Hacker News Books

As for what other conception of states can exist, socialism is pretty cool I think

Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher

Pretty much any book by Nassim Taleb, but the Black Swan was my first read of his, and then Antifragile

I would say that you need Inventing the future, that while being limited in many things, is a necessary read.

Then proceed with Capitalist Realism and if you like it, Fanged Noumena.

below a quote from "Capitalist Realism, Is There No Alternative" by Mark Fisher - this is a devastating but interesting read on this subject. (I just finished this last week).

pdf: https://libcom.org/files/Capitalist%20Realism_%20Is%20There%...

"> Watching Children of Men, we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That slogan captures precisely what I mean by ‘capitalist realism’: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it. Once, dystopian films and novels were exercises in such acts of imagination – the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways of living. Not so in Children of Men. The world that it projects seems more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an alternative to it."

highly recommend.

I find Peterson's thinking easy to listen to, but I wanted to figure out "OK, but this guy seems kinda.. slick?.. and if this all makes sense and sounds fairly easy, why does it sound too-good-to-be-true? What's the catch?" Detangling charisma from the contents, etc.

So, in that same spirit of seeking difficult blind spots, I liked this video [0] that gives an interesting critique (both agree/disagreement) perspective of Peterson's approach. Admittedly, the part where Lain compares the bodycounts of communism to capitalism is kinda weak because it's an appeal to hypocrisy. It doesn't matter too much because Lain explains that Peterson's understanding of Marxism prevents him from seeing it as anything but an oppression fetish.

The important part is the description of capitalist realism. It's the idea that capitalism is itself normalized to the point that it becomes a massive blind spot which, like a propagating 'meme', distorts the ideas of what is possible. Reading the book Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher (only 80 pgs) changed my life, for what it's worth. Public PDF here if you want to check it out [1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGld3FbDY6s

[1] https://libcom.org/files/Capitalist%20Realism_%20Is%20There%...

I also highly, highly recommend "K-Punk" by the same author (now deceased, RIP): https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/mark-fishers-k-p...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism:_Is_there_n...

That's some of the stuff that comes to mind as having shifted my perception on things in some fundamental ways. I don't think I've ever practically changed anything in my life though as a response to reading a book, not sure how that would even manifest.

* Status Update by Alice Marwick - an ethnography of the SF tech scene in the mid-late 2000s, a very detailed examination of the status structures in Silicon Valley and how we were changed by the rise of social media.

* Postscript on the Societies of Control by Deleuze - short, insightful, somewhat prescient paper on the evolution of "control" mechanisms in postindustrial, capitalist societies.

* Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher - a very compelling analysis of the neoliberal postmodern condition, and how the cultural milieu has changed since the fall of the Soviet Union, and free-market capitalism became the only extant economic system in the world.

* Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs - this probably needs no introduction; it was an extremely transformative treatise on urban form, vitality, diversity, and completely overturned the urban planning field when it was originally published. I think everyone who plans on living in a city should read this book.

* Hollow City by Rebecca Solnit - an ethnography of the gentrification and bohemian displacement in San Francisco during the dot-com boom of the 1990s. She doesn't just blame "the techies" for the gentrification, but rather uses the gentrification as a lens to examine the culture around urbanism has changed in the recent decades.

"Over the years, [Elon Musk] cultivated a media persona that was “part playboy, part space cowboy,” Vance writes. [...] Musk sells himself as a singular mover of mountains and does not like to share credit for his success. At SpaceX, in particular, the engineers “flew into a collective rage every time they caught Musk in the press claiming to have designed the Falcon rocket more or less by himself [...] In fact, Musk depends heavily on people with more technical expertise in rockets and cars, more experience with aeronautics and energy, and perhaps more social grace in managing an organization. Those who survive under Musk tend to be workhorses willing to forgo public acclaim.” [1]

“Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.” [2]

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/08/04/166593/techs-end...

[2] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

edit: another part that really stuck with me was how there is a modern tendency to privatize the burden of stress; consider how mental illness is the individual's burden so it must be handled at the individual level, etc etc. Fisher wrote an article in the Guardian about this, "Why mental health is a political issue" in 2012 - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental...

>What must be discovered is a way out of the motivation/
demotivation binary, so that disidentification from the control
program registers as something other than dejected apathy. One
strategy would be to shift the political terrain - to move away
from the unions' traditional focus on pay and onto forms of
discontent specific to post-Fordism. Before we analyse that
further, we must consider in more depth what post-Fordism
actually is."

Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism

https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.1.WxB4yL&id...

Nineteen Eighty-Four is more interesting, apparently, there are hundreds of vendors selling it on taobao.com, including the Xinhua which was started/owned/managed by the Communist Party of China.

https://list.tmall.com/search_product.htm?q=Nineteen+Eighty-...