A belated and groggy Wednesday reading
Aug. 21st, 2019 07:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyJust finished: The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots & Class Conflicts in the American West, Mark A. Lause. I already wrote about this and my feelings upon finishing it are the same: great content, shitty writing. It took me a long time to read because his sentences are so tortured that I kept having to re-read them just to know who killed who. I want to copyedit the whole thing.
Currently reading: Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto by Aaron Bastani. I picked this one up because of the title. It's another Verso book, actually. This one is a pure delight, however. For those of you who haven't figured it out, FALC describes my politics in a nutshell, but this book is a detailed explanation of how it's actually possible. It's the most gleefully utopian thing I've read in awhile and I don't even care if it's true, it's a story I desperately need to believe.
So far, at least one of his assertions is wrong, anthropologically speaking (the shift from hunter-gatherer to agrarian = development of culture is way over simplistic and not very accurate) but I don't think it changes the central thesis of the book, which is that advancements in technology can result in post-scarcity, and that capitalism as such doesn't make any sense in a post-scarcity society. The other economic arguments he's put so far are demonstrably true, so I'm interested to see where he goes with it. (I have a Whole Thing about how a planned economy can work using AI—not that I'm the first to suggest that.).
Also it's well-written so maybe Verso does have editors.
Currently reading: Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto by Aaron Bastani. I picked this one up because of the title. It's another Verso book, actually. This one is a pure delight, however. For those of you who haven't figured it out, FALC describes my politics in a nutshell, but this book is a detailed explanation of how it's actually possible. It's the most gleefully utopian thing I've read in awhile and I don't even care if it's true, it's a story I desperately need to believe.
So far, at least one of his assertions is wrong, anthropologically speaking (the shift from hunter-gatherer to agrarian = development of culture is way over simplistic and not very accurate) but I don't think it changes the central thesis of the book, which is that advancements in technology can result in post-scarcity, and that capitalism as such doesn't make any sense in a post-scarcity society. The other economic arguments he's put so far are demonstrably true, so I'm interested to see where he goes with it. (I have a Whole Thing about how a planned economy can work using AI—not that I'm the first to suggest that.).
Also it's well-written so maybe Verso does have editors.
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Date: 2019-08-22 12:57 pm (UTC)But I think it's been well-established that permanent settlements, culture, the arts, language, religion, etc., all pre-date agriculture, so it's a weird assertion to make.