The Antisocial Socialist

What a lovely way to wake up this morning! My primarily anarchist servers have even issued rare permits for anarchists to lib out on Bluesky. 

Just finished: Nothing. Look, the degree to which my eyes are constantly blurry from fatigue and/or tears, it's a wonder I ever get to read at all.

Currently reading: The Long Red Tomorrow by Erik Grove. This continues to slap. We're at the point of the noir where everyone is dropping dead around our hero, there's probably no point in even solving the mystery, and he's held together by grit and duct tape. There is a particularly great scene where we get the guy going out a window, only it's Mars, so, lower gravity. Just one of the really nice touches that makes this book so well written. I adore how he's playing with all of the conventions of the genre but absolutely committing to the bit such that it feels fresh.

 Just finished: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow. This was very good. Like I said in my last post, there are a few areas where I disagree. I think Cory's objection to copyright makes sense and he backs it up well but also it's ideological and that means he's not taking into account copyright reform and its use to protect, rather than profit from artists. (Full disclosure: I get a cheque every year from Access Copyright, which I very much appreciate.) He ultimately takes a line of AI as normal technology, which I find ideologically abhorrent, as currently my prison abolition beliefs are warring with my desire to see every AI techbro in forever jail for what they are doing to our climate and our culture. He is optimistic about what could be left after the bubble bursts. I guess we'll see.

I'm disheartened in the way that I find it disheartening when people took the "let's make covid endemic" line or when people talk about climate resiliency rather than fighting against the corporations and governments that are accelerating the climate crisis. Maybe it's the utopian optimist in me but I really think we could put the brakes on a technology that no one asked for and no one wants and that is being shoved down our throats. We will have to write our own emails but that seems a small price to pay (and I already write my own emails).

But this is absolutely worth reading, because his analysis is always very shrewd and backed up by evidence and insights. The basic framing of the essays in terms of technology meeting human needs and extending human capabilities vs. dictating agency is vital, as is the framing of AI as a labour issue first and foremost. Plus, because it's Cory, it's entertaining and accessible to read.

Currently reading: The Long Red Tomorrow by Erik Grove. I met the author at one thing and then another thing and he was like, oh do you want an ARC of my upcoming book, which can always be a bit dicey. Just because you get along with a person doesn't mean you'll like their book. However! It is actually engrossing af. It's a cyberpunk noir set on a Martian colony and the vibes are impeccable. An ex-cop searches for a missing guy, while haunted by the literal holographic images of two women he has lost, and accidentally also seems to have acquired a dog. This is 100% Elon Musk's Mars, settlement in a place where no life is meant to live, with gritty miners and dust everywhere and shortened lifespans. It's also very Catholic-inflected for some reason (the cyberpunk interfaces are called halos, the cops are Saints, guilt and sin lurk around every corner). It feels like someone kind of wrote a neo-noir for Mark Fisher. I'm loving it so far. 

 Relieved to wake up in a city that voted for school lunches and not unlimited imported cops.* Chow is not my favourite, mainly over her handling of pro-Palestine protests, but she's the best possible outcome and will probably be more progressive with a stronger mandate than last time and a vastly more progressive council. I have quibbles with individual races, but council overall looks way better. It's a clear message that Toronto is sick of the far-right bullshit that has buried our city since the time of David Miller. 

Also, it's just nice to see someone who likes the city elected to run it. That ought to be a low bar, but Brad and his bot army really wanted to paint a picture of Toronto as a dystopian crime-addled hellhole populated entirely by homeless Hamas bike-riding drug addicts on one side and a tiny group of scared rich Jews** holed up in their midtown houses in terror on the other. It's really not that; as I point out constantly in my Law & Order: Criminal Intent Toronto reviews, actual crime in Toronto is negligible. It's one of the safest places in the world to live, unless you are Indigenous or homeless, but Brad was never concerned about those folks. Olivia, for all her flaws, genuinely does love it here, and I've met her a ton of times at various events. 

So this is not a victory in the "we won and get to have brunch" sense but it is a massive sigh of relief.


* Bad Badford's proposal involved hiring more cops than get trained annually in Toronto, so where were they supposed to come from?
** Bradford, as you can guess by his name, is not at all Jewish, and frankly his philosemitism borders on fetishistic.
*** For the three people who read them, there is a new season with a new detective and reviews are coming, but it's coming out when both Canadian and British baking shows are out, there's new Slow Horses and Diplomat, and there's a goddamn telly show about giant squid attacking people in Newfoundland, so it's going to have to wait. 

Just finished: Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo. Yeah, I just wanted this to go harder, I think. I got the sense that he wanted to write a creepy horror story and a dark academia story but with a happy ending for the slow burn gays, which absolutely I support, but I still wanted a deeper commitment to either the creepy or the dark academia story. Many problems would have been solved by making one of the characters not white. 

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. You have probably heard of this and I have had a hold on it for ages, but if somehow you missed it, this is a story about a tradwife influencer who gets isekaied into 1885, with a family that is like her family but not quite her family. This is not a spoiler because it's obvious from the word go: She is not actually in 1885. That story is interspersed with her rise and fall as an influencer and the crumbling reality of her perfect marriage and home.

Listen, I get that this is a deeply flawed book, especially the ending, which weirdly had some of the same problems as my issues with Summer Sons (a.k.a., you gotta commit to the bit). I also want to point out that this book is around 500 pages long and I read it in three days over a busy weekend because I couldn't. Stop. Reading. It's funny as fuck. Burke very clearly detests her lead character and often I find it off-putting when the point of a story is "let's put a bad person in a bad situation and torture the fuck out of her" but the satire is strong enough with this one that she gets away with it. 

Below all the funny there's a really solid core of asking why women enforce the patriarchy on other women, how libertarianism and conservative bootstrap ideology is ludicrous and even in the past that they idolize so much we lived in a society, and why white women are Like That. Anyway just really engrossing and I'd love to talk about it.

Currently reading: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow. I always appreciate Cory's writing on tech stuff, and while I disagree with him on a lot of his takes around AI, I'm still interested in his argument. Which boils down to that we need to think less about the tech itself and more about the political, social, and especially economic relations that dictate how the tech is used.

Which of course is very true, and he argues it brilliantly, but to me that's not all of it. You ultimately can't do good deeds with a cursed sword. That said, the distinction in the use of tech between a centaur (a technology that can extend what a human can do) and a reverse centaur (technology that dictates what a human can do) absolutely matters in AI discussions and so this is very good so far.

Just finished: Hustle, Baby by Priya Guns. I don't have a lot more to say about this but it's quite good throughout; I felt the ending was too rushed to feel climactic or satisfying, and I reiterate my issues with that mid-2000s thing of short sentence fragments (is that just a mid-2000s thing? I don't think I read enough realist fiction to be clear) but the setting, characters, and sharp-edged anti-capitalist satire cover a number of flaws.

Currently reading: Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo. This one was recommended to me ages ago (I forget by whom) and has been on my list forever. It's a Southern Gothic dark academia queer horror that ought to be more up my alley but something about it is bugging me??? I'm not sure what. It's about Andrew, who was about to join his best friend/adopted brother/obviously the love of his life Eddie at grad school at Vanderbilt when Eddie suddenly dies by suicide. Also they could both see ghosts. Eddie was rich and left Andrew a house (along with a roommate, Riley) and the one prof is very keen to have Andrew continue the research into folk stories that Eddie was doing before he died. Somewhat reluctantly, because he's quite a disagreeable person, Andrew falls in with Eddie's old crowd, who do a bunch of drugs and race cars. He keeps having visions of Eddie's revenant and is convinced he was murdered.

The vibes are pretty great and it's a fun read, but I'm waiting for something more. Humour, maybe? These characters are all in their 20s. They should be at least a little funny. Also, are there no girls who go to Vanderbilt? I feel like they would outnumber the boys in the department. All the boys are hot, which makes sense because we're in a closet-case's POV, and of course it's about Southern white masculinity (the treatment of the three POC characters so far has been...something) but. There are many boys and I find it hard to distinguish any of them, or Halse's working-class mechanic character from any of the academic nerds. 

I'm about 2/3 through and we've just hit a curse, which is cool and which I would have liked to have happened much, much earlier, as the dark didn't feel dark enough through much of the book.

Just finished: What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed. Chat this is so good. Read it. It's one of those books that is a joy to read in all its weirdness but holds up better under analysis (Wizards Vs. Lesbians episode about it). There is a lot going on at every level, which is possibly why Reed only writes a book every 30 years. 

Currently reading: Hustle, Baby by Priya Guns. This is about a Tamil family in Malvern in the early 2000s. As refugees from the civil war, they're barely surviving. Mary is a born-again Christian, her teenage daughter Dilo has been hustling the other kids since elementary school, and Mary's sister Anji, once a Tiger, gets roped into an MLM (not that kind, or that kind) and also gets the family kicked out of their church; unfortunately, Mark, a day-trader, is there to rescue them and bring them into a new church and a new scheme. 

This so perfectly captures the time and place, and I love the characters, especially Anji. I'm not a huge fan of the prose style, which has that very fragmented, snappy upmarket fiction rhythm to it, but it's worth it for the politics and satire.

Just finished: Nothing

Currently reading: What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed. I am racing the library hold expiry on this, but I think i'll make it as I'm into the last stretch. It's such a strange book to try to describe—there's almost no plot, just vibes. John tries to help Sudharma, the translator, communicate with the basket-men, a sentient species native to the planet, but ultimately worries that the only way to do so would be to alter Sudharma’s brain to understand the world the way the basket-men do. He tries to help Iren, a jess (a third gender that exists among one of the groups of settlers but is a marginalized identity), with a mysterious reproductive health issue. He has a relationship with Vo, a visitor from Earth, who is entwined with the aiyi who have taken over the planet and transformed her into basically a godlike entity. He struggles with the heteronormative world of Scythia compared to his polyamorous homeland.

Meanwhile the desert is its own thing, with every animal species beginning its life cycle as a plant. Also did I mention that John carries around a bag made from his great-uncle's skin soaked in his brain, which he refers to as his soul.

This is basically Jeff VanderMeer-style worldbuilding with Becky Chambers-style plotting and Ursula K. LeGuin-style prose and gender exploration, and it's just deeply engrossing for all its weirdness. Maybe because of its weirdness. Plot is overrated.

 There's been a lot of good content this week, especially with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor doing the podcast circuit, but the podcast that really had me this week was Behind the Bastards' "Radovan Karadžić: The Genocidal Dictator Who Became a New-Age Guru" (Part 1, Part 2).

This is a story about the Bosnian genocide so. I mean. It's obviously incredibly horrifying. I remember the news coverage at the time well. They deal with it as sensitively and respectfully as anyone could manage, though if you want a blow-by-blow for some reason, this is not the episode. 

It's Karadžić's post-genocide career that makes this episode truly special, and believe me that it's worth listening to the atrocities to get to what happened next. Because past the crimes against humanity is possibly the strangest, funniest turn a bastard has taken in a good long time. There are early comparisons to George W. Bush, better known for his other work, and maybe there's a profound tidbit in here about the way we remember and sanitize mass murderers whose crimes occurred in our lifetimes but basically do yourself a favour, if you can stomach the kind of content BtB features, give it a listen without knowing anything at all about what happened to Karadžić after the genocide, then tell me what you think.

Oh also Jamie Loftus is on it, if you want more incentive.

 Of course it's Wizards & Spaceships, "Are We Having Fun Yet? ft. Peter Watts." I have adored Peter's writing (both fiction and non-fiction) for about as long as I've been keeping this journal; Blindsight is by far my favourite hard SF, and probably my favourite overall SF book ever. His work is so good because he's ten steps ahead of everyone else in terms of thought experiments and unforeseen consequences. Also he's funny as fuck.

The sound quality of this is not great due to it being a live, and inebriated, recording, still, I implore you to give it a listen. Come for the doomsday discussion, stay for the terrible puns.

 Happy OMG911BBQ!!nevarforget!!! It astounds me that 25 years after a terrorist attack that had nothing to do with shoes or liquids on planes, we're still removing our shoes and getting our toothpaste confiscated, but 6 years into a pandemic that's still killing people, we're not making people wear masks in hospitals.

Anyway the one big legacy, of course, is that the Anglosphere decided once and for all which side it was going to fall on in the whole liberty vs security debate. It hasn't made anyone safer, of course (see: pandemic that killed 7.1 million people and counting), but it's certainly made most people more spiteful and mean, and foreclosed on a social vision of what is possible. We can only expect a greater burden of policing, greater state surveillance, greater corporate surveillance, more brutality. Until, I guess, people have had enough.

Of all things, the 1984-esque Flock cameras, along with data centres, seems to be the thing that's brought people to the breaking point. Even Republicans. Especially Republicans, because there are a whole bunch that are motivated by love of cars and anti-state sentiment. On Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, Margaret has a four-part series on "The Valiant War On Flock: How People Are Fighting Mass Surveillance" (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4), and it's very uplifting because in a lot of areas, they're winning. And we need a good news story.