And he ends with some intriguing off ramps to sites of resistance (or recomplication): the “Métis” of hands-on (and especially indigenous) knowledge and various forms of anarchic resistance to legibility.
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Greg Borenstein
@atduskgreg
Senior Technical Game Design Manager at : Design Lead on Secret New Thing. Before: TFT, Nexus Blitz, NYU ITP, MIT Media Lab, futurist.
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Scott doesn’t discount the real utilitarian gains created by some of these schemes but he also shows how many of them oversimplified the world’s complexities to the point of absurdity or mistook the visual aesthetics of order for rationality itself.
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5. Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott
Some classics are actually better than their reputation and this is one of them. It’s a catalogue of vivid historical examples of modernist methods of measurement and regulation: single-species forests, mega-planned cities, etc.
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Reading this made me want to write more and also made doing so seem easier, not my usual experience with writing books. Particularly ones that use untouchable Russian masterpieces to illustrate their ideas.
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He rereads his writing over and over constantly improving it to remove cliche and make things more specific. He lets the process force him towards deep empathy with characters of all kinds and the concise but utterly unique voice that is his signature.
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Saunder’s approach is, for lack of a better word, more phenomenological than any other writer I’ve read on writing. He attends closely to the experience of reading the words he writes, sentence by sentence and word by word. His primary creative process take the form of revision.
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4. A Swim In The Pond In The Rain by George Saunders
Saunders has taught creative writing at Syracuse University for 25 years and this book is his translation of his pedagogical approach.
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He goes into satisfying depth on how J Dilla developed his musical style and technique but far from hagiography, Charnas follows Dilla’s own experience and lines of interest to explain the institutions, histories, and technologies that made his innovations possible and successful
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3. Dillatime by Dan Charnas
I’m usually fairly averse to biographies. Searching for the meaning of some famous person’s historical impact in the details of their personal life can feel both hagiographic and gossipy. Here Charnas manages to do the opposite.
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And in this informal, conversational context Judt feels avuncular, like the brilliant, worldly uncle I look forward to hearing hold court on holidays.
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Judt’s story of being the child of Jewish refugees in a secular family is so similar to my own family. As is the constant intermingling of individual anecdote and world history. Through Holocaust survivor and Great Depression stories I grew up feeling like history was personal.
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It almost feels like the director’s commentary on Postwar: an account of both the history of the 20th century and Judt’s personal journey through it showing how he built the tools and perspective that let him write Postwar. But it’s even more intimate than that.
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2. Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder
Speaking of filling in historical gaps, I read Judt’s magisterial Postwar last year. This book is a kind of autobiography of Judt, written as a dialogue with while Judt was dying of ALS.
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Anyway it’s rare to find a book that is this intellectually exciting, fills in an important historical period, and helps explain your own personal experience. And this did all three for me.
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I could imagine a sequel to this book about how the High Weirdness of the 70s created the seed of alternative culture that slowly grew underground roots through the 80s before exploding into the mainstream in the 90s.
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Also this answered a great cultural mystery for me. As a teen in the 90s I felt like there was a canon of alternative culture across media: PK Dick novels, William Burroughs, The Illuminatus Trilogy, Factsheet 5. I didn’t know what these all had in common before reading this book
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He uses this theoretical perspective to talk about religious/psychedelic/weird/mental illness-related experiences without collapsing them or mystifying them, which is an impressive feat.
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1. High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the 70s by
Davis builds a sophisticated theoretical apparatus out of a lot of the theory that most resonated with me (Latour, Fisher, Speculative Realism, etc) and then, most excitingly, applies it!
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Since I’m not going to finish another book today it looks like this finishes my Book Thread for this year. 66 books and ending with Mark Fisher seems appropriate: twitter.com/atduskgreg/sta
Thought I’d write a little bit about my 5 favorite books from the year…
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66. K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher
I’d been slowly savoring this huge collection over the course of the year, not wanting to run out of unread Fisher. Having read the politics of excerpts what hit me hardest was the section on Popular Modernism…
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Is there a good book about the history of satanic panics? I’m curious about the connection between the conservative christian paranoid reaction against horror and fantasy media of the 70s and 80s and online reactionaries’ obsessive hunt for “woke” messages in today’s media.
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“Technology is religion by other means.” — Eugene Thacker, introduction to Techgnosis by
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These pieces unify his artistic and critical voices with a sense of urgency that feels incredibly relevant today both as someone who tries to make creative work and as someone trying to understand the political and material forces that shape our world and how it feels.
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Fisher’s writing about music (post-punk and “hardcore continuum” dance especially) captures the complex interplay between cultural invention, economic conditions, and the possibilities of political change.
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66. K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher
I’d been slowly savoring this huge collection over the course of the year, not wanting to run out of unread Fisher. Having read the politics of excerpts what hit me hardest was the section on Popular Modernism…
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65. City of Quartz by Mike Davis
The classic social history of Los Angeles: union busting, real estate speculation, racial oppression, racial oppression through real estate development, union busting by the Catholic Church, and the globalization of real estate speculation.
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Which is funny because their paper explores how ownership of “algorithmic” work functions by proceeding like a detective story trying to hunt down the chain of ownership of each individual component of the final work. A story in which my grant of permission is the MacGuffin!
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I’d completely forgotten that I’d corresponded with the authors (@aballes2c, E. Reddy, and B. Caciki) back in 2019 and given them permission to reproduce images from the comic in their paper.
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Today I stumbled across an academic article published in Big Data & Society about my Generated Detective comic from back in 2014:
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Maybe the top of the thread is actually an easier place to start:
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100-tweet brainstorming prompt from @vgr. Somewhat surprised at the topic he chose for me. But things immediately started jumping to mind so, let's see... twitter.com/vgr/status/120…
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100. Cities are where people come together to figure out how to live together with others, like and unlike ourselves, often with great difficulty. They’re where we give up the juvenile dream of running off to be left alone and admit, finally, that we’re all in this together.
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Maybe for Avatar 3 James Cameron’s grandkids can show him how to turn off motion smoothing.
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Avatar 2 is an incredible achievement in a lot of ways but because of the 48 fps my brain kept telling me it was an insanely over ambitious Halo cutscene.
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You can tell I’m ready to leave Twitter because I’ve stopped resisting the urge to Hate QT.
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“AI is coming for your jobs” discourse — in a world of outsourcing, union busting, and casualization — is another example.
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“Science fiction is always about the present” —
New corollary: “Fears about future technology are always about present technology’s ills”
Imagine writing on SOCIAL MEDIA about the fear that some future tech will shatter consensus reality and make media untrustworthy. twitter.com/deepfates/stat
This Tweet is unavailable.
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So if you want a world with all the wonders of “AI art” generation tools and ALSO thriving communities of artists making “mind blowing shit” then the thing to worry about is social welfare, not just tech and creative craft.
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If we had a strong social benefits system and affordable big cities then the damage “AI art” will do to artists’ earnings would matter a lot less. Without those it looks a lot like kicking out some of the few remaining toothpicks holding up the whole edifice.
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There’s a reason that the most legendary creative scenes emerged from big cities where living was cheap: punk and disco from Hell’s Kitchen, post-punk and jungle from London council estates, etc. These things require a community of artists with time and the freedom to fail.
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Yes in the hands of artists — like all other tools — “AI” will be used in all kinds of exciting ways. Musical creativity will survive and evolve. The danger is not to creativity but to the already incredibly precarious economic foundations of artists lives.
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Most of the money in the “creative economy” is made by the people who own the platforms and means of transmission. Google, Clear Channel, Spotify, etc. Licensing (ie. paying artists) is a significant cost for them and they will use these tools to drive those costs down.
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