Greg

like a lot of climate fiction, it picks one focal point to hone in on, which i think flattens the hyperobject. And i think the politics are a bit confused. I liked the thread of community emerging amid collapse, but it ended up not really trusting in that either? So i wasnt left with much other than grief.

Notably, published before the wildfire threat really kicked up in gear…

Great primer on an issue that is terrifyingly important. Sadly dated by the collapse of the US government, but that's not her fault! Read and consider what might have been... and maybe, if we survive, what could yet be.

RIYL sylvia federici

reading the judea passages in 2024 is extremely bleak. The jews knew what we were getting into, it was all obvious then, smdh

Credulous econospeak that already felt naive and dated when it came out, now seems outright dopey. Reminds me of the Lean Startup in how it's oblivious to the problems of its pat framework. What are the successful platforms that we trust and celebrate today? I can think of a few that aren't outright villains (Etsy, Kickstarter) but for the most part this concept seems like a dud whose time has come and gone.

Challenging but rewarding read, needed to look up a word every other page or so. By the end I was very annoyed with both characters, but that was kind of the point. I wish for a story more about Tsau, less about the whites self-regard.

This was a real disappointment after Eghbal’s excellent ‘roads and bridges’ report. the author seems to have bent right in the direction of macho developer culture that overvalues engineering wizardry and underinvests in maintenance and community. Rather than seek to learn how to sustain investment in maintenance and community, Working in Public turns against its own namesake value and instead calls for acceleration of the heroic individualism that has left the internet a wretched husk of what we imagined it would be.

accessible read about the most important topic around, but i wish he’d worked a little harder for insight as to what can be done. Reads like a long set of magazine articles. I fully agree with his conclusion — to have anything like a functioning society for anyone other than the filthy rich, we will need to establish a universal right to housing — but he lands there on the fifth to last page of the book. Come on my dude

great chapter on cooperative community information infrastructure

i’m in this one , great chapter ;)

loved it at the time. Does not really hold up so well in retrospect

holds up worse than here comes everybody. Too optimistic, did not see the clear signs of unsustainability and the weaknesses of the surplus, the extractive nature of the systems

the examples he gives have aged remarkably badly, and reveal the risk of mindlessness and toxicity if these ideas are deployed without a value system beyond profit to guide them

At least someone tried.

Style over substance but i didn't really mind

Their reaction when they see the natives leaving before the storm... i still think about that and shiver.

Desperate cope for the Davos set. Truly embarrassing stuff. The first line of the book reads: "What is capitalism?" She never answers the question, because she just does not want to think about it.

this is the most important stuff in the world, and this book can serve as a fine jumping off point for further study. I prefer bollier’s Think Like A Commoner, though, as a focused look at the topic. The early chapters of this are great as they provide a real pattern language; that format drops off tho and it becomes more of a hodgepodge of stories and essays, which i found disappointing. Yes the world is alive, no we can’t survive as commodities under capitalism, yes there are alternatives— but how? Desperately we need to get clearer on how, because it’s hard. I am resolved to keep looking.

Love how he nails Freud. Also appreciated how he homed in on Marx's flaw (ironically, bourgeois belief in the power of politics combined with a messianic apocalypticism, which obscured the more relational needs for social transformation in socialism). His big agenda: cooperative industry and little-d democracy. Early advocate of Basic Income Guarantee. I'm all about it. He doesn't seem to think much about women, though.