Franklin’s lectures are no less relevant in 2025 than they were when she added the final three chapters in 1999 to texts delivered as lectures in 1989 conceived as early as in the 1970s with respect to a a gem of fascinating sets of dialectics regarding what she calls the real world of technology. Holistic and prescriptive work, planners and planees, environment and nature, liberation and exploitation, time and space.
““How weary one gets of this constant pounding,” Theodora said ridiculously. “Next summer, I must really go somewhere else.”
“There are disadvantages everywhere,” Luke told her. “In the lake regions you get mosquitoes.””
— Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House, p. 147
A fun break, finished in a day, deserving of it’s reputation.
As the women arrive at the house I put on Portishead’s self titled, this one needs spooky music.
Runyon’s gangsters have more in common with Benya Krik than Hammett’s, who gets a cover blurb, to me, but those characters are only in the first few stories—the rest are about a jewish boy’s (the authors?) childhood in Odessa. I enjoyed them, but I’m going to put off starting the second Babel collection I’ve got for now.
Covering 2010-2020ish, this caught me up on a lot of the struggle I had been oblivious to before 2016 and been distrusting of various sources since. Pretty remarkable work. Bevin succeeds, to me, at detailing the process and outcomes of what seem to have been predominantly anarchist movements he’s sympathetic to.
What a strange little book. Kinda a rehash and very abridged version of Levy’s Hackers that begins in WW1 and ends post-snowden. Especially strange to finish on hackers fighting back against the government and corporate attempts to run “the internet” as I was descending to land at DCA to attend the last ShmooCon in DC.
I’m still team Evgeny Morozov re: “what’s the Internet?”
Starting the year with the slimmest book on the pile, and a memoir to boot, worked well the past two years. I forget why I wishlisted this one — I thought I’d read another Adolph Reed Jr. book but I see shelving this now that it was his son, Touré, whose “Toward Freedom” I’d enjoyed (and just added to Bookwyrm.)
Gravely started reading The Wrestler’s Cruel Study
Christmas gift
Content warning: pretty online
A few of my favorite very-online writers—but I’m think of Pargin and Jeb Lund (who for all I know don’t know each other at all) specifically here and not like, uh, Lockwood—are pretty good about using their veterans-of-forum-wars (or at least that era of online) past to be pretty strong voices for not being assholes on the internet.
this is a lot of that
cw: mens rights nonsense
my point: so if you feel like you don’t need some old guy rubbing your nose in a “deuteragonist" (I had to look up the word for that) “hey look at this kid who is a twitch streamer who is kinda black pilled, don’t be lame like this”, because you yourself are also over that, maybe skip this one
Ultimately it’s a fun read and a break from the John and Zoe books and pretty mad at the same stuff a lot of people are on mastodon are mad about re: the other social networks, so, I’m glad I read it.