Occasional Musings

Came across this interesting review of book on human history – The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity by Graeber and Wengrow. Recently had read the books from Y. Harari on this topic, which was refreshing. Looks like this could be an interesting book to check on.

Brief summary: “Nevertheless, The Dawn of Everything is a thoroughly mesmerizing book. Its new story about human history is provocative, if not necessarily comprehensive. The book’s great value is that it provides a much better point of departure for future explorations of what was actually happening in the past. There are almost unlimited possibilities here to build upon, and a much more fruitful critical perspective from which to think about human history.”

Also has a passage, which summarize the current thinking of human history, a teleological model. ” … Human societies varied a lot. Now they don’t vary as much, but the technology they employ is wildly more complex. People live longer, but they aren’t necessarily healthier or happier during their long lives. The overall average levels of violence may have decreased (although the massive variability in early human societies suggests that “average levels” is not a particularly useful way to think about violence, or really anything else in the archaeological record), but the violence that does happen is more spectacularly destructive. Most importantly: We can now fail on a global scale, and we seem to be in the process of failing.

More of this article from LARB here: [The Link]

Microwork is a series of microtasks, which sociologist Antonio Casilli defines as “fragmented and under-remunerated productive processes.” Companies break up big projects into small tasks that can be performed by anyone with an internet connection, then hire people to do them for very little money, usually through a third party that handles the staffing. Mega-corporations use private firms like Samasource, while smaller companies find workers through user-facing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, Fiverr, and ClickWorker…

While it is noted automation might remove jobs, however trend seems to be that there is rise of this microwork (which may not be sustainable or suitable). Read more of this here:

• [2018] Earn Money Online: The Politics of Microwork and Machines
• [2021] How ‘Microwork’ Preys on the Desperate (and Other Reasons to Avoid It)

Futurists are drawn to the sensational and the unlikely: brain uploading, magnetic floating cars. But the actual future will be more like today’s world. Here is an interesting list of predictions for the future by 2050. Some of them seems more US centric, but an interesting read nevertheless:

Technology related

• There will be Martian colony
• Marketization of everything
• AI will be most futuristic impactful change in day-to-day life
• supersensorium (supermarket like experience of entertainment) will grow
• A mostly storeless society
• Education will take place mostly online
• Genetic engineering of embryos to avoid disease will have become common
• Anti-aging tech will extend the health-spans of the rich

Demographics

• Huge improvements to standards of living
• Families will continue to decline in importance
• The future really is female
• The rise of the throuple
• A minority-led country

Political changes

• The world will not war
• The age of the mob will spur domestic turmoil
• Soft totalitarianism will become the norm
• People and culture will become boring

More of this here: [The Link]

An interesting article and review of the recent book by James Suzman about history of work and why we work in the first place. Long time ago, hunter gathering societies, worked minimally to get food and spent rest of time in leisure. How has society changed and can we go to a post-scarcity society where there is no need to work for make a living?

Book mentioned in the article

• Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, by James Suzman

Read more the article here: [The Link]

Book from the author of the article: Automation and the Future or Work, by Aaron Benanav

Came across an interesting article reminising about the days and role of collector and collection of cultural items like books, music and other (physical) items. With everything becoming digital & online recommendations especially ebooks and spotify for music, the act of collecting and the experience of collection has changed significantly. Few excerpts from the article

“In the digital era, when everything seems to be a single click away, it’s easy to forget that we have long had physical relationships with the pieces of culture we consume. We store books on bookshelves, mount art on our living-room walls, and keep stacks of vinyl records. When we want to experience something, we seek it out, finding a book by its spine, pulling an album from its case, or opening an app. The way we interact with something — where we store it — also changes the way we consume it, as Spotify’s update made me realize. Where we store something can even outweigh the way we consume it.”

“Over the past two decades, the collecting of culture — like maintaining a personal library — has moved from being a necessity to a seemingly indulgent luxury.”

“Yet even with all its excesses of content, our era of algorithmic feeds might herald the actual death of the collector, because the algorithm itself is the collector, curator, and arbiter of culture.”

More of this in the article here: [The Link]

An interesting article on the reviewing books and the profession of writers/book reviewers. Like many creative pursuits making a living or making a profession out of it is getting harder and harder. A creative writeup on this here.

A sobering conclusion from the article: “Despite all the odds, good reviews are being written in this wretched era, by staff critics and by freelancers. New, technocratic solutions are proposed every day: billionaire funding, paid newsletters, essays crowdfunded on the Ethereum blockchain, a new patronage system funded by NFTs of GIFs. How grim it all seems. We never really wanted to live in the future. Then again, the history of book reviewing is a history of frustration and disappointment. Why should our era be different? At the very least, we should put an end to the misery. Publications of means, adjust your rates for inflation and pay your writers on time. Publications without, we can do better: Just say no to CTRs (Contemporary Themed Reviews)”.

More from the article here: [The Link]

A good rebuttal from Gawker here: [The Link]

Puts out a clear call to action by reminding what critiscism is about: “If there is a problem with book reviewing the problem is that those of us who are good at it aren’t good enough, there aren’t enough of us, and we aren’t doing a good enough job of expanding the scope of literary discourse, to put it in touch with tradition and open it wide to new writing. I recoil at terms like “thought leader” and “gatekeeper,” but we do have at least the duty of helping to create the culture we want to live in, and that world should be full of infinitely various delights. The imperatives are to be stylish, to be thorough, to be funny, to be generous, and occasionally to be cruel. Boredom, envy, gray skies and gray sentences — these are the things we were born to kill.”

The emergence of creative class (bobos) has broken the old structures of rich, middle and poor but has lead to a new map of class structure. Pretty good article from David Brooks in The Atlantic called “How the bobos broke America: The creative class was supposed to foster progressive values and economic growth. Instead we got resentment, alienation, and endless political dysfunction”.

The article also talks about failings of modern meritocracy.. Another topic in itself.

Read more of this article here: [The Link]

From the article, below is a summary of the current state of groups, more structured around political orientation.

Blue oligarchy: tech and media executives, university presidents, foundation heads, banking CEOs, highly successful doctors and lawyers.

One step down from the blue oligarchy is the creative class (bobos) itself, a broader leadership class of tenured faculty, established members of the mainstream media, urban and suburban lawyers, senior nonprofit and cultural-institution employees, and corporate managers, whose attitudes largely mirror the blue oligarchs above them, notwithstanding the petty resentments of the former toward the latter

One economic rung below are the younger versions of the educated elite, many of whom live in the newly gentrifying areas of urban America, such as Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York or Shaw in Washington, D.C. More diverse than the elites of earlier generations, they work in the lower rungs of media, education, technology, and the nonprofit sector. Disgusted with how their elders have screwed up the world, they are leading a revolution in moral sentiments.

On the lowest rung of the blue ladder is the caring class, the largest in America (nearly half of all workers, by some measures), and one that in most respects sits quite far from the three above it. It consists of low-paid members of the service sector: manicurists, home health-care workers, restaurant servers, sales clerks, hotel employees.

Red hierarchy is the GOP’s slice of the one-percenters. Some are corporate executives or entrepreneurs, but many are top-tier doctors, lawyers, and other professionals who aspire to low taxes and other libertarian ideals.

One step down are the large property-owning families, scattered among small cities and towns like Wichita, Kansas, and Grand Rapids, Michigan—what we might call the GOP gentry.

Below them is the proletarian aristocracy, the people of the populist regatta: contractors, plumbers, electricians, middle managers, and small-business owners.

A level below the people of the populist regatta, you find the rural working class. Members of this class have highly supervised jobs in manufacturing, transportation, construction. Their jobs tend to be repetitive and may involve some physical danger.

… “But it is only Utopia that allows us to dream together.”
An interesting article about talking about Utopia in political/social movements. Most blue prints of Utopia have been distorted and lead to disastrous outcomes. However, efforts to describe possible social conditions is important to make progress. See also recent documentaries by Adam Curtis talks about this – how absence of thought on how we should organise ourselves, has lead to current systems of power, which is not necessarily to the benefit of majority of people in society.

Few excerpts from the article here..” [Fredric] Jameson saw this cramped, blighted imaginative inability to conceive of positive systemic change as one of the hallmarks of postmodernism.”

..”The utopian impulse exists to spark discomfort with the status quo and agitation.

Where it ends no one can know, because all social progress is made from the bottom up, with people hammering out alternatives amid the conflicts of political life. But the energy to create those alternatives wouldn’t exist without utopian dreams.”

More of this here: [The Link]