Some brief notes on books, at the start of a summer that hopefully will allow for more reading.
Monk and Robot (Becky Chambers); Mossa and Pleiti (Malka Older)
Summer reading rec, and ask for more recs: “cozy sci-fi” is now a thing and I love it. Characters going through life, drinking hot beverages, trying to be comfortable despite (waves hands) everything. Mostly coincidentally, doing all those things in post-dystopian far-away planets (one fictional, one Jupiter).
Novellas, perfect for summer reads. Find a sunny nook (or better yet, a rainy summer day nook) and enjoy. (New Mossa and Pleiti comes out Tuesday, yay!)
Underground Empire (Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman)
This book is about things I know a fair bit about, like international trade sanctions, money transfers, and technology (particularly the intersection of spying and data pipes). So in some sense I learned very little.
But the book efficiently crystallizes all that knowledge into a very dense, smart, important observation: that some aspects of American so-called “soft” (i.e., non-military) power are in increasingly very “hard”. To paraphrase, the book’s core claim is that the US has, since 2001, amassed what amounts to several, fragmentary “Departments of Economic War”. These mechanisms use control over financial and IP transfers to allow whoever is in power in DC to fight whoever it wants. This is primarily China, Russia, and Iran, but also to some extent entities as big as the EU and as small as individual cargo ship captains.
The results are many. Among other things, the authors conclude that because this change is not widely-noticed, it is undertheorized, and so many of the players lack the intellectual toolkit to reason about it. Relatedly, they argue that the entire international system is currently more fragile and unstable than it has been in a long time exactly because of this dynamic: the US’s long-standing military power is now matched by globe-spanning economic control that previous US governments have mostly lacked, which in turn is causing the EU and China to try to build their own countervailing mechanisms. But everyone involved is feeling their way through it—which can easily lead to spirals. (Threaded throughout the book, but only rarely explicitly discussed, is the role of democracy in all of this—suffice to say that as told here, it is rarely a constraining factor.)
Tech as we normally think of it is not a big player here, but nevertheless plays several illustrative parts. Microsoft’s historical turn from government fighter to Ukraine supporter, Meta’s failed cryptocurrency, and various wiretapping comes up for discussion—but mostly in contexts that are very reactive to, or provocative irritants to, the 800lb gorillas of IRL governments.
Unusually for my past book reports on governance and power, where I’ve been known to stretch almost anything into an allegory for open, I’m not sure that this has many parallels. Rather, the relevance to open is that these are a series of fights that open may increasingly be drawn into—and/or destabilize. Ultimately, one way of thinking about this modern form of power dynamics is that it is a governmental search for “chokepoints” that can be used to force others to bend the knee, and a corresponding distaste for sources of independent power that have no obvious chokepoints. That’s a legitimately complicated problem—the authors have some interesting discussion with Vitalik Buterin about it—and open, like everyone else, is going to have to adapt.
Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero (James Romm)
Good news: this book documents that being a thoughtful person, seeking good in the world, in the time of a mad king, is not a new problem.
Bad news: this book mostly documents that the ancients didn’t have better answers to this problem than we moderns do.
The Challenger Launch Decision (Diane Vaughan)
The research and history in this book are amazing, but the terminology does not quite capture what it is trying to share out as learnings. (It’s also very dry.)
The key takeaway: good people, doing hard work, in systems that slowly learn to handle variation, can be completely unprepared for—and incapable of handling—things outside the scope of that variation.
It’s definitely the best book about the political analysis of the New York Times in the age of the modern GOP. Also probably good for a lot of technical organizations handling the radical-but-seemingly-small changes detailed in Underground Empire.
Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (Nicholas De Monchaux)
A book about how interfaces between humans and technology is hard. (I mean clothes, but also everything else.) Delightful and wide-ranging; maybe won’t really learn any deep lessons here but it’d be a great way to force undergrads to grapple with Hard Human Problems That Engineers Thought Would Be Simple.
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