No guarantees that I finished any of these. I drop a lot of books, even ones I like.
This is far more interesting than any self-sucking about cybernetics. All of the philosophy I've read that deals with similar topics refuses to discuss power and control as natural realities, instead treating them as aberrations. Skinner is excited to wield this power to shape humanity, so the successes and failures of his theory are much easier to grasp.
"...there is no reason why progress toward a world in which people may be automatically good should be impeded. The problem is to induce people not to be good but to behave well."
The problem beneath the problem is that "good" and "well" are undefined. We cannot even hold the sanctity of life as a truism; Western governments fund genocides on behalf of ethnostates. Asserting or fighting for freedom in the short term is by no means a matter of discomfort with the realities of behaviourism. We can't trust the people who devise the incentives. Antivaxxers might be stupid, but it's no coincidence that Americans are the loudest antivaxxers--why would you trust a privatized healthcare system?
In the years since Skinner I think people have passively absorbed the reality that structures of incentives and reinforcements are incredibly powerful. The central question of video games is how deterministic mechanisms can create intense emotional experiences.
Democracy is the central contradiction in applied behaviourism, and it is one that Skinner sidesteps (in what I have read so far). The only way to guarantee that social incentives serve the common good is for society to control itself. At the same time, there would be intense interest in hijacking and misusing the levers of control. This leaves us in the usual place, where (drink) capitalism and its anti-human incentives need to go before any progress can be made. Even then, corruption is a possibility, as so many failed communist projects show.
I wrote a longer piece on the book here.
I read this mainly to finish the trilogy of the Stalker movie and game, and it differs from both of those. The three characters in Tarkovsky's movie are aggressively archetypal (there is probably a better word for this). Writer, Scientist, Stalker. I was surprised that the majority of the novel happens outside the Zone, dealing with the visit's effect on society. The characters are remarkably concrete.
Red is a great character, drawn toward the Zone even as it destroys more and more of his life. The penultimate section was pretty haunting. Adam Curtis' comparison between Soviet society and the Zone always fell a little flat for me, but that scene in Red's apartment clarified it.
Zenless Zone Zero's titular zones are reminiscent of the Zones in Roadside Picnic, according to Wikipedia.
Absolute classic. I would need to reference the book heavily to say much more about it. The method is great, the writing is great, the footnotes are even fun since Marx is such a dedicated hater. I love the interplay between his data and interpretations.
My most vivid memory was grasping Marx's use of alienation. I had understood it as a sort of cosmic, general making-alien of labour, and I think that is part of it, but more literally the right to dispose of one's own labour-power is given over to the capitalist, and the products of that labour are also alienated (i.e. taken away for sale). My old reading was conditioned by some of Marx's earlier writing, which had not broken from Hegel completely and was not terribly legible to me.
I am split on whether Capital is useful in explaining conditions today. I am glad I read it, I am working through the other volumes, but I have read some compelling criticism of Marx's finer points, too nerdy to get into here. Volume 1 is beyond argument as far as I can tell.
Kind of an aimless book written by the guy who made up the word cybernetics. It touches on the concept of machine learning (in 1964), but says very little. I'm kind of confused at how a book like this won an award, it's a nothing book. Some very basic control theory, and pontification about machines making copies of themselves and the roles of machines in the future.
The idea, I guess, is to discuss the religious significance of engineering/cybernetics in a decidedly Abrahamic frame. But it falls prey to the same issues as AI promoters--it doesn't pass the smell test, basically. I have to define a human in terms of function to be wowed by a concept like machines creating copies of themselves--Wiener draws an analogy with God making man in His image. If the AI revolution has proven anything it's that we are easily fooled by semblances of humanity, but these are not humanity.
Overall, it's just past its expiry date. An interesting relic of the 60s, but I think I need to read Wiener's actual Cybernetics and some more modern information theory stuff. God & Golem feels like it was written very cynically for "general audiences," exploring nothing in any depth. It might wow some hippie-wannabe teenager in 1964, but a 2023 internet user has spent most of their life immersed in systems 10x more advanced and spiritually ambiguous than anything Wiener discusses.
My issue with the book in brief is that I assumed it would spend 300-500 pages discussing the topic promised on the cover. It is less than 100 pages of large print, and has all the depth that this implies.
I have only read a couple Japanese novels, this and Confessions of a Mask, but both express a level of detachment in the narrator's voice that is very appealing to me (because it mimmicks my experience as a chronic internal-monologuer). I don't know if this style is an artifact of translation, or the Japanese language, or the stories being told, but I like it a lot. Many of America's great contemporary writers are very complex--with Pynchon I often feel like I'm missing the joke--but Norwegian Wood's complexity is all contained in its characters. It's like Suttree, if I have to compare it to an American book.
The content of the novel is fantastic, and tragic. Read it yourself. It reminds me of the Elementary Particles a little bit, but Murakami can summon the same intensity as Houellebecq without getting grotesque. No shade to the latter, I love that book, but what sticks with me is its critique of 60s hedonism more than any of its fictional people. In Norwegian Wood student radicalism bubbles under the surface but it is first and foremost about people. It is political the way life is political.
I was put off of Murakami because so much of his work is branded as postmodern--a flavour of art that needs to be handled very carefully if you want to avoid meaningless navel-gazing. Finishing Metal Gear Solid 2 for the first time must have lit up some dusty pathway in my brain because I was immediately drawn to the novel, which has been sitting on my shelf for probably over a year. Reading this piece (ARCHIVED) sealed the deal.
It's way better than I thought it would be. Reframed behavioural psychology for me, not as something "evil" but as a reality we have to contend with. It has humanist uses, but like any technology it exists in a definite context.
I've had mixed results with the techniques. I got a morning yoga and workout habit going for a few weeks but that completely fell off. Something that really worked was partitioning space--I made a separate account on my computer just for work and that has made it much easier to write. I'll give the exercise habit another shot at some point, maybe it'll take.
Not sure what to make of this novel. It had a strong effect on me, but so much of it is this fictional hagiography, little more than a list of Arseny's miracles as though we need to be reminded that he's a good person. The central tragedy and its effects on Arseny are rendered well, especially as a framing device for the time/language/identity stuff. Interjecting with modern language every once in a while is also an effective technique to communicate strange or mystical experiences. I was not expecting to read the word "supertask" in a medieval historical novel.
The bulk of the Book of Cognition is incredible. Arseny's abilities as a healer are ambiguous for the most part, and the editorial narrator is quick to tell us that people are gladdened by Arseny himself more than the herbs he gives them. This is an interesting theme but Arseny (now Ustin) spends the second book performing genuine miracles and speaking with Foma, who magically knows everything about him. The book was still compelling to me--I read a third of it late one night in fact--but the second book was carried by the prose more than the events themselves. Lisa C. Hayden's translation is great.
My question, I guess, is whether Laurus is magical realism or if its portrayal of Arseny's perspective makes it seem that way. Ambiguities like this are central to the novel. Characters frequently discuss the strange creatures that live beyond the known world and people take their existence for granted. Arseny's healing is another example, of course. It is largely about uncertainty and belief.
I have read about 40 pages at time of writing. So far, I've always conceived of Nazism through a high school history education and the pop-cultural backdrop of History Channel shows, where Hitler is eating ground up mummies or whatever. I am only a little ways through the book, but it really does make sense of why Nazism was able to take hold. As a layman, the question of "how could this happen" looms large over the holocaust--how could the German citizenry accept such a thing? Obviously anti-semitism was widespread in the late 19th century, but in Germany it was part of a bigger nationalist-theosophist milieu.
Germany was a jigsaw puzzle of regions and ethnicities leading up to WWI, and a bunch of reactionaries wanted to unify (ethnic) Germans as Germany. This is the material reality of the whole thing. As this antagonism develops between Austrian Germans and e.g. Slavs, theosophy starts to take hold, professing a pseudo-Hinduistic cosmic caste system where spirits can ascend through the racial hierarchy over lives, eventually becoming Aryan. These guys love swastikas, but theosophy is not nationalistic in and of itself, it's a hodgepodge of esoteric beliefs and took root in many countries. It also calls itself a science, and has a place in occult magazines alongside the hard science of hypnosis.
The catalyst for Nazism seems instead to be the "volkisch" fantasy of medieval German peasantry, rituals praising Wotan, and worship of nature in general. Paganism, in a word. The practice of volkisch activities in the late 19c. served to create a mythical thread of history through Germany, professing the continued existence of a German volk since time immemorial. This was allowed to mingle with theosophy's racism and provided it a pseudo-scientific basis for anti-semitism. So we have this occult-nationalism on one side, and an occult-science of racism on the other. It's an ideology with a powerful emotional and psychedelic effect, and it legitimizes itself as a science. If these ideas infect powerful people, what do you think is going to happen?
WWI left Germany more of a jigsaw puzzle than before. It was destroyed and punished unjustly by the "international community" and this real grievance was melded with all the occult shit. Everything was up in the air and it offered the perfect social environment for some crazies to seize power.
To me there was a striking resemblence to Qanon, although the current formulation of reactionary politics hasn't done any outright genociding yet. The American right loves the myth of the founding fathers, which establishes an American historical bloodline mostly through the legal instrument of the constitution. For years, American values have been "under attack" from any number of commie, non-white, or non-straight groups. Qanon is the occult science. Adherents try to divine the occult meaning of the Q drops, and they have unwavering belief even as prophecies fail to materialize. It is a revolutionary gnosticism that wants to destroy leaders of the material world so as to pass into the spiritually perfect Trump-universe. I don't know, I'm just riffing here.
The book itself is dense, listing many names, years, and events in a fairly dry way. This overload of information serves to establish the broad popularity of what Goodrick-Clarke usually calls pan-Germanism. Interesting details still stick out, and he establishes the lineage and mutation of the ideas he is discussing, even if my eyes kind of glaze over at the specificity.
I picked this story up again for the first time since high school. I was thinking about the phrase "bug man" and the story seemed like a good thing to consult. There are two parts of the Metamorphosis that I found scary: The way that Gregor totally normalizes his situation, and the way his attempts at communication are always interpreted as malicious. The bug part is gross, but not scary; it is scary for the family but we're in Gregor's perspective the whole time and so we kind of normalize his situation as well.
That's what really sticks in my head, and where the Metamorphosis does kind of dovetail with the whole "live in the pod eat the bugs" thing. Gregor rationalizes an insane situation. His main problem at the beginning of the story is that, because he is an insect, he cannot get out of bed and go to work. His insistent rationalizing leads to each of his injuries, his familiy's hatred of him, and his death. The phrase "America is Already Great" comes to mind, liberals writ large insisting that nothing is wrong while everything gets worse. MAGA itself was and is a symptom of that country's profound sickness but liberals are unwilling or unable to deal with that and retreat to their usual platitudes.
Anyway. Kafka's prose is well-suited to the kinds of stories he writes, I would describe it as serviceable in the best possible way--not at all flashy, but serves to focus our attention on the proper details. It is not suited to "classical" horror (slasher/cosmic/whatever), but is perfect for a character like Gregor: the "normality" of the writing contrasts with the situation and is an integral part of the story's horror. This is also a big part of the appeal of his famous horror-beaurocracy novels. Although I must admit they aren't really my thing.
Strange, brooding, lost. I can't decide if it's his best or his worst but it's one of my favourites. If it's his best novel, then it's mankind's greatest work of art. It wrestles with a dense tangle of ideas and I can't help but think it's allegorical. The name Bobby Western. Characters sometimes exaggerated to the point that they feel archetypal.
The schizophrenia scenes struck me as remarkably similar in tone to parts of Gravity's Rainbow (and Pynchon's other stuff, but GR is what I'm most familiar with). The book as a whole almost feels like America's side of the story--where Pynchon was obsessed with the psychosexual effects of the Rocket, McCarthy laments the atomic bomb. Physics, psychology, and paranoia loom large in both novels, but the comedic parts of GR are horrific here in the Kid and his circus. Also Thalidomide Kid/Kenosha Kid. Not sure if there's anything substantive there, just making connections.
The NYT interpretation is interesting also, that the Kid is Blood Meridian's Kid. The warped Americana is certainly consistent, and would mark a sort of closing by return where the violence of the early American west catches up with a child of the nuclear bomb. Apparently McCarthy has been working on the Passenger since the 80s, so it's not too crazy to think that the two books may be contiguous.
But the Judge's preaching is nowhere to be found here. Maybe the Judge is science itself, this thing that promises meaning and Truth but seems to just kill everyone it touches. Maybe the judge was right, and the human world is a crystal grown from the seed of war. I don't know.
This note is getting long in the tooth, but I am constantly thinking about Blood Meridian's epilogue. It is so stormy and abstract but it almost certainly refers to a post-hole digger i.e. the enclosure of the West within fences (and legalized property). The spirit of War is no longer in the Glanton gang's flamboyant bloodletting but is transferred into these property relations. Whatever McCarthy intended, it's such a prescient passage and the way he wrote it renders the whole thing into a nightmare.
A companion or coda to the Passenger, entirely in dialogue. While the characters are charming and well-rendered, believability is strained for me and the novel at times felt like a reading list more than a novel. It must be McCarthy's densest piece of writing, I will have to read it again to make heads or tails of it, but on my first reading it was a bibliography disguised as a Cormac McCarthy novel.
I did enjoy it though, and it led me down some fun research rabbit holes. Grothendieck is fascinating.
I don't have anything to add to the conversation about Shakespeare, he's remembered as great for a reason. Both as an architect and master of the English language. This stuff really went over my head when I was younger but it's almost dizzying how good of a writer he was. And he did it within the limitations of blank verse!
A book about the history and function of debt in antiquity, and the widespread practice of periodic debt forgiveness. The concept of silver (business) debts and grain (personal/subsistence agricultural) debts activates my almonds. The origin of numbers in the counting of valuable cattle. The biblical stuff is of particular interest, the church's early merging with the Roman state served to erase Jesus' more radical messages about forgiveness. We are always in the shadow of finance.
I love Salinger's style. Actions are always rendered raw, as in the ending of A Perfect Day for Bananafish while the dialogue of its (usually privileged) characters is often obscure or precocious. The friction between these things is what makes Catcher in the Rye such an interesting book, an interplay between Holden's interpretation of reality and the bare truth.
Identifies Google's innovations in advertising and metrics as a genuinely new form of capitalism. Her proposals for how this system works are not super interesting and the book is steeped in Liberal nostalgia, but the author conducted tons of original research and took special care to explain the tricks Google and co. have used to normalize surveillance over the years. She also made the same connection as me, between this stuff and B.F. Skinner's research, which felt nice.
Pokemon Go and the shadier parts of the StreetView project were headed by the same people. This is a great point for Pay to Win, to connect the whole surveillance capitalist project to games and explain Zuboff's guaranteed outcomes in terms of game-mechanical incentives.
Kojeve's lectures on Hegel were attended by all of the big name French existentialists, but it doesn't seem like they got much out of them. The way Kojeve bridges Hegel and Marx and blends in his own interpretations is fascinating, I really want to read his original works. I think about the diagrams all the time.