, one-dimensional affair that sits at the root of right and wrong. Interestingly, this "felicific calculus" has all the properties of something you can optimise though gradient descent.

I tend towards thinking that it's not that today's dominant tech is deliberately utilitarian. Rather, the tools available now, largely engineered by oversimplification (initially intentional) produce the same structure as utilitarian governance.

This is notably visible in Bentham's very behaviouralist take on government: its tools are punishment and reward. You could basically govern by A/B testing. (This also relates to the interesting lines that @shoshanazuboff draws to Skinner and friends.)

(This is also reminiscent of "eigenmorality", basically a moral calculus built on PageRank: scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1820&r…)

Not all is bad in this book, this section on punishment could be read more in a world in which prison has yet to be abolished.

But overall, this is mostly a excessively reductive understanding of people (even of just pleasure and pain) smothered under long enumerations meant as crutches to clear thinking in the same way that spreadsheets are often used today.

"Whistleblower", by @susanthesquark. This book has left me a blend of inspired and wrathful. It has the kind of strength and courage that remind you how to live the good life. Get it here: bookshop.org/books/12087734…

"Le prix de la démocratie", de @CageJulia. Ça fait mal au bide de voir à quel point nos démocraties sont achetées mais c'est bon pour la gueule de lire que des solutions crédibles sont proposées!

Note that this is coming out in English soon as "The Price of Democracy". Get it while it's hot! smile.amazon.com/Price-Democrac…

"Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed", by James C. Scott. A superlative, clear, and grounded exposé on how good intentions and a belief in engineering and science can so readily lead to impoverished and unsustainable outcomes.

I had been meaning to read this for a while and now I regret not doing so sooner. It ties together many of my current lines of interest: * Why the Internet's corporate megafauna are so dangerous, not just in spite of but perhaps because of good intentions?

* Why is the Web so resilient (but threatened by G, FB, &co)? * What is wrong with technocracy? * What's wrong with the dev frameworks we have? * What happened to hackers and what is the role of those who remain?

* What is good digital governance and why it's not compliance or risk management? * Why virtue ethics can be better while being less prescriptive or measurable than digital ethicists may like?

Anyway, if you're into these issues I recommend it! Two things to watch out for: - I thought the font size in the paperback was too small. Other formats may be better. - I felt some of his examples were a bit too in the weeds until I realised he was practicing what he preaches!

Remember you don't need to buy it from a megacorporation! Please support small bookshops, now more than ever. bookshop.org/books/seeing-l…

"Abaddon's Gate", by James S. A. Corey. More weird alien shit. Cool humans being dumb. Crappy resilient tech. Love it.

"Physical Causation", by Phil Dowe. Clear and detailed exposition of his conserved quantities approach to causation, dense but never gratuitously so, and at times delightfully quirky. I was however left with doubts (likely from my own ignorance) on a few parts:

He pursues an empirical account of causation rather than a "conceptual" one (explaining what people mean by causes), but many (counter)examples strike me as being conceptual in nature.

I see "empirical" causation as actual, singular, immediate. Everything else is a model, and while that may be just what you need to make good predictions you get into "what it really means to cause" territory very quickly.

He also uses spaceships as examples of immanent causation because they keep moving without interactions. This seems like a sloppy argument on many accounts?

And his contention that backwards causation is somehow more credible than superluminal causation could use some backing up. But all the same a great read!

"The Future of Another Timeline", by @Annaleen. A novel that works at every level of nuance, from subtle hints to overwhelming emotion, with politics that carry the story and a smart take on time travel that helps interweave everything. Loved it!

"Les ruses de l'intelligence: la mètis des Grecs", by M. Detienne & J.P. Vernant. After "Seeing Like A State" I wanted to dig more into mētis, and this is kind of the book for that. It's good, but I found it too anecdotal/exegetical and too philological rather than philosophical.

I'd be curious to hear if anyone has tried to build a metaphysics or epistemology on notions of mētis. It also seems very linked to phrónēsis and the virtues.

"Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism Is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, And Taking Over The World", by @jathansadowski. A good synoptic take on how bad things are, recommended if you think the problems with tech are overblown or circumscribed. Good reference list, too.

The chapter on fixing this is fine but schematic, we've got our work cut out, as always. Just one thing seemed strange: collectivising the extracted data. I get the impulse to use this for good, but data isn't electricity or railroads, it's legibility itself.

I don't think we should give the State this much legibility, that would only work given good governance (and even then - I don't think any entity is smart enough to govern this much data well). We should limit collection and scatter what does remain collected. Smash the rest.

"Cibola Burn", by James S. A. Corey. A whole new star system, an amazing planet with a fascinating biosphere and marvels to study for decades. Will humans figure out a way to fuck things up anyway?

"Philosophy of Mathematics", by Øystein Linnebo. An accessible tour of approaches and issues in, well, the philosophy of mathematics.

"Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism", by Benedict Anderson. His framing around language and simultaneity makes me wonder what the Internet will be brewing, over time. We see some, but it's hard to separate from biased systems.

"Two Cheers for Anarchism", by James C. Scott. Much of this is a shorter, simpler repackaging of material found in "Seeing Like A State". It's not bad, still fiery and endearing (and right), but I would only recommend it if you haven't read SLAS and don't plan to.

Having said that, this book reinforced my incipient notion that the problem spaces of anarchism and governance are the same: how to achieve ethical outcomes, at scale, while minimising the need for hierarchy and authority.

"Red Plenty", by Francis Spufford. A nonconventional literary object somewhere between fiction and nonfiction. A story of State, of cybernetics, and the mechanics planning at scale; written with keen humanity and gems of style.

Credit where due: this was recommended by @henryfarrell in @five_books. twitter.com/five_books/sta…

"Thinking Like Your Editor", by Susan Rabiner & Alfred Fortunato. Clear, effective, does exactly what it says on the tin. (Thanks to @sivavaid for the find!)

"Nemesis Games", by James S. A. Corey. A pretty grim tome, clocking in at 4 billion dead and the Earth in bad, possibly terminal, shape. No aliens here, humans can screw everything up on their own. Felt like the series was pivoting around this one?

"Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts", by James C. Scott. An interesting treaty on the relationship between hegemony and resistance, as captured through the public transcript of their interactions, but more importantly in their separate hidden views.

I was looking for a view on emerging resistance that could inform today's situation with tech, but that's not it. In part, tech is closer to a total institution (like prison, psychiatric institutions...) that prevents the emergence of strong resistance cultures.

In part, speech does not matter so much for the type of hegemony that tech fosters. The kind of resistance you would want is a reformulation of hacker values: * craft > engineering, * tooling > technology, * friction > scale. It isn't even nascent yet.

"The Open Society and Its Enemies", by Karl Popper. There's a lot in here about good intentions that produce totalitarian outcomes. The criticism of Plato is particularly enjoyable.

"Tools for Conviviality", by Ivan Illich. By "convivial" he means tools that support autonomous and creative intercourse between people and with their environment. He seeks tools to work with rather than tools that work "for" you.

There's a lot in there that resonates with today's problems, including problems of technology that have remained obscured by the dumpster fires of privacy, monopoly, racism, harassment...

Tools should increase agency, but the expectation of "personalisation" and algorithmic UI is to remove it. My way of putting it is that you cannot become good at @Netflix. The notion makes no sense, there is no craft to learn. That's why it's such a miserable experience.

We could joke that "in capitalist Internet, tool learns you!" but the longer term ramifications from loss of agency concern me. It may be worse for not seeing itself as manipulative. I often wonder if others experience these UIs as alienating as I do?

The book also made me wonder how limits to growth and limits to scale relate to each other. (Many thanks to @dauwhe for the recommendation!)

"The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic", by Stewart Shapiro (ed.) This is not a topic I know well so I picked this up as a crash course. I was surprised at how much I found myself caring about various positions. This book is worth the length, which is rare.

"The Art of Doing Science and Engineering", by Richard Hamming. A collection of anecdotes, some of them interesting.

"Researching Internet Governance: Methods, Frameworks, Futures", by Laura DeNardis, Derrick Cogburn, Nanette Levinson, Francesca Musiani. Feels like a solid overview of the various strands that make up this field of study.

On the downside, I'm sitting here with some very real Internet governance issues and I don't feel that reading this book has helped. More work is needed before the field can go from descriptive to prescriptive (or even just over some counsel).

Get it here! twitter.com/Caro_Bxl/statu…

"Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet", by @timhwang. A convincing, well-documented case that the current programmatic ad market bears very worrying similarities to the pre-2008 financial market.

Whether you like it or not, the future of advertising is at present deeply tied to the future of the web. You need to understand and influence one to understand and influence the other.

One cause for worry that I would add to the author's is that the people who build the web are largely ignorant of how ads work. And people who work for platforms don't see why commodifying attention and content is dangerous. So read this book!

Also: the author references Seeing Like A State, which confirms that it's a key text to understand the Internet.

"The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy", by David Graeber. This book makes thinking about bureaucracy fascinating. It does not always deliver as much as I would have liked it to on its promises, but it suggests great avenues to explore.

One topic it touches on which I think is relevant to the current election is the idea that a critique of bureaucracy is politically needed, for several reasons. First, bureaucracy isn't how you change the rules, you can only play with the existing ones. We need new rules.

Put differently a-bureaucracy is what leadership looks like, it's free play and inventing new games rather than returning to the same. Also, because of ubiquitous computers, our lives have become even more bureaucratic under the sprawling corporations of Big Tech.

This new bureaucracy is also more opaque, more asymmetric, and more arbitrary (to people at least) than the worst of Kafka. It's "computer said no" all the way down. We need to break past that, but that's not where things are headed with current tech companies.

This is more than anger at the political class. Our lives have become so bureaucratic, the need to fuck that up is strong. Graeber's accurate description of police as armed bureaucracy is also particularly timely.

"Privacy Is Power", by @carissaveliz. This is the book to get for the people around you who think that privacy is not a big deal. A clear and impactful synoptic of how fucked up things are, why it matters (with loads of examples), and what to do. Recommended Christmas present!

"Constructibility and Mathematical Existence", by Charles S. Chihara. A number of interesting points, but the overall structure of the book and the comparisons with other views felt disorganised.

"The War of the End of the World", by Mario Vargas Llosa. Incredibly dense narrative and rich characters, lots of dirt and blood, writing so sharp you forget it's there.

"Breath", by James Nestor. As nonfiction goes I found the writing a bit formulaic, but it has lots of interesting information on breathing and answered many of my questions about my own breathing.

I made a @Bookshop_Org list of what I read in 2020 — you can find most of the books above there! bookshop.org/lists/2020-9c9…