Infocide in open content communities: Includes flouncing, but puts it in a larger context.
Bankruptcy court overlooks predatory lending, discharges student loans based on debtor’s autism instead. It’s important to remember that the strategies that benefit an individual client in court can be harmful overall (and maybe even to the client in some ways). Here, the strategy is only desirable because of the way creditor-favoring laws have made it almost impossible for a person to discharge educational debt; we didn’t have to create these alternatives.
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giandujakiss: There was fan fiction before you called it fan fiction, and before there was copyright it was called writing. -- Anne Jamison, English professor
Grant Morrison, Supergods: In law school, we used to joke about a class that would be called “Law and What I’ve Been Thinking.” This is “Comics and What I’ve Been Thinking.” In all honesty, this is not so bad in a book, but overall I wasn’t incredibly interested in Morrison’s acid trips (though he does strike a pretty good balance between ‘I totally believe in the mystical transdimensional experience I had’ and ‘this is valid for me, but I’m not telling you that I believe it’s the factual structure of the universe’) or his opinions on the various Batman films.
Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created: Tracks the “Columbian exchange” of biological material (sweet potatoes, potatoes and people prominent among the participants) from the Americas to Asia, Africa, and Europe, and back again. It’s a neat way to organize the history, and contextualizes many huge changes—especially the most environmentally destructive ones, as society after society fouled its own nest in response to particular encounters with globalization.
Jeannie Banks Thomas, Naked Barbies, Warrior Joes, and Other Forms of Visible Gender: Lots of neat examples of and gender-related theorizing about yard art, funerary statues, and Barbies, presented in disorganized fashion (though basically divided into chapters about each). I was most struck by her discussion of cemetary statues: female statues are usually generalized figures representing mourning, purity, erotic appeal, etc., while male statues are of specific men, often personalized with reference to an occupation or hobby. “Images of handsom, sensuous, nude, or partially nude men posed in fetching, prostrate, arresting, and vulnerable postures are not erected to mark women’s graves.”
Rebecca MacKinnon, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom: Evgeny Morozov’s Net Delusion is the funnier/more bitter version of this book, which also makes the core point that the internet is far from inherently liberating and that its liberating aspects are under continual assault from dictatorships and democracies alike. She talks a lot about China, which designed its policies much more carefully than other regimes and is able to offer satisfactory censored experiences to many of its people, and is now exporting its technologies of control to other regimes (as, not for nothing, American companies are too). MacKinnon is interested in the slow and difficult civil-society work of fighting illiberal uses of the internet, and she is therefore more hopeful than Morozov even as her solutions are inevitably partial and vulnerable to change. (Morozov doesn’t really offer any, since that’s not his project.) I am a big fan of MacKinnon’s belief in the important synergies between liberals and radicals: “Within the global environmental movement, some organizations and initiatives have seen value in working with corporations and governments. Others are opposed to compromise and insist on radical alternatives as the only course. All points on the spectrum need to exist for progress to be made.”
Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms & Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815: Although this is a book about the struggles for and against the implementation of interchangeable parts manufacturing for guns in the pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary era, it’s also a great book for anyone interested in the history of technology generally, because it’s a closely observed and theoretically rich study of the ways in which technology always has and helps make meaning. Even whether something “works,” it turns out, is hotly contested, especially when it’s human beings doing the measuring. Technological progress is not a phenomenon independent of political and cultural organization, as the workers who resisted the measurements and deskilling that came along with interchangeable parts knew quite well; Alder also points out that Japan was able to reject the gun entirely for a long period, because it didn’t fit with the kinds of fights the rulers wanted to have. In France, what it meant for a gun to “work” within a context of particular strategies for organizing men and fighting tactics was itself up for grabsons. And lest you think that’s all over and done now that we have really advanced tech, consider how well the iPhone “works” despite needing a case to limit dropped calls and frequent replacement of the gorgeous but easily cracked glass front and back.
Bankruptcy court overlooks predatory lending, discharges student loans based on debtor’s autism instead. It’s important to remember that the strategies that benefit an individual client in court can be harmful overall (and maybe even to the client in some ways). Here, the strategy is only desirable because of the way creditor-favoring laws have made it almost impossible for a person to discharge educational debt; we didn’t have to create these alternatives.
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giandujakiss: There was fan fiction before you called it fan fiction, and before there was copyright it was called writing. -- Anne Jamison, English professorGrant Morrison, Supergods: In law school, we used to joke about a class that would be called “Law and What I’ve Been Thinking.” This is “Comics and What I’ve Been Thinking.” In all honesty, this is not so bad in a book, but overall I wasn’t incredibly interested in Morrison’s acid trips (though he does strike a pretty good balance between ‘I totally believe in the mystical transdimensional experience I had’ and ‘this is valid for me, but I’m not telling you that I believe it’s the factual structure of the universe’) or his opinions on the various Batman films.
Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created: Tracks the “Columbian exchange” of biological material (sweet potatoes, potatoes and people prominent among the participants) from the Americas to Asia, Africa, and Europe, and back again. It’s a neat way to organize the history, and contextualizes many huge changes—especially the most environmentally destructive ones, as society after society fouled its own nest in response to particular encounters with globalization.
Jeannie Banks Thomas, Naked Barbies, Warrior Joes, and Other Forms of Visible Gender: Lots of neat examples of and gender-related theorizing about yard art, funerary statues, and Barbies, presented in disorganized fashion (though basically divided into chapters about each). I was most struck by her discussion of cemetary statues: female statues are usually generalized figures representing mourning, purity, erotic appeal, etc., while male statues are of specific men, often personalized with reference to an occupation or hobby. “Images of handsom, sensuous, nude, or partially nude men posed in fetching, prostrate, arresting, and vulnerable postures are not erected to mark women’s graves.”
Rebecca MacKinnon, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom: Evgeny Morozov’s Net Delusion is the funnier/more bitter version of this book, which also makes the core point that the internet is far from inherently liberating and that its liberating aspects are under continual assault from dictatorships and democracies alike. She talks a lot about China, which designed its policies much more carefully than other regimes and is able to offer satisfactory censored experiences to many of its people, and is now exporting its technologies of control to other regimes (as, not for nothing, American companies are too). MacKinnon is interested in the slow and difficult civil-society work of fighting illiberal uses of the internet, and she is therefore more hopeful than Morozov even as her solutions are inevitably partial and vulnerable to change. (Morozov doesn’t really offer any, since that’s not his project.) I am a big fan of MacKinnon’s belief in the important synergies between liberals and radicals: “Within the global environmental movement, some organizations and initiatives have seen value in working with corporations and governments. Others are opposed to compromise and insist on radical alternatives as the only course. All points on the spectrum need to exist for progress to be made.”
Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms & Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815: Although this is a book about the struggles for and against the implementation of interchangeable parts manufacturing for guns in the pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary era, it’s also a great book for anyone interested in the history of technology generally, because it’s a closely observed and theoretically rich study of the ways in which technology always has and helps make meaning. Even whether something “works,” it turns out, is hotly contested, especially when it’s human beings doing the measuring. Technological progress is not a phenomenon independent of political and cultural organization, as the workers who resisted the measurements and deskilling that came along with interchangeable parts knew quite well; Alder also points out that Japan was able to reject the gun entirely for a long period, because it didn’t fit with the kinds of fights the rulers wanted to have. In France, what it meant for a gun to “work” within a context of particular strategies for organizing men and fighting tactics was itself up for grabsons. And lest you think that’s all over and done now that we have really advanced tech, consider how well the iPhone “works” despite needing a case to limit dropped calls and frequent replacement of the gorgeous but easily cracked glass front and back.
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