Reading Wednesday

[sabotabby]

 My reading pace has slowed down substantially with the 8-hour workday + 5 hours of coursework a night situation, adding to the number of things I am miserable about. Speaking of misery and the promise that I won't have to work this hard forever for fear of ending up under a bridge...

Recently finished: Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto by Aaron Bastani. This book was a breath of fresh air. Even if it's all bullshit—which, I hope it isn't—I don't remember the last time I read such a hopeful book. Far from being an unrealistic techno-utopian fantasy, a lot of the solutions that Bastani proposes to address the major challenges of our time, including climate change, economic inequality, aging populations, resource scarcity, and automation, seem fairly doable. And he doesn't fall back on the inevitability of technology saving us, either; the solutions are there, but the obstacles are largely political, and require collective action. As I mentioned last week, I have some points of disagreement—he relies on some very outmoded thinking around development, and I found his discussion of the challenges of automation a little thin. I was also hoping that there would be more on economics; I find the idea that central planning has basically been revived in the private sphere in ways that were impossible during the USSR intriguing, and while he brings it up, he doesn't explore economics in as much depth as he could (in fairness, this is a manifesto, and the technicalities probably belong in a separate book). But he has some really intriguing ideas. Among my favourite was the idea of Universal Basic Services to replace the idea of Universal Basic Income (which is flawed for a number of reasons). Basically, everyone is guaranteed healthcare, education, transit, food, shelter, access to democratic/legal institutions, and information, whether you have a job or not. This seems like a far more sensible framework than UBI, and attainable given even the resources that we currently have and disregarding some of the more out-there proposals like asteroid mining.

Currently reading: Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing by and about Indigenous Peoples by Greg Younging. This turned out to actually be a style guide. I don't know what I expected. While it's well-written and thoughtful, it's really more for publishers and editors than people like me. Still, I'm learning some things so I'll finish it.

Comments

[dewline]

I've heard of the latter book via several channels and am considering buying it as soon as my finances allow for it. Based on your review, I think it will make a good companion to the other style guides I've been accumulating over the years.

[sabotabby]

It's definitely worth it if you're working in any sort of publishing.

[radiantfracture]

Thinking of using bits of the guide for my Indigenous Literatures course, but I haven't really dug into it yet.

[sabotabby]

I am learning a bunch of stuff; as a former editor, it's just interesting—the difference between land claims and Indigenous Land Title, or demand vs. assert.

[notasupervillain]

My question is always - how does the Earth sustain all the billions of us living a reasonable quality of life?

[sabotabby]

He argues an upper limit on population; once quality of life gets to a certain point and birth control is widely available, the population stagnates. Unlimited free energy (the upper restraint not being supply—we have the sun—but storage, which is where mining asteroids for lithium comes in). We already have enough food and housing, and can get even better as lab-grown meat improves, just piss-poor distribution.

[notasupervillain]

So, not turning people into AI versions of themselves that require fewer physical resources. Damn.

Anything else he thinks we need for utopia? Or just lithium for batteries?

[sabotabby]

Well, communism. :) Basically he's writing mainly about existing technology that's not well-distributed yet, or lacks efficiency, like lab-grown meat. He recommends a bunch of changes; the asteroid mining was the most outlandish one. I think he puts a bit too much faith in people like Elon Musk for a Marxist.

[notasupervillain]

As someone who thinks we can't possibly technology our way out of this mess, yeah. As someone writing a novel about Supervillains trying to technology their way through exactly this mess on their way to Communism of some flavour, I'm intrigued.

[sabotabby]

The nice thing about it is that in many ways, he's not arguing that we can technology our way out of this mess and (for the most part, occasional weird Elon Musk fanboying and/or asteroid mining aside) doesn't argue that anything is inevitable. It's more about applying the technology to social change. Which, of course, is still utopian, but a different flavour of utopian.