I guess a lot of people made a big deal out of this when it came out a few years ago? That's cool, I guess. Here are some things I found interesting:
II guess a lot of people made a big deal out of this when it came out a few years ago? That's cool, I guess. Here are some things I found interesting:
Income inequality is a natural outcome of mechanical advantage and technological innovation: the more technology replaces labor, the more wealth accrues to those who control technology, and the less to former human laborers
This is basic Marxism, right? I am not an economist (clearly) so I have no idea how true that is, and I'm not convinced they really proved it in the book, but it's an interesting counterargument to the usual "rich people are assholes" line of reasoning, which, of course, is not a mutually exclusive hypothesis.
Universal basic income is not going to work
I think I actually found out about this book while reading an article about UBI, everyone's favorite idea of late. UBI is kind of an awesome fantasy, but I think I side with the authors (and Matthew B. Crawford, and Wendell Berry) in thinking that the non-monetary value of work is too high to dispose of, as well as the corollary notion that most people will not create value for society or the world (or themselves) based purely on self- or social motivation. I was frankly kind of amazed how down they were on the idea! I felt like the entire book was leading up to a painfully predictable UBI finale. Got me!
Stop complaining about free trade because globalized job displacement won't last. When machines replace workers, *all* those jobs will be gone, not displaced
What is the populist counterargument to this? Smash the looms? Here's one: the human labor rarely really goes away, it just gets hidden and compensated less. If we could keep manual labor within national boundaries and subject to equitable labor standards, at least they'd be good jobs instead if Mechanical Turk-like jobs.
There were also some *fairly* problematic bits, starting at the beginning with their godawful "most of history was boring" bit, where the boring parts were when humans weren't pillaging the environment, reproducing like bacteria, or killing each other on ever grander scales. Peace, balance, satisfaction: totally boring. No reason to read Ian Morris, apparently.
They also laud the sharing economy as a wonderful new source of jobs, where jobs are basically ways to keep people busy, glossing over the whole issue of reduced income and more importantly reduced security (gigs are unreliable, no gig platform gives you insurance). The thrust of the book as a whole is to temper the techno-optimism (income inequality is real and will kill us if we don't address it, no matter how fancy our tech), but this seemed like a pretty glaring oversight for 2014.
Their long-term recommendations for surviving our robotic future are... kind of dumb. The first third of the book is all about how machines are starting to do the things we thought were uniquely human, so if that's true, why turn around and recommend that we'll all be ok focusing on what remains in the human domain? In the short term, sure, learn to complement machine powers with your meaty wit and discretion, but what about 100 years out when our phones will, in fact, be both funnier and wiser than we are?
And while this is mostly a book about technology and the economy, it seemed myopic that they failed to address the many "externalities" that could torpedo all of their analyses. What about climate change? What about reactionary political movements? What about the real physical limits of our planet like potable water and the gravity well?
On the whole, while I was often pleasantly provoked while reading, and I really did appreciate the middle bits where they picked apart the strong technological optimism of their peers, the authors' dogged commitment to a sunny outlook probably hamstrung their efforts to make predictions. I mean, no one can make real predictions about the future, but it would have been nice to hear more about the downsides of these "brilliant" technologies. Inspiration is great, but so are contingency plans.
If you've suffered through this entire "review," allow me to recommend these two others, both infinitely more cogent and insightful than anything I've written here:
Culture plays a significant role in the success or failure of civilizations. Interesting thesis, right? One that might not seem so objectionable untilCulture plays a significant role in the success or failure of civilizations. Interesting thesis, right? One that might not seem so objectionable until you state it in concrete historical terms: Western civilizations have dominated the world for the last 200 years largely because of their culture. Culture is personal, so people take things like this personally: you're saying Europeans are intrinsically superior to other people? Eurocentrist! Bigot! Racist!
David Landes has been called a Eurocentrist, and probably meaner things too, but the author present in this book is clearly not prejudiced. He's distinctly postjudiced. He probably knows more about non-European cultures than you do, and extolls many of their virtues, but after thinking about a huge range of history, he finds themes in Western culture that he believes were critical to its success. I think that's a totally legitimate opinion, and I admire Landes for exploring a touchy subject in a world of haters.
However, as legitimate as it may be, it's still an opinion, which brings us to this book's first failing: arrogance. The very title is absurdly presumptuous in its scope, as if a satisfying explanation existed for the inequality of nations, but titles are meant to be provocative. What bugged me was the fact that the importance of culture in the behavior of groups is exquisitely difficult to prove in the present, under semi-controlled conditions, with relatively small numbers of people. Does Google outperform Yahoo because they have a superior culture? Or because they have better tech, better recruiters, better spies, better something else? That's very tough thing to prove, and if you wanted to try you would have to perform extensive surveying, interviews, and qualitative observation to convince any self-respecting sociologist. Scale that up to civilizations and restrain yourself to the scant anecdotal evidence history provides us and you really have to start injecting some first person quid pro quos, e.g. a lot of "I think"s and "In my opinion"s, something Landes rarely does. I guess this is a critique of history as a discipline more than of this book in particular, but the scale of the claims being made here, and the fact that there are specific interpretations being presented, just irritated the scientist in me. I suppose history, like so many branches of inquiry in which deduction is a practical impossibility, has a tendency to overstate its explanatory power.
The anal informaticist in me was also repeatedly incensed by some seriously un-cited passages, like one in which he explains that printing never caught on in China because ideographs are intrinsically hard to set in type, and that ideographs dissuade literacy: "one may learn the characters as a child, but if one does not keep using them, one forgets how to read" (p. 51). Perhaps he thought the challenges ideographs presented to printing are common knowledge or obvious, but I disagree. You have to cite facts! Granted I am a citation Nazi, but come on, he's a historian!
Speaking of historians, are there any histories that don't include numerous pointless tangents in which the historian lays out the factual history of pet interest X, regardless of whether X has any relevance to the overall thesis? Frankly I enjoyed most of the tangents in this book, but they really just muddy the waters. State hypothesis, present evidence, recapitulate hypothesis, analyze, repeat. Stay on target.
In the end, I enjoyed reading this, but I would only recommend it as a source for further reading material. I didn't find the largely secondary, anecdotal, and correlational evidence he presented convincing. I would very much mistrust any work that cites this book as a source of anything other than opinion. I am, however, interested in reading some of Landes's work on the historical importance of timekeeping.
WORDS
edulcoration (n): purification (p. 34)
condign (adj): fitting, appropriate (p. 144)
cliometrics (n): application mathematical economic techniques to history (p. 165)
gravamen (n): part of an argument that carries the most weight, or any accusation. Perhaps also the name of my future metal band. Currently vying with "One Great Black Woolfe of a More Than Ordinarie Bigness, Which Is Like to Be More Feirce and Bould Than the Rest, and So Occasions the More Hurt." Definitely wins for brevity.
contumacy (n): stubbornness (p. 181)
cui bono (L): for whose benefit? (p. 225)
suzerainty (n): basically lordship. A suzerain was a French feudal lord. (p. 430)
irredentism (n): belief in annexing some other place to your own holdings b/c the people there share something in common with you. Pretty arcane. (p. 435)
FUTURE
The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia - cited a lot in the first chapter, a Eurocentric antecedent to Landes
This book is too big to fit in my brain, and I read it too slowly to have any kind of coherent response. On the whole, I agree: peer production is botThis book is too big to fit in my brain, and I read it too slowly to have any kind of coherent response. On the whole, I agree: peer production is both righteous and effective for a lot of things, a networked information economy is generally better than the mass media information economy, and we should be very afraid of legal actions that threaten these things (e.g. erosion of net neutrality, increased intellectual property rights, etc). I already believed in those things (I am, after all, both a participant in and purveyor of peer-production systems), but it was nice to hear them echoed back to me in excruciatingly deliberate academic prose. And by nice I mean gratifying in the way that dentistry is gratifying. Certain neural pathways now feel free of plaque.
I think the most important underlying theme is the same that I've been struggling to derive from other current movements: there are no absolute improvements, only net gains. The Internet didn't suddenly create the techno-utopia many people thought it would, where everyone exchanges information freely and no is subject to centralized control, but it did push us in that direction. Occupy didn't end income inequality and usher in an anarchic utopia (in fact things have only gotten worse), but at least people talk about income inequality.
Ok, onto the collection of vague complaints that I shall call a review.
One of Benkler's main arguments is that a networked information economy yields a net increase in freedom. As he writes on p. 130, "The networked information economy makes individuals better able to do things for and by themselves, and makes them less susceptible to manipulation by others than they were in the mass-media culture." To re-iterate my point about incremental gains, it's important to emphasize that his point is about a relative improvement over mass media, since I think Benkler would admit that a networked information economy mediated by the likes of Facebook and Google is very, very susceptible to manipulation, though perhaps less susceptible than one mediated by NBC and Comcast.
I think there are a couple problems with this, even if it's accurate. First of all, those with the knowledge and ability to manipulate information (e.g. geeks) will always be more free in this scenario than those who can't. How free are you if your every information transaction (e.g. looking at this review) is being tracked by third parties (e.g. Goodreads advertisers or Goodreads' parent company, Amazon) who then use that preference profile to present you with other information to consume (e.g. other reviews, other books to read), thereby limiting your choices? And what if you aren't savvy enough to know that this is happening, or don't know how to circumvent this kind of profiling? You could argue that combating this is just a matter of education, but in my experience the sharing economy is not providing that education, and most people are just as blithely unaware of how their networked information consumption is being manipulated as they were under the mass media. Or, like me, they *are* aware but just accept it because it's too inconvenient to disable cookies or whatever. Does it matter if freedom exists if no one has the will to exercise it?
There's also the issue of economic freedom. Benkler argues heavily against intellectual property for most information goods, arguing persuasively that in a lot of industries, like software, property rights over information are actually detrimental, not just to the greater good of making better things from these goods that everyone can benefit from (e.g. better software), but at the level of firms and individuals, who can reap more profit by creating, customizing, and configuring information goods for special needs than they can by licensing information property. Fine, but... what if you don't want to do that? What if you're a coder and you don't like working with clients. You make cool things, but you don't want to deal with people and their endless stupid ideas on how to change your cool things to suit their needs? If you can't sympathize with a techie view on this, imagine a musician who makes great music, but hates to perform. If she cannot make money off selling the right to listen to her music (i.e. via exercising intellectual property rights), then she *has* to perform, or work another job. This actually seems like a net decrease in economic freedom, since the musician can't just make music like she used to in the old economy.
This extends beyond intellectual property into peer production: the more goods that get produced via peer-production, the less ways there are to make a living. Taxi driver, bed-and-breakfast operator, encyclopedia editor / researcher, anything-other-than-wedding photographer, these are all jobs that are vanishing or gone thanks to "disruption" via peer production and/or the sharing economy, whatever you want to call it. Ostensibly the new alternatives create better goods, or are more efficient, but they create some freedoms (free access to encyclopedic knowledge, freedom to work when you want to) at the expense of others (freedom to work the job you can or want to). Has freedom increased if you are no longer free to take photographs *for a living*?
Also, just to give you a taste of the academicese:
I claim that the modalities of cultural production and exchange are a proper subject for normative evaluation within a broad range of liberal political theory. Culture is a social-psychological-cognitive fact of human existence. Ignoring it, as rights-based and utilitarian versions of liberalism tend to do, disables political theory from commenting on central characteristics of a society and its institutional frameworks.
That's not typical, but certainly not exceptional either....more
I know almost nothing about money. I know what it is (a physical representation of value that can be exchanged in place of true value), I know what a I know almost nothing about money. I know what it is (a physical representation of value that can be exchanged in place of true value), I know what a loan is, and what a bet is, but words like "bond" and "equity" set my head spinning, and "credit default swap" and "subprime mortgage bond-backed CDO" generally result in a horrible rash and near-asphixiation. So I guess I need to give this book credit for forcing me to learn a few things about money and finance, like what a mortgage is, how the debts of multiple mortgages can be used by a bank to justify borrowing more money from bigger fish in the form of mortgage bonds, and how those mortgage bonds can in turn be aggregated to support even bigger loans in the form of CDOs. I also learned about how all this aggregation theoretically reduces the risk that any individual component will fail to pay out, how one mortgage owner might end up unable to pay back the money they borrowed, but the probability that all of them will, at the same time, is supposed to be low. And finally, I have some understanding of how the inability of bond consumers and rating entities to estimate the probability of people being unable to pay back their mortgage loans led to this huge, unjustified demand for those bonds that created the incentive for mortgage grantors to loan money to ever more "subprime" customers in ever shadier deals, knowing full well those people would default, which, ultimately created the financial crisis.
Right? I got most of that? If I did, then way to go Michael Lewis. You managed to teach a complete ignoramus about something that was both complex and important, and you did it in compelling, page-turning style. Even if I got that half wrong, I'd say it was still an accomplishment.
However, this book did not make me happy. Not at all. And while I feel slightly better informed, I certainly don't feel enlightened. Or proud to be an American. Or a human being. First of all, Lewis did not predict my level of ignorance, and there was no glossary, so I definitely had to scramble to look up a lot of terms. Even now some of them are still mystifying (what the hell IS "leverage" in this context?). Second, while Lewis's protagonists were engaging, interesting, and finely detailed, I found his attempt to position them as the only moral or even sympathetic characters in the story to be, well, kind of disgusting. Sure, they had insight, and sure, they responsibly investigated the true nature of all these subprime loans, but what did they do with that knowledge? They... made money off it. Eisman made snarky comments to people who should have known better. Burry wrote a bunch of private emails to his investors. I think maybe the Cornwall guys tried to tell some journalist friends. But seriously, these "good guys" were all confident the entire world economy was going to tank, costing countless jobs and general turmoil, and they responded not by sounding the alarm or by doing everything in their power to spread what they knew, but by profiteering.
You could argue, of course, that the bets that made them rich were the financial equivalent of sounding the alarm. In theory, their credit default swaps (or more likely Lippmann's) should have drawn attention to the weakness they saw in the subprime mortgage market, thereby toning down the insanity, but they were obviously aware that the subprime crowd was very far from wisdom, so their default swaps were not attempts to save the world. Basically, Lewis paints these guys as heros, but I don't think they're any less despicable than anyone else in the book. Just smarter.
I've always maintained a completely uninformed suspicion that the world of finance was largely populated by evil, greedy, useless people who create almost nothing of value to humanity. This book did little to dispel my prejudice.
It did get me thinking about infrequent catastrophes, though. I signed up for a wilderness first aid course, I'm getting renter's insurance, and I should really, really get an earthquake preparedness kit. Really. So, you know. Win....more
While I usually don't feel like Goodreads reviews are the place to give plot summaries, the covers and blurbs of this book are horrible and misleadingWhile I usually don't feel like Goodreads reviews are the place to give plot summaries, the covers and blurbs of this book are horrible and misleading, so if you're even remotely interested in reading it, you should know that the it's about a place like Earth where pacifist anarchists colonized the moon and have been living there for 200 years in isolation from the socioeconomic systems on the home world. You should also know that the subtitle is "An Ambiguous Utopia," and, as such, is dismissive of capitalism and government, effusive about the wonders of anarchy, as well as shrewdly critical of the actual anarchic society Le Guin has crafted. Yes there are people and a story and those are fun, but if you're not interested in speculative political economy, look elsewhere.
That being said, I am not ostensibly interested in speculative political economy, or at least I wasn't until I read this book, and now I'm really interested in it, so maybe the stupid "In a world..." blurbs and this utterly absurd Heston-esque cover are somewhat excusable.
Anyway, since I find I'm getting a bit too precious with my write-ups here, to the point where I'm hardly even writing them, here are a bunch of questions / subjects I jotted down after finishing, which ended up looking like some weird homework assignment. Basically my idea of leisure these days is high school drudgery.
The subtitle is "An Ambiguous Utopia." What's the purpose of utopias? Why are utopias so uncommon in scifi? Isn't "ambiguous utopia" an oxymoron? What makes this book utopian, both in the baseline exploration of Odonian culture and Shevek's ultimate understanding (which is...)?
So it's utopian because there's an entire planet without government and things are actually pretty cool and not Mad Max-ish. I can't claim to know much about the intellectual history of anarchism, but my personal experience with small groups of strangers is that when there's no form of regulation, nothing productive happens, and people usually end up being dicks. To wit: YouTube comments. If you chose a random YouTube video with more than 100 unique commenters and put all those people on an island, my guess is that most of them would kill each other, quickly, perhaps within minutes. So to me the idea of a functional anarchic society is ludicrous, or it was, but this book warped my brain in wonderful ways and now it seems at least sort of plausible given the constraints UKG provides (all volunteers, mostly economic refugees, strong written doctrine focusing on negating the idea of property, entirely artificial language imbued with doctrinal values, etc).
It's ambiguous because, as Shevek learns, no rules doesn't mean no regulation. I'm reminded of Larry Lessig's four types of control from Code 2.0: rules, norms, prices, and architecture. On Annares they've tried to replace rules and prices with norms, but things go awry when Shevek et al. realize norms are still a form of control. Architecture could be the language, which is artificial and designed with certain values in mind, and the design of society, e.g. the organization of labor into syndicates, the reliance on centralized computing for voluntary (sorta) labor assignment. You could also argue the choice of a desert world is a form of architecture, where cooperation is required to survive. If it wasn't, people would have more ability and opportunity to resist the norms. Anyway, things aren't so rosy when people want to kill you for thinking dangerous thoughts.
As to what the point of utopias is, you'd think it would be to explore ideal worlds that we should strive toward, but it almost seems like they have the same denigrating effect of dystopias. Dystopias generally depict *our* future in which some awful trends in our time and run their course, the point being, look how crappy we are now! If we keep this up, we'll really be screwed. Utopias tend to be about *other* worlds, i.e. not our future, the message being, Look how crappy we are relative to this amazing place! Red Mars is kind of the exception (not strictly utopian, but pretty much).
But why are utopias uncommon, while dystopias are legion? I guess the potential narratives are either dull (things are great, the stay great, things end up great), or depressing (things are great, protagonist screws things up, everything falls apart). The Dispossessed shows how it could work, if you're willing to handle some contrivances.
"True journey is return"
Shevek says this to the Hainishman at the end, it's written on Odo's tombstone (p. 84), UKG writes, "The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer, and his sons are born in exile" (p. 89). The idea of cyclicity runs throughout the book, but I'm unable to capture UKG's point in a sentence.
How does the notion of simultaneity relate to the ideas of dispossession? Similarly, how does the idea of the ansible, and the "annihilation of space," relate? What is the meaning of a permanent revolution?
Re: simultaneity and dispossession, UKG does write that you can't own the present, by which I think she means you can't delude yourself into believing in stasis. In that sense reality is a permanent revolution, and ignoring that leads to problems. I'm not sure the ansible and instant space travel really do relate to dispossession, maybe only insofar as they could accelerate change and facilitate understanding between worlds.
Is there a word for books within books?
Wikipedia says it's a fictional book, but that is so, so unsatisfying. Odo's works are constantly cited (PRISON LETTERS p. 358, others?), and much like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, there's a play about a character doing the opposite of what Shevek does. Borges once wrote that writing whole books was "a laborious and impoverishing extravagance." Much more efficient and entertaining to write a quick story about the book you would have written instead.
What are the rest of the books in the Hainish cycle? How do they fit together?
Obviously Goodreads can help me here, now that I'm back online. Le Guin doesn't seem to think of them as a coherent set, but they all look interesting. Plus: space. Most of them seem to treat planets as sociopolitical simulations, and follow the model of a lone emissary acting as the reader's avatar, which is a pretty old, common model, but maybe not always as explicit as an alien visiting a new world.
On So-called "Soft" Scifi
UKG cares so little about things she doesn't want to explore! The USA / USSR analogies are so thinly-veiled they might as well go veilless. The aliens are so human as to have place names like "Concord," the ecosystems they inhabit so Terran they have fish and birds and trees. It doesn't detract from the story, and the details are irrelevant to the political economical ideas she *wants* to play with, but kind of amusing. She's totally a nerd, though, occasionally digressing in to similarly unnecessary linguistic detail.
Addendum
Apparently I added this because David Mitchell said he liked it. Can't figure out where I read that.
Notes on re-reading in 2020:
I had somehow forgotten that half the book takes place on Urras, the "propertarian" world, and that that half of the book has the more linear, perhaps more dramatic, present-tense plot, while the half on Anarres is more like a long-view series of vignettes from Shevek's past. The latter serves as an effective broad look at Anarres, and maybe that's why I remember it, but the Urras parts only allow us to see that world through the small, controlled lens provided by Shevek's hosts: one University in one city in one country. I feel like the book wants us to see that Urras is an analogy to Earth in the 1960s/70s, but also that it is not a dystopia, that it's an ambiguous dystopia as much as Anarres is an ambiguous utopia. The disclosure toward the end that Earth is an ecological ruin and human society is largely restricted to tightly controlled austerity emphasizes what an *unambiguous* dystopia really looks like. Thus it's kind of strange UKG didn't allow us to explore Urras more. There are hints, and then a quick glance at the broader class structure toward the end, but that's it. If it's just an analogy, why spend half the book there?
I was also surprised to find what we would call an attempted rape today, in which Shevek, drunk for the first time in his life, forces himself on a woman who repeatedly resists him, he ejaculates prematurely, then passes out. Later he is ashamed, and sort of marvels at his own shame, but there is no consideration for the woman in question. What is the point of this scene? If it is only to show the nadir of propertarian society's influence on Shevek, why take it to sexual assault?
Shevek's relationship with Takver is similarly confusing. It just comes out of nowhere: she was that girl at that party that one time, and apparently she's been thinking about him ever since, and then suddenly there's this physical magnetism. I believed their scenes together as a more established couple, but this origin seemed contrived.
Both of these things make me wonder if UKG didn't handle sex very well. Left Hand is sort of a love story, though only debatably a romantic one (or was it? I forget). I don't recall a sex scene. Looking back on my other reviews, I apparently had a problem with a character just "getting over" her history of sexual violence in Four Ways to Forgiveness, too. Something to look out for as I read her other books.
Some quotes and notes:
p. 82 "He had assumed that if you removed a human being's natural incentive to work–his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy–and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe."
This is such a lovely inversion of knee-jerk critiques of Universal Basic Income and similar ideas, but also a very clear expression of the values underlying peer production platforms like iNaturalist, values that I still cannot clearly convey to people in a quick and convincing way: people do it because it is intrinsically satisfying! Some people just like recording stuff. Other people like knowing and recognizing stuff. Some people like slowing down and paying attention. Not everything needs to have levels and challenges and rewards, or (god forbid) currency fungible outside the platform.
p. 89 "He was a frontiersman, one of a breed who had denied their past, their history. The Settlers of Anarres had turned their backs on the Old World and its past, opted for the future only. But as surely as the future becomes the past, the past becomes the future. To deny is not to achieve. The Odonians who left Urras had been wrong, wrong in their desperate courage, to deny their history, to forgo the possibility of return. The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer, and his sons are born in exile."
As I noted in my first review, UKG hammers on this theme of return repeatedly, but I'd forgotten the part about history, that we have no choice to be "explorers" in time, but while we can never return to the past we've left, we can remember and engage it and thus remain whole. Only the temporal exile denies and forgets. I don't think this gets much direct treatment in the book, but it's an implication of Shevek's entire journey and the work of the Syndicate of Initiative: the anarchists of Anarres had forgotten, perhaps intentionally, what they were escaping when they left, and had recreated it in a different guise. Shevek leaves in part to re-engage with that past. Aside from the obvious "condemned to repeat it" admonitions, I wonder what UKG would think of recent controversies over the removal of Confederate monuments, debate over murals that depict historic violence but also criticize it, or how some trans people and others who radically alter their identities work so hard to erase or ignore their pasts. I'm a pretty strong proponent of history and acknowledging the past even if you think it was terrible, so these topics discomfit me. I wonder if UKG thought about them. If she did, I'm not sure those thoughts made it into this book. The topic also brings to mind this wonderful TTBOOK interview with journalist David Rieff on the necessity of forgetting. Maybe I should start listening to that show again.
p. 165 "You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them." This seems outdated today, where the most common way to crush ideas is to drown them in a million other conflicting ideas, or to subvert them by providing an easier and more satisfying substitute....more
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