Reviews and Comments

Fundamentally a history book, but written with enough narrative to feel like a novel. I'm not sure whether it's better classed as tragedy or horror: the fevered dreams of empire, the cruelty of feudalism-cum-capitalism, the menace of typhoid and scurvy, the genocide of colonialism, the hypocrisy of Christianity, the animistic forces of hunger and thirst...

Yet as skillfully as Nabokov in "Lolita", Grann's explanation of this world and its logic, the real characters and their motivations, succeeded in getting me to empathize with them all: none angels, none demons.

The technical details of the different situations are described in vivid detail: how the men-at-war (battle ships) were created and organized into "floating castles", how the survivors of the ship-wrecks set up camp, and how the Kawésqar people — who saved the survivors time-and-again — lead their lives.

The organizational and legal details were particularly interesting. That "the captain goes down with the ship" for instance, meaning they leave last, making sure to get all else off first - this being the practical bargain the captain makes in having complete authority.

Very horrible. Couldn't stop reading.

(Writing this review from memory almost 10 years after reading!)

Falkvinge writes his personal history of the Swedish Pirate Party, from founding in 2006 (the first Pirate Party) to gaining a seat at the EU elections in 2009.

It is a deeply pragmatic book. The process of founding a Party + Movement is non-trivial, and since it is a mixed strategy, requires compromise. The approach is described as having a centralized "scaffold" (of people in salaried or elected positions) which activists act from. The "3 Pirate" rule was an interesting innovation, where activists could make decisions in the name of the Pirate Party if 2 others agreed with them. This significantly decentralized power and enabled lots of creative actions. Still, the mostly centralized scaffold of party staff were able to make rapid and bold actions of their own, while consulting with activists, not getting held back.

A good book for people wanting to start, do and lead. (Reminds me of "Blueprint for revolution" by Srdja Popovic which is another movement autobiography or Otpor! in Serbia.)

Well, I made a paper model after reading this one and talked to a bunch of people about it as I was reading it.

In the subtitle, "the surprising factors that determine the fate of every project", the "surprising" is clickbait. But that's a good thing I guess, maybe means I've learned something over the years. Nevertheless, the book is dramatic, interesting and quite readable.

Flyvbjerg, a professor and consultant for megaproject management, compiled a huge database of megaprojects. This book seems to be the fit-for-public compilation of his research an experience. Packed with fascinating stories of great success (Empire State building, Guggenheim Bilbao) and hard(ly) success (Sydney Opera House, Heaven's Gate), interviews with Edwin Catmull, Franck Gehry and Daniel Kahnemann.

I think the practical point that stood out most for me is that the most accurate forecasting method is to refer to other completed projects of the same class, the more the better. This helps account for unknown unknowns & black swans which we otherwise don't factor in due to latent human optimism.

So read about how the Sydney Opera house went 14 times over budget and the architect was forced out half way, leaving Australia never to return. Read about how Pixar films go through ~8 iterations of feature-length, hand-drawn slide shows before being developed. And how solar and wind are the most reliably on budget of all project classes.

(And this is definitely an engineering book. While conscious of climate change, it goes on to suggest carbon capture and storage as a serious technology. And one of the examples of success is the expansion of Heathrom terminal 5... it is steeped in Capitalism Realism. Still valid and useful and helpful for doing stuff, just don't come for your critical theory.)

This is a book about working in groups, and while the target audience seem to be companies most of the content is transferrable to non-profits or anti-profits.

The 3 co-authors are all guys with PhDs, psychologists. Hayes seems to be one of the main people behind Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which seems to be the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy + Mindfulness.

The theoretical basis of the book is multi level selection (evolutionary) theory (MLS)+ commons theory. MLS expands Darwin's model of genetic & epigenetic variability, heritability and fitness to include learning & culture. They claim this expanded model accounts for social innovations and that the 'fitness' of humans really can't be accounted for if learning and culture are ignored. Apparently MLS is the mainstream evolutionary theory, so we can all stop straw-manning "hard geneticists" and their "selfish gene".

I skimmed the chapter on commons theory, but I think they did a good job for people new to it. They reformulated Ostrom's 8 principles in a convincing and accessible way.

The chapter on the evolution of learning was quite interesting from habituation, to classical condition, to social learning (e.g. mimicry), to operant conditioning, to symbolic learning. Not very detailed, but stands out as being the clearest I've heard the differences being described.

The second part of the book, the larger half, was less interesting. Here the authors go through their reformulations of the commons principles and how they apply to groups. The anecdotes and experiences are interesting, and there are some practical tips in there. However it's pretty dry... professional I guess. It feels steeped in Capitalist Realism — see book of same name by Mark Fisher. And they have this 4-quadrant matrix thing that they claim solves everything, and refer to the Prosocial method a lot ("Prosocial" appears over 300 times in the book!) which gives a strong taste of trying to establish a brand.

I recommend the first part (4 chapters on theory) but can't really recommend the second part.

Contemporary evolutionary theory X Commons theory? Let's see!

It's an adventure book, and a good one at that. It follow the life of two young men, boys, who meet at a monastery. One dedicates himself to the monastic order and convinces the other his calling is elsewhere. It's about art, self-discovery, the value of authenticity, and many other things. I read it in the original German, which was a bit tricky, but it has some beautiful words that don't get used so much (e.g. "Nichtloskommenkönnen".

I read Hesse's "Siddartha" about a year before this. This is a different book, but has some nice parallels. I can imagine I'd give it 4+ stars if I'd read it before I was 20 or lead a more normal life. It is beautiful and well worth a read.

This is a short, easily understandable guide aimed at horizontalist groups. Prefigurative, not prescriptive, with lot's of relatable examples, and at the end a large appendix of constitutional documents historical and modern to gain inspiration from.

I am glad this exists! It makes the case for building lasting structures, institutions, and that governance (via constitution) is a strong support to that.

There are times where I wish it was a bit more prescriptive, and had a more positive light on leadership and specializing which I now believe to be not only inevitable, but actively desirable.

Overall, a lot of good common sense for organizing, and a great entry for people who are newer to governance.

I received a printed copy from a friend after saying I hadn't read any classic anarchist literature.

Published in 1892, the book is as much a political commentary on that time as it is the conception for how things should change. The fact that clothing is a recurring issue, that the common people are often in rags and tatters, is unrelatable with the state of manufacturing today. In Kropotkin's time the machines where on the ascendant, but the outstanding demand was so great that people still went wanting. Much more relatable was the issue of rent. At one point he talks of people spending up to half of their income on rent, and I already know of cases where people pay more.

Thus it's interesting to see that a lot of the material want that Kropotkin was motivated by has been improved without an anarcho-communist revolution (his main point of agitation) but through social and liberal democracy, even partly neoliberalism (i.e. distribution of electronics.)

Workers are treated almost as if they are noble savages. While I agree that people are a hell of a lot better at dealing with adversity than we all realize, I do think Kropotkin's assumptions are overly optimistic. There are is a diversity of personality in every strata of society.

But let me say positively: this book's aim is to prove that a "better world is possible", which seems to have been in doubt then as now. It seems many elite thought that production could not meet all human demands, and that therefore there had to be elite and poverty. Kropotkin goes through branches of industry, political arrangements and technological developments to prove - with significant use of examples and figures - that all human needs can certainly be provided for.

As for "steampunk": the steam engine was there, the internal combustion engine not yet. I have never in my life read something by an anarchist/leftist/etc that was so enthusiastic about coal! And fair enough, at the time it must have seemed miraculous. Grapes in Scotland!:

"In the north of England, on the Scotch frontier, where coal only costs 3 shilling a ton at the pit's mouth, they have long since taken to growing hot house grapes."

But how much coal? Talking about a greenhouse market garden:

"... they obtain 143 tons of fruit and early vegetables, using for this extraordinary culture less than 1000 tons of coal."

Yikes, 10:1 ratio of coal to veggies... What was that about veganism? Oh yeah, that was also not a thing then:

"... the three principal products bread, meat and milk."

Overall, the book is optimistic despite bubbling over into the idealistic. Feminism does present, but a concern for non-human life is not spoken of. It motivates struggle, but does little to articulate how. Definitely worth a read for people interested in political history.

And as a finishing point, and testament to Kropotkin's technological optimism, he predicts solar panels:

"A Mouchot of the future will invent a machine to guide the rays of the sun and make them work, so that we shall no longer seek sun-heat stored in coal in the depths of the earth."

I started this while travelling and finished it in a couple days.

It's about Otpor! - the nonviolent and creative movement that helped topple the dictatorship of Milosevic in Serbia in the early 2000s (and NATO bombing Belgrade...)

But it's also about many other movements and actions across the world in the 20th century, with many events and interesting tactics I'd never heard of. Popovic makes analysis across these movements and gives ~10 broad advices.

The writing does at times get a bit annoying: he makes it sound like Otpor! and the Serbs figured everything out and he seems to like throwing leftists under the bus.

Nevertheless I think he makes a very good case for nonviolence and offers pragmatic advice: find points, however small, which 99% percent of population support (or aren't against), creatively campaign to win those & use the momentum and credibility from that to go on to the next, bigger thing.

TL;DR: work is dying, and we should help hospice it. Automation is actually good, capitalism isn't, and we have to address both at once. The struggle for a better world must include strategies which are long-term and wide-scoped in addition to the more familiar spectacular events we associate with leftist action. Another world is coming, we can help shape which.

I read this book 10 years after it was published; the analysis, arguments and proposals presented in the book seem to have only matured with time.

The book incorporates a lot of Marx (analysis of capitalism) and Gramsci ((counter-)hegemony). Piketty, Žižek and Fisher are mentioned. The book still very much "belongs" to the authors. Although this is a book of politics, analysis and theory, yet goes surprisingly far into practice.

It begins with a critical analysis of the contemporary left, coining the term "folk-political" to describe a combination of localism, prefiguration, horizontalism, demandlessness and power-aversion, and arguing that folk-politics cannot deliver new universal common-senses to replace those of neoliberalism. It continues with an investigation of how neoliberalism went from a fringe economic position in the 20's to the Mont Pelerin Society in 1945 to hegemony in the 1980s when Keynsianism was heavily challenged by stagflation: this was a long game with diverse tactics (supported by deep pockets). Next comes the call to reclaim the future, citing the great optimism of the early Soviets and the radical feminism of the 70s - "There is no alternative" must be reasonably challenged for a positive goal, instead of reactionary defence against capitalism. The demands for the future are then set out: 1) Full automation 2) The reduction of the working week 3) The provision of a basic income 4) The diminishment of the work ethic. Then comes a dive into Gramsci's theory of hegemony (which came out of the observation that the working class weren't revolting, contrary to Marx's predictions) and how to change it. Finally the ideas are sketched out into actionable steps, involving the familiar actors such as parties, trade unions and grassroots, but a lot more.

This is a really solid book! I learned a lot about working history and the current state of work. Especially now with LLM/AI new high point, it really feels like the emperor is wearing no clothes regarding the work ethic we still have - the sections on reconfiguring/abolishing the current work ethic are particularly relevant. The scope is very ambitious, and does a great job of justifying that level of ambition.

The prose is certainly quite materialist and rational. This makes it wonderfully clear, and the sentences quite quotable. Yet this form sometimes struggles against the utopic grandeur it portrays. That's fine, I know the mytho-poetic can be off-putting to some, but I think it would not have hurt. (Contrast to the almost dream-like story weaving of Graeber) Commons are scarcely mentioned, which as a fan makes me sad: I wonder if the growth in popularity in the last decade would have seen a greater focus. I would also add that the book, as with so many published books, could have been more concise, and this would have concentrated its value. The criticism of folk-politics is nuanced, but still comes across a bit paternalistic and exaggerated. Perhaps because it has indeed been my milieu, described our tacts. But I was glad for this strong take, it describes a lot of criticism I have very well. Lastly, the authors do fall into a bit of the "left = good" binary. While I'm in there personally, I do think we need to make a world for all to live in, and there simply is a spectrum of openness, extroversion, etc. In fairness, I think this is addressed with the authors making space for "good" hierarchical structures as part of an organizational ecology.

Reading this was sobering and clarifying. I have talked to everyone who was near me about it and it's still working on me now.

Seems to be 'the' long-termist book. Very, very utilitarian. Made me feel relatively safe about meteor strikes and volcanoes. Even made me feel a bit less worried about nuclear armageddon, which I previously thought would be a complete and total show-stopper. I feel he downplayed the badness of rapid biospheric destruction & atmospheric change.

The conclusion that AI threat outstrips all other existential risks is something I still can't get on board with. In any case, it seems enough EA people (the presumed target audience) agree and are on the case. That leaves the rest of us to battle the current and progressing crises :)

Definitely worth a read. The span and scope Ord addresses does invoke feelings of awe and compassion. 3 stars because it is politico-philosophical book, but reading it has lead to me changing very little.