Reading and research resources

General
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I was very impressed some time ago by some of the reading resources put forward by the people behind Mirlo - The Fun Music Place - it made me feel like there’s some really good background that will take care that Mirlo possibly wont go down the Bandcamp route for example… Anyway, I was thinking that it wouldn’t be bad to gather these kind of resources here too.. perhaps as a wiki page that can be slowly expanded.

At the same time, I feel like there’s so much criticism and thinks written that this never could be exhaustive list…

Maybe it’s better to have some short reviews about what people actually read. Or maybe also a ‘to-read’ shelf or shelves. Not sure how it would be smart to organize this. There was also a question / initiative about Working together to put on workshops / talks / etc

Anyway, here’s The Fun Music Place’s resources page:

And I would personally recommend reading Cory Doctorow: The Internet Con - How To Seize The Means of Computation - I have extensive notes about it too.

And today I was watching (again) Yanis Varoufakis discussing his book “Technofeudalism” which I haven’t yet read but watched Yanis explain arguments from the book number of times. In short, he claims, there is no capitalism any more. Online platforms aren’t markets but fifdoms, and we are all paying rents.

(this could be tagged ‘research’)

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I’ve read part of this, and the argument stands. It’s crucial to be aware that Big Tech, with their direct channels into everyone’s nervous system (not to mention all the other stuff that stems from it), are primarily (and among the primary) political actors. Building ways to break people out of their hypnosis is one reason for me to be in this space.

I don’t know if people on here are generally familiar with a certain pithy little take attributed to Upton Sinclair: can’t make someone aware of something if their living depends on not realizing it! Thus, seeing someone who got as far as finance minister in a representative democracy actually raise such a realistic point as Varoufakis did – well, that most definitely felt like a breath of fresh air!

I also like the framing as a story told to his daughter. I should finish that one – after all, it’s also a Balkan perspective.

Balkanisms

Can’t know if it looks exactly the same from, say, Ljubljana – but I’ve often felt that as a sort of para-colonial late-comers to capitalism, East Europe can offer outsider critique that is not possible from Western authors (who have, after all, been steeped in the stuff for generations.)

Consider the most basic example, that of Žižek: obviously passe, and problematic in a lot of aspects, but certainly made some waves back in the Occupy era. Maybe the first author who made leftist cultural critique accessible to me. I don’t even know who would be the Bulgarian equivalent - perhaps Kristeva? With her own spicy takes on gender that maybe don’t quite jive with the established orthodoxy.

Of course it’s always a compromise between the value of the outsider perspective and the putative reward of becoming accepted by the continental tradition of old white dudes (some of them queer, some of them ladies, but as a rule: unapologetically ouroboric and, ultimately, étatist…)

Maybe it really is this simple – don’t give money to Big Man, laugh bitterly at the fundamental absurdity of society, and solve any problems by direct action that cuts right through the oppressive construct. Western thought never lets us have it this simple – somehow it’s either overly diffuse, or straight to the point of “best of all possible cosmic horrors”. The mark of the inconceivable alternative…

Would be happy to read those, if you feel like sharing!

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I’ll drop a few recs of my own. One I see in my Foliate is Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow.

Couple paragraphs for taste, hope it’s OK to post them here:

excerpt from Chapter 8. How Live Nation Chickenized Live Music

Previously, running live events required artist managers, talent bookers, event promoters, venues, and ticketers, each operating largely independently from the rest. Now, though, a leviathan called Live Nation Entertainment has vertically integrated every element. It manages artists and books and promotes talent to play in venues it owns, runs, and tickets. It’s horizontally integrated too, to the point where it’s the world’s largest live entertainment company, the largest producer of live music concerts, one of the world’s biggest artist management companies (representing more than five hundred of the world’s biggest artists), and the world’s biggest live entertainment ticketer. All this gives it enormous control over live music.

excerpt from Chapter 10. Why Fortnite Sued Apple

The anticompetitive flywheel is obvious: Apple started with an innovative, attractive product, which locked in the first users. Then it gave software developers and content distributors an easy way of reaching that audience, encouraging them to invest in new software offering an ever wider range of content. That attracted more users, all tied to the App Store as their only source of software. Once enough users were locked in, the suppliers were too. That’s what gave Apple the power to unilaterally change the deal developers and creators had signed up to. They also gave themselves unlimited power to decide which apps made it into the store, with the developer guidelines not even pretending to offer any kind of procedural fairness: “We will reject apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, ‘I’ll know it when I see it.’ And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.” Researchers Nieborg and Poell describe this rule as “emblematic of the platform’s strict content control, heavy curatorial bias, and above all, low level of accountability.”

Each chapter is a good and well-substantiated case study.

So is, of course, Mood Machine by Liz Pelly as already recommended here.

But suppose one is already convinced of the general picture, and familiar enough with the technofeudal modus operandi so as to be able to extrapolate details. What texts help construct an alternative that does not run into the same pitfalls? (I gravitate to fictions and the mystical – but these offer more in terms of personal praxis, perhaps some harder deconstruction than non-fiction would permit, and certainly not what I’d call coherent system-building approaches.)

In this respect, perhaps Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher is worth a mention.

Which naturally leads me to recommend anything by Kodwo Eshun, such as More Brilliant Than the Sun. Adventures in Sonic Fiction. He also features in a nice anthology, Post-Punk Then and Now, alongside Fisher as well as this gem by Agata Pyzik:

“On The One Hand The State Is Funding You and Enabling Your Existence, On The Other Hand, Your Whole Shtick Is To Rebel Against It”: Post-Punk and Poland, a Talk by Agata Pyzik

Maybe that’s what I’ll read tonight…

And, speaking of system-building, I’ve already hinted at my fascination with the work of Stafford Beer and that whole “Project Cybersyn” thing. I like to believe a computerized centrally-planned economy in 1971 could have entirely deprecated money. USSR tried a tiny bit of that during the “rebuild” but too late and over too large a territory, traditionally mismanaged…

I wasn’t able to find the one which I started, but I went through the titles of his publications and there are some pretty heavy-hitting ones – both books as well as shorter papers. (Readily available in the coughrepositoriumcough…) Which I suspect have precipitated into technofeudalists’ knowledge bases already – same as someone caught a glimpse of D&G on a certain defense minister’s bookshelf…

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did you mean ‘balkanization’?

(pejoratively) the fragmentation of an area, country, or region into multiple smaller and hostile units […] usually caused by differences in ethnicity, culture, religion, and geopolitical interests. [ → ]

Or you mean area of Balkans?

Can’t know if it looks exactly the same from, say, Ljubljana – but I’ve often felt that as a sort of para-colonial late-comers to capitalism, East Europe can offer outsider critique that is not possible from Western authors (who have, after all, been steeped in the stuff for generations.)

Via famous Slavoj’s joke, the border of where the balkans start depends on who you are and where you are: for Austrians it starts at their southern border. For Slovenians it starts at their southern border. For Croatians, it starts … at their southern border.

But East Europe is Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.

Consider the most basic example, that of Žižek: obviously passe, and problematic in a lot of aspects, but certainly made some waves back in the Occupy era. Maybe the first author who made leftist cultural critique accessible to me. I don’t even know who would be the Bulgarian equivalent - perhaps Kristeva? With her own spicy takes on gender that maybe don’t quite jive with the established orthodoxy.
Of course it’s always a compromise between the value of the outsider perspective and the putative reward of becoming accepted by the continental tradition of old white dudes (some of them queer, some of them ladies, but as a rule: unapologetically ouroboric and, ultimately, étatist…)

I would like to argue against the view that if one is a philosopher or critical thinker situated either “inside” (in the west), or “outside”, (hmm… East Europe or.. Balkan?) one is unable to impartially analyse the state of things “inside” or/and “outside”. I personally wouldn’t dare to reduce views and work of philosophers like for example Žižek, Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, Foucault, Marina Gržinič, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Silvia Federici, Deleuze, or Yanis Varufakis to their regional locality or how long have their country of origin been socialist or capitalist. It would just be a too gross simplification.

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It would be. :+1:

I did not mean “balkanization”. I do agree there’s a pejorative aspect to that notion; I see it as something largely done to the region by to the actions of geopolitical forces not situated in the region – so naming this phenomenon of fragmentation after the Balkans is in somewhat poor taste.

I do, however, believe in the particular value of “outsider” perspectives and indigenous critiques to capitalism and to its self-reproduction through culture-bearing media. (To take you halfway across the world, I found the Pirahã’s responses to a missionary bringing legends of Jesus Christ to be enlightening; it also seemed like their simple and incisive clarity went completely over the head of the anthropologist relating that story.)

While we’re all part of the same grand and diverse world, whose cultural, scholarly, and aesthetic heritage rightfully belong to all of us (rather than to various kinds of “intellectual (property)” conglomerates in symbiosis with one particular geopolitical assemblage) I do view the dominant socioeconomic model of capitalism as having originated from a particular region of that world, establishing itself over a particular “long moment” in world history.

Similarly, I can only assume that all other interlocking systems which we find ourselves ambiently born in have concrete spatiotemporal origins – which can be roughly said to have an “inside” and “outside” as pertaining to information distribution, discursive norms, et cetera. Learning about those origins may be seen as instrumental to dismantling those systems which bring us adversity.

But I digress.

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You can find it on Anna’s Archive :slight_smile:

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Evgeny Morozov has a 9 part podcast on this that I think is well worth listening to

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