What I highlighted the week of February 22, 2021
Articles
VGR is doing some good writing on storytelling at Ribbon Farm recently.
This new show at the New Museum about Black art and grief sounds powerful. I'm looking forward to checking it out soon.
Roxane Gay and Monica Lewinsky talking about how to write about trauma.
This Meghan Daum essay from many years ago was incredible. It describes an experience of New York city in her 20s that sounds very familiar to me, if not personally, as an experience I know a lot of my peers have had here.
I loved this essay in Point Mag, from an English professor in India, about the ways in which European and American writers are read versus post-colonial writers:
Postcolonial texts seem to have two jobs in these syllabi: they either negatively illustrate some form of moral or social misconduct, or they positively represent a “marginalized” culture or geography. Ideally, they do both at once, often in the manner of a Live Aid concert.
The New Yorker profile of Glennon Doyle, about whom I knew little, but whose presence can be felt throughout culture, features an intersting quote from Elizabeth Gilbert about people who write and share a lot about their lives:
Doyle’s good friend Elizabeth Gilbert—who also rose to fame with a memoir about self-actualization, and who addresses her followers as “dear ones” online—explained the connection. “I don’t want to pathologize, but we might have some teensy boundary issues, and some history of not being able to tell where I end and the other person begins,” she said. Gilbert defended the relationships as real, though: “People will say, ‘I feel like I know you,’ and what I tend to say to them is, ‘Well, you do—that’s not an insane thing for you to think. I’ve quite literally told you everything.’ ” She added, “If you’ve come this far with me in my—I hate the word—journey, and you’ve stuck with me, then I kind of know you, too.”
I'm not sure about lists like these that are supposed to help you through moments of depression or high anxiety, but in so far as they're useful, this was a good one.
And another good one about why learning from YouTube is so well suited for how we learn
“We are built to observe,” as Proteau tells me. There is, in the brain, a host of regions that come together under a name that seems to describe YouTube itself, called the action-observation network. “If you’re looking at someone performing a task,” Proteau says, “you’re in fact activating a bunch of neurons that will be required when you perform the task. That’s why it’s so effective to do observation.”
I loved this Rivka Gelchen essay about the neighborhood in Midtown where I worked for more than five years. It is an odd, alien planet of a place and Gelchen captures it perfectly.
This personal essay by historian Ada Ferrer about the Cuban revolution that separated her family and the life-long toll it took on her half brother was gutting.
Movies
I watched and liked, but did not fall in love with Nomadland, sort of like Richard Brody, I guess. But I did like this conversation with Chloé Zhao and Frances MacDormand. And this profile of Chloé Zhao.
I thought The Stranger was one of the best depictions of an under-explored and under-theorized aspect of Indian culture: scam, doubt, and lack of trust.
TV Shows
- We continued our rewatch of Mad Men and Don Draper is much less sympathetic as a character on second viewing.
Podcasts
- I listened to more episodes of "Working it out with Mike Birbiglia"
- And the Rewatchables episode on "Coming To America" was everythign I'd hoped it would be
What I highlighted the week of February 15, 2021
Articles
This interview with Pankaj Mishra like every interview with him is chock full of great insights, critiques and dunks, including the unforgettable phrase "proud boys of the mind."
During the NYT vs SSC chronicles, I ran into this long diatribe against the NYTimes by the founding CEO of Soylent that I had never read before. I don't really know what to make of it but it stuck in my mind.
Speaking of which, Will Wilkinson's description of SSC v NYT is one of the best ones I've read. Also, Elizabeth Spiers commentary is very good
this OpEd by Heather McGhee author of "The Sum of Us" has a remarkable quote
“So where should we make the point that all these programs were created without concern for their cost when the goal was to build a white middle class, and they paid for themselves in economic growth? Now these guys are trying to fundamentally renege on the deal for a future middle class that would be majority people of color?”
I liked this essay on late bloomers and "opsimaths" that lauds the importance of life-long learning, persistence, and luck in a successful life.
I like this framing of racism as a lose-lose for every citizen, summarized from a new book called The Sum of Us, especially this quote:
“So where should we make the point that all these programs were created without concern for their cost when the goal was to build a white middle class, and they paid for themselves in economic growth? Now these guys are trying to fundamentally renege on the deal for a future middle class that would be majority people of color?”
I had never read this contra-Tolentino essay by Lauren Oyler but it is a thing to behold.
Alex Ross on Tarkovsky, another thing to behold.
This Aeon essay on industrial policy in India and its relationship with Hindutva politics was pretty good
By producing images of the nation and its culture, and marketing them to global investors, the state asserts its power. Historians of nation-states have a saying: states make (or, in this case, re-make) nations, not the other way around. State power demarcates the ‘domestic’ affairs of the nation as a forbidden territory for external actors. But the tacit bargain is that the state manages and facilities capital mobility and, in return, retains the power to rearrange the domestic sphere without external interference or sanctions.
I had no idea about Paul Graham's life long relationship with painting. There's a lot of interesting ideas about what you choose to work on over the course of a life and career, too.
Patricia Lockwood on Elana Ferranté is entirely way too quotable
I liked this essay on YouTube as a medium of master-apprentice knowledge transfer
Movies
I had never seen Down With Love, 2003 rom-com with Reneé Zellwegger and Ewan McGregor, but it was a delightful Valentines Day watch.
And I really liked Judas and the Black Messiah
And Robert Altman's The Player
TV Shows
I finished Search Party and really liked the last 2 seasons. A remarkable difference what HBO can do for a show vs TBS.
And we continued our Mad Men rewatch.
Podcasts
- I started listening to the Working It Out podcast with Mike Birbiglia and have been enjoying it. I particularly liked episodes with
What I highlighted the week of February 8, 2021
Articles
Among the many takes on the GameStonk news story, this one about the role of speculation in protest was interesting to me.
Ross Douthat's column on Mitt Romney's family tax credit proposal seems like a rare instance of something there may be bipartisan progress on at the federal level while much else remains gridlocked into atrophy.
Glen Greenwald's write-up on "hall monitor journalism" was a novel way of considering a strand of journalism, and perhaps a central tendency in how journalism is practiced in the modern age, that has always felt icky to me.
This paper which brings the Wall Street Consensus into conversation with climate change and finds that it (1) won't do much to help the global south and (2) won't do much to help climate change is, um, scary.
Movies
I watched, and really did not like, The January Man
I rewatched and loved-loved-loved Love and Basketball
I watched and was bowled over by Taste of Cherry
TV Shows
I watched more Search Party. Season 3 is much more enjoyable than I expected.
And continued our rewatch of Mad Men
Youtube
- Cal Newport's talk on Deep Work had some great strategies about training, supporting and managing deep work habits.
Podcasts
Tara Brach's Sacred Presence meditation was, like most of her ~20 minute meditations, very useful in guiding you through a body scan and encouraging coming back to the present.
A24's podcast recently featured a conversation between Kelly Reichardt and Kenneth Lonergan. They brought up interesting themes about Reichardt's work, which is often set in the 1800s and Lonergan's interest in doing somethign like that.
What I highlighted the week of February 1, 2021
Articles
This long interview with Zeynep Tüfekçi by Antonio Garcia-Martinez had lots of great details about Tüfekçi's approach to public science communication.
In The New Republic "Against the Consensus Approach to History" was mostly a walk-through of a specific approach to American Revolutionary history and, at the end, has a discussion about who gets to tell history "as it was."
This long-read in Eater about Black plant-based-eating introduced me to much of the plant-based culinary history among Black people in America.
This short Crooked Timber book review of Mike Konczal's new book has a great quote about markets:
“markets are great at distributing things based on people’s willingness to pay. But there are some goods that should be distributed by need.”
This Arnold Kling book review of a new book about trust in a polarized age resonated for me as I've been obsessing about low social and institutional trust. The review is mostly from a Libertarian perspective, but the lessons and discussion are relevant all the same.
"Barstool Conservatism" seems like a phrase I'll be thinking about and using for some time to come.
This long interview with Robert Caro and Kurt Vonnegut has many stories I've heard from Caro already but also has many lines that Vonnegut seems preternaturally capable at doling out off the cuff.
Movies
I watched:
The Little Things and really did not like it.
Time and really really loved it.
and rewatched Coming to America, one of my all time favorites.
TV Shows
I watched the first season of Search Party and we continued our re-watch of Mad Men.
Music
I liked this new song by Julien Baker and James Brown Live in Paris in 1968
Podcasts
I listened to:
more Lolita podcast
a few episodes of The Daily
Writing and highlights, week of January 18, 2021
Highlights from articles, books, podcasts and reviews I read this week.
Articles
Naturally, this supervillain, like all the others, had a tragic origin story: the death of his brother, the subversion of the genre he loved, the primal urge to continue making music outside of the system that had sustained him and then spit him out.
The roots of modern right-wing extremism lie in the post-World War II reaction to FDR’s New Deal and the Republican embrace of it under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Opponents of an active government insisted that it undermined American liberty by redistributing tax dollars from hardworking white men to those eager for a handout—usually Black men, in their telling. Modern government, they insisted, was bringing socialism to America. They set out to combat it, trying to slash the government back to the form it took in the 1920s.
For the past four years, Trump and his enablers have tried to insist that unrest in the country is caused by “Antifa,” an unorganized group of anti-fascists who show up at rallies to confront right-wing protesters. But the Department of Homeland Security this summer identified “anarchist and anti-government extremists” as “the most significant threat… against law enforcement.”
Environmental anxieties haven’t toppled neoliberalism. Instead, to an unprecedented degree, they infiltrated it. (Or perhaps they were appropriated by it. It’s an open question.)
But alarmists have to take the good news where they find it. And while mood affiliation is not always the best guide to the state of the world, in 2020, for me, there were three main sources of hope. The first is the fact that the age of climate denial is over.
The second source of good news is the arrival on the global stage of climate self-interest.
The third cause for optimism is that, while the timelines to tolerably disruptive climate outcomes have already evaporated, the timelines to the next set of benchmarks is much more forgiving.
“Humans are producing no-analogue climates, no-analog ecosystems, a whole no-analog future,” she writes. The book’s key question is: What innovations will we jerry-rig, and what risky interventions will we conscience, as we slide down the precipice? Her ambivalent response is “If there is to be an answer to the problem of control, it’s going to be more control.”
“One big conservation proposal that’s out there is E. O. Wilson’s ‘half-earth’ — we should put a half of the planet aside for other species. But even that — which I would certainly support — isn’t really conserving the world. That is changing the world. That’s not the world that we had.”
Those models suggest unmitigated warming could cost global GDP more than 20% of its value by the end of the century; limit warming to two degrees and climate change would still kill as many people each year as COVID-19 has
A just state, Augustine reasoned, is a community bound by caritas, or agapē in Greek, love that is selfless and directed toward humankind
Henrich’s genius and the source of his methodological originality reside in his application of contemporary social science to uncover universal laws, and to classify and categorize social reality in a context-free approach
The main shortcoming of Henrich’s analysis is its reliance on linear causality. Tracing an outcome, e.g., the distinctive psychology of Western society, to an original cause, the Church ban on cousins wedding, is in itself WEIRD
The economists' empirical toolkit now has structured around 5 types of tools for causal inference: lab/controlled experiments; Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs); natural experiments; observational methods and structural models.
You know who manages by metrics? Big companies like Google, Amazon and LinkedIn.
And what do they have in common?
Their core product got notably worse over time.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
First of all, I think that looking at metrics can be helpful. They just shouldn’t be the sole yardstick decisions are measured against
But the forecasts hinge on a number of presumptions. Even if you accept that a ton of cool, potentially economy-driving ideas may be out there on the horizon, who is to say their time will come in the 2020s
In a milestone 1989 paper, Paul David, a Stanford economics professor, wrote that electricity had followed a natural arc. Like steam a century before, electricity was a “general purpose technology” that, after decades of gestation, was propelling not only itself to enormous success, but countless other industries and the entire economy
The Roaring Twenties were fueled in no small part by a youthful population with a median age of 25; two thirds of the country was 35 and younger, filled with verve and entrepreneurialism.
The prediction engine – the conceptual tool used by today’s leading brain scientists to understand the deepest essence of our humanity – is also the one wielded by today’s most powerful corporations and governments.
If software has eaten the world, its predictive engines have digested it, and we are living in the society it spat out.
‘spending metabolic money to build complex brains pays dividends in the search for adaptive success’
The strength of this association between predictive economics and brain sciences matters, because – if we aren’t careful – it can encourage us to reduce our fellow humans to mere pieces of machinery
Are we shovelling more of ourselves into the mouth of the machine, just to see what it churns out?
But John Yarmuth, a Democratic representative from Louisville, Kentucky, who has known McConnell since the late sixties, told me he’d long predicted that the alliance between Trump and McConnell would end once the President could no longer help McConnell. “Three years ago, I said he’d wait until Trump was an existential threat to the Party, and then cut him loose,” Yarmuth said. “He’s been furious with Trump for a long time. Many who know him have talked with him about how much he hates Trump.” But, Yarmuth noted, McConnell, focussed on Republican judicial appointments, “made a Faustian deal for all those judges.”
Podcasts
Writing and highlights, week of January 11, 2021
Highlights from articles, books, podcasts and reviews I read this week.
Articles
I believe that all young adults should begin their productive years with the same amount of wealth. What these studies call intergenerational immobility is a special case of opportunity inequality. If I can show that, in my country, 50% of income inequality is due to factors that anyone would agree individuals should not be held responsible for, whereas the standard conservative view in my country is that everyone should be capable of pulling herself up by her bootstraps, I have a powerful argument to reform tax, educational, and healthcare policy. The libertarian attack on common ownership of talents—that it would expose everyone to possible kidney harnessing—is a non sequitur.
A seminal essay about conservatism I had never read.
According to the Gaullist vision, a nation is defined not by institutions or borders but by language, religion, and high culture We should ponder the extraordinary fact that Oxford University, which granted an honorary degree to Bill Clinton on the grounds that he had once hung around its precincts, refused the same honor to Margaret Thatcher, its most distinguished post-war graduate and Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. Modernism in architecture was an attempt to remake the world as though it contained nothing save atomic individuals, disinfected of the past, and living like ants within their metallic and functional shells. He persuaded me that societies are not and cannot be organized according to a plan or a goal, that there is no direction to history, and no such thing as moral or spiritual progress. "the dust and powder of individuality." “prejudice” —by which he meant the set of beliefs and ideas that arise instinctively in social beings, and which reflect the root experiences of social life The real justification for a prejudice is the one which justifies it as a prejudice, rather than as a rational conclusion of an argument Although society can be seen as a contract, he argued, we must recognize that most parties to the contract are either dead or not yet born. Although society can be seen as a contract, he argued, we must recognize that most parties to the contract are either dead or not yet born.
Buildings break your heart, especially when you invest them with your ideas and your identity—especially when you make them symbols not just of who you are but of who you are supposed to be.
Trump's presidency can be described in many ways, but one accurate description is as a relentless, continuous war on professionals and professionalism. Elites are influential by dint of who they are and whom they know. They are elite because they have social connections and powerful positions. Professionals, by contrast, are influential by dint of what they know and what they do. Their status is contingent on both their standing and their behavior For amateurs, "compromise" is a dirty word; every issue should be settled purely on its merits. Transactional politics — the politics of bargaining and negotiating — is thus inherently distasteful to the political amateur, who views "each battle as a ‘crisis,'...each victory as a triumph and each loss as a defeat for a cause." The point is not that amateurs should stay out of politics and leave it to their betters. Not at all. The point, rather, is that professionals and voters, like air-traffic controllers and airline passengers, have different roles to play, and both roles are essential. Pushing aside party professionals and assuming that increased participation will solve every problem is like coping with airport gridlock by firing the controllers while packing the planes with more people.
The attack on the Capitol was a predictable apotheosis of a months-long ferment. Throughout the pandemic, right-wing protesters had been gathering at statehouses, demanding entry. In April, an armed mob had filled the Michigan state capitol, chanting “Treason!” and “Let us in!” In December, conservatives had broken the glass doors of the Oregon state capitol, overrunning officers and spraying them with chemical agents. The occupation of restricted government sanctums was an affirmation of dominance so emotionally satisfying that it was an end in itself—proof to elected officials, to Biden voters, and also to the occupiers themselves that they were still in charge
“We’re a democracy,” Mr. Black said.
“Bro, we just broke into the Capitol,” the America Firster scoffed. “What are you talking about?” “Any chance I could get you guys to leave the Senate wing?” the officer inquired. It was the tone of someone trying to lure a suicidal person into climbing down from a ledge.
“We will,” Black assured him. “I been making sure they ain’t disrespectin’ the place.”
“O.K., I just want to let you guys know—this is, like, the sacredest place.” Fuentes distilled America Firstism into concise terms: “It is the American people, and our leader, Donald Trump, against everybody else in this country and this world. In case anybody was confused about what those options might be, Fuentes explained, “Our Founding Fathers would get in the streets, and they would take this country back by force if necessary. And that is what we must be prepared to do.” Lauren Witzke, a Republican Senate candidate in Delaware, publicly thanked the group for having provided her with “free security.” (She lost the race.) Five years later, in the months before the 2016 election, Stone created a Web site called Stop the Steal She echoed many Republicans I have met in the past nine months who have described to me the same animating emotion: fear
Rather, the picture that emerges of districts represented by the most committed Pro-Trump Republicans is one of fast-growing, rapidly diversifying greenfield suburbs where inequalities between white homeowners and their non-white neighbors have been shrinking and low voter turnout has helped deliver large margins to Republican candidates.
For Strauss, the classical teaching is a combination of wisdom and moderation that's oriented by man's excellence, but that still makes its peace with the necessities of political life. And that the modern teaching has decoupled wisdom and moderation, has let technology loose from moral control, and really is steadily on the way now—to just extrapolate beyond Strauss—to some more radical statements of this, to a post-human universal tyranny, where human nature is going to be replaced by artificial intelligence, the singularity, and the destruction of everything meaningful in human life.
Podcasts
- Bag Man by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC
Black Lives Matter Reading List
Lately, I've been participating in discussions (online and in person) about Black Lives Matter, police brutality, protests, and race relations. In one of these discussions, a friend brought up the frustration she feels when talking about these topics with friends and family who are less than sympathetic to the argument put forth by the Black Lives Matter movement. In her own words:
I feel surrounded by people who, I feel, do not fully understand the challenges black people face, and have faced for so long. They don't get the implications of slavery, because well, "that was centuries ago and they should be over it by now. Black people enslaved other blacks in Africa. blah blah" Ugh.
But what it often boils down to is the sentiment that black people should just miraculously pull themselves out of poverty, unemployment, a broken family structure, poor education, a terrible criminal justice system, and go get a job. Because they, "we", were immigrants and struggled, so why shouldn't black people have to struggle too? Why give them "handouts?" "Why are the police to blame when they kill each other more often, and kill police as well?"
I understand where these arguments come from, but I wish I could articulate and try to paint a picture of many of their lives and history so they can start possibly seeing things in a different light. Anyways, this is probably more of a phone conversation, but it's just been on my mind as it's always a sore topic in my house. And I'm not doing my due diligence.
With this in mind, I noted down this list of writers, books, articles, movies and music that came to mind. They have helped me understand race relations in the United States since I was in high school. I look to these and similar works to continue my education in how my country works. This is not a list of quick arguments, easy definitions, or flashy statistics. It represents an on-going education.
Any such list is invariably missing something. Please recommend additions and I'll update this post.
Writers:
- Ta-nehisi Coates - probably the writer I look to most often for guidance on these issues. Start with the essays listed here, especially The Case for Reparations, Letter To My Son (which is an extended excerpt from his book Between The World And Me), and The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.
- James Baldwin - the intellectual predecessor to Coates. Wrote mostly in the 50s-70s. His speeches and lectures, many on YouTube (like his debate with William F Buckley), are sometimes even better than his written work.
- Toni Morrison - a prolific writer, still writing. Song of Solomon, Sula, Beloved, The Bluest Eye are all great works of fiction. Her essays are great too. This profile is also great.
- Tim Wise - easily digestible, often logically sound, but less academic. A good starting point, not least because he’s a white guy.
- Jelani Cobb - academic and magazine writer. His long piece in the New Yorker this March on BLM is a good start.
- Cornel West - he’s recently kind of gone off the deep end, but generally his writing is incisive, sharp and part of the canon of great contemporary writing on race relations. A profile here.
- Wesley Morris - sports, culture, film writer. But his essays are often full of commentary on more than just sports or art. Like this essay from a few weeks ago that’s chock full of insights about changes in black culture and new black voices.
- bell hooks - academic, cultural critic, author. Mostly engagaged with feminism theory, post-modernism, capitalism, but race shows up in her work everywhere. Especially Yearning.
Books:
- The Warmth of Other Sons, Isabel Wilkerson - Possibly the fullest and most complete chronicle of the great migration, setting the table for how blacks left the south, migrated and settled in the north, and built lives in the face of myriad struggles. The legacy of this 6-decade long migration is still present today in cities like Detroit, Chicago, Newark, etc. Review here.
- The Half Has Never Been Told, Edward E. Baptiste - the story of how important slavery was to the founding of this country, and why it still matters. Review.
- Negroland, Margo Jefferson - personal memoir of a journalist, raised on the South Side in the 60s. Relevant as a middle-class counter point to narratives that tend to be about poverty. Which is to say, yes, poverty is a part of the problem, but even middle class blacks live different lives from middle class whites. I wrote about it here.
- Between the World and Me, Tanehisi Coates (as mentioned above). I wrote about it here.
- The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin (the intellectual inspiration for Between The World and Me) Short. Fiery. Review here. Actually, better review here.
- Rap on Race, James Baldwin & Margaret Mead - a conversation in 1970, at the end of the Civil Rights movement, Baldwin and Margaret Mead had a 7+ hour conversation about America, race, basically everything. It is full of wisdom. An essay series on it here.
- Arc of Justice, Kevin Boyle - about some of the underpinnings of the criminalization of Blacks. That’s a huge issue, and perhaps the most important one, which as I look back over this list, is sorely under-represented. But the relationship between blacks, the justice system, policing and voting is especially important in contemporary discussions.
- The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander - probably the best, most persuasive argument, in favor of seeing our current prison system as a system of mass incarceration, replacing Jim Crow and slavery before it. It comes up in basically every piece of writing I see now about #BlackLivesMatter, as well it should. Wiki page here.
- Racecraft, Karen and Barbara Fields - an academic and popular work outlining how “race” was invented to serve “racism” not the other way around. Review here.
Articles:
- Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights, Angela Davis (PDF) - another scholar and activist from the 70s who had a major impact on black thought. This article in particular is about how black women have been systematically denied birth control and some of the concerns of the feminist movements of the 20th century, like unwanted births or having to raise children out of wedlock against her will, are still disproportionately affecting black women.
- Asian American children’s letter to parents in support of BLM - although targeted toward immigrant parents, there are chunks of this letter that properly grasp the relations between blacks and other minority groups. There's a lot to be said about the aspirations of minority groups to white privilege and how this co-opts otherwise sympathetic people into anti-black narratives.
- A collection of contemporary longform essays is listed here. Lots of great essays and writers represented within. Including this collection of essays about police brutality.
- Resources aimed at white readers listed here.
Movies:
- Do The Right Thing, Spike Lee
- 4 Little Girls, Spike Lee
- He Got Game, Spike Lee
- Hoop Dreams, Steve James
- The Interrupters, Steve James
- What Happened, Miss Simone, Liz Garbus
- Selma, Ava Duvernay
- Dear White People, Justin Simien
Music:
- Nina Simone
- Beyonce
- Blood Orange
- Kendrick Lamar
- Tupac
- Notorious BIG
- Mos Def
- Talib Kweli
- Common
A Marxian reading of Technology
Tonight I attended my first meeting of the Jacobin Magazine reading group. Jacobin Magazine is a leading leftist magazine, providing cultural, social and political commentary from a polemical leftist perspective. The reading group meets once a month in Brooklyn and provides a semi-structured conversation for readers of the magazine. This month's topic was technology. And tonight's readings were Technology and Socialist Strategy and Red Innovation.
Red Innovation dealt with some of the anxieties the labor force currently faces, about being automated out of a job. It brought context to this topic by discussing the history of government investment in research and development, society's role in intellectual property rights and generally proposing a social structure that would encourage innovation without realizing some of the anxieties of de-skilling, greater unemployment or increased inequality.
Technology and Socialist Strategy dealt with the topic of technology in a slightly different way. It brought to bear different strands of Marxian theory. From discussing Marx's approach to technology (he was generally impressed with technology, but saw clear, inherent class based problems), to Gramsci's Fordist romance, to the late-century English labor movements - this article was a much more textured look at technology's role in labor force and social development. One of the main lessons I took from it, and from the discussion tonight, was that any technology reflects the system in which it was built. The technologies we live with today, and the anxieties they provoke, are inherently tied to the system in which they were produced. Conversely, technologies produced in a post-capitalist system might look, feel, perform completely differently. A question that could follow from this is - will new, completely different technologies possibly usher in post-capitalism? Or does the causal arrow only flow one way?
Some of the discussions tonight, especially about technology's role in government reminded me a lot of the general O'Reilly premise that with enough smart, efficient technology, government services can benefit everyone. This is generally a well accepted premise, and government's not so secret love affair with technology is something we should look at critically. The same government that monitors our use of the internet, or phones, or deploys drones across the world to "accomplish goals in our national interest," can easily be painted as a neutral, benevolent purveyor of technological efficiency for its citizens (cutting wait times at the DMV with an app, for example).
I'm far from a technophobe, but I also don't view technology as a neutral, value-less force. Technology carries values, and we should be careful when we promote one technology over another or technology writ-large over no technology.