Hacker News Books

If I've read any of the federalist papers before I don't remember it. But I checked out the first article [1] after your comment and now the play 'Hamilton' makes a lot more sense. What a lyrical style.

I'm half afraid to read more. Something tells me there's going to be insight to contemporary issues laid bare to the extent that I just lose faith in humanity.

[1] https://www.congress.gov/resources/display/content/The+Feder...

Ida Tarbell's father was an oilman who was ruined by Rockefeller and Standard Oil while she was a girl, which is important to keep in mind when contextualizing her work. She lived her life in part as a crusade against Standard Oil and Rockefeller. Obviously she was heavily biased, this being instilled in her early on.

For a less biased look at the history of the American oil industry by way of Rockefeller and Standard Oil, I strongly recommend Titan by Ron Chernow - author of Hamilton - which is an excellent account of Rockefeller and Standard Oil, both the good and the bad.

Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson
A mathematician's apology by G.H Hardy
My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford
Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts
Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror by Victor Sebestyen
Hamilton by Ron Chernow

I would say there are several classifications of things worth saving through a broad net:

- kindling sources, like a LiveJournal post that inspired Lin Manuel to write Hamilton (for a fake example)

- early work of a future star, like imagine Lorde posted early songs to MySpace. This is already a clear issue as many posted songs have been deleted or lost for various reasons.

- valuable things on shaky ground. Yahoo Groups, for the latest example. But I just saw on Reddit someone was looking for a deleted scene from Blair Witch Project that was supposedly the first video ever published on Amazon Prime Video... and now it has nearly vanished. That seems crazy to me from so many directions.

- the value of the ephemeral. Gold and jewelry from old civilizations is nice but we know so much of how people actually lived by examining their garbage, scrap notes, broken bowls, etc.

- the myth of permanence. We feel like 10 million people see a video, it is probably preserved. But there are no master tapes of any of this and so much of everything is interlinked and hard to piece together after the fact. What were people's tech stack when they were making MySpace? How big were people's hard drives? Did rhey share sonngs theough Kazaa or play them on MySpace directly? What was the state of Javascript then, what were the security issues or underground trends? How did songs propogate, where were they shared? Were people sending links in email or AIM, were people sharing links on Digg? This is stuff from like a decade or two and already you need to think like an archaeologist to have any sense of how the culture really existed because there were so many moving parts from year to year.

- the value of datasets. Imagine putting some thought against the Geocities archive to see how HTML blink tags grew then fell in popularity over time. Or how a meme propagated, or analyze the link structure between groups of people or by topic or any make any number of interesting inquiries about how humans operate culturally in digital space and how interact socially through certain set of tools and limitations. There are very interesting possibilities here for understanding ourselves better as a species.