#Book

Non-fiction and The Chaos Machine

I’ve been reading more non-fiction for a work book club. It seems to fall roughly into a few categories: polemic, self-help/business, and history. I’ve been wondering how to rank and compare the different kinds.

The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher has a compelling narrative about publicly unaccountable algorithms created by Silicon Valley corporations maximizing human interactions for revenue, despite harms created from those interactions. Google/Youtube and Facebook are mostly singled out for their failure to stop harm. It’s very similar to Stolen Focus, which calls this corporate behavior “surveillance capitalism”. Both books fit squarely in what I call polemic non-fiction.

Thoughts on A Memory Called Empire

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

Stories like this where some kind of emissary or ambassador is on an alien planet provide a way to explore big ideas. The Left Hand of Darkness, Embassytown and to a lesser degree The Sparrow have a similar structure and explore big ideas about personal identity and broader culture.

Towards the end of the book I was reminded of the divide between the United States and the American South. In the book this would be Teixcalaan and Lsel Station respectively. One is large in terms of geography, population and drives the culture. The other is smaller and lives within the same cultural milieu despite feeling independent of it.

Comic book recognition

Tear down the ivory towers, obliterate the false differences between experts and hobbyists. End proscriptive grammar and let descriptive grammar reign. Accept that knowledge is a journey and usurp the title of “expert” from the dinosaurs who seek comfort from a chaotic world by telling everyone “how it is.”

I’ll save the full manifesto for some other time but in that spirit I’d like to praise a line from Ebert’s review of The Dark Knight

Why aren't you a superhero?

{{< figure src=“http://gnumatt.org/images/kickass.jpg" title=”" class=“align-left” >}} As a kid I wanted my life to be different from the one I imagined ahead of me. I wanted to be a master jewel thief or president of a unified North and South America. As I got older the dreams got smaller. I wanted to monopolize America’s garbage collection industry. Now they’re more abstract. I wish I’d had a comic book like Kick-Ass to inspire me when I was younger.

Humankind's Manifesto

In All Star Superman #10 Superman creates an alternate Earth, Earth-Q, to see what humankind does without a Superman. On Earth-Q someone gives a speech that I think is a great manifesto for humankind.

Let us not yield sovereignty even to them, the highest of the angelic hierarchies! Become instead like them in all their glory and dignity. Imitation is man’s nature and if he but wills it, so shall he surpass even imagination’s greatest paragons.

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It would be interesting to

It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word.

-Fyodor Doestevsky Crime and Punishment

I’ve been plagued with this concern that I can only produce things that are derivative. I did a search for “pure thought” and found a link to Hegel. The Hegelian view of man is that the essence of man is his labor. Perhaps that is the only thing I should be concerned with? One of the people that Doestevsky found inspiration from, George Sand, said “There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.” Perhaps love is the one thing that each one of us can offer in a singularly unique way?