Shannon
patreon
VOTE on next charge post + updates + Q&A? (comment questions!)
🕑 Added 2024-01-03 19:43:13 +0000 UTC-Poll below! These will be written mini reviews like the Deakins writeup I did last month. Now that I'm charging I want to give more exclusive material to patrons on top of behind-the-scenes updates and writing a review is very easy for me to do.
-Additionally I'd be happy to do a monthly Q&A for patrons if people have questions! Leave them in a comment below! Nothing creepy or weird please! I'm fine with questions about my researching/editing/writing process or what I thought about X media or respectful questions that disagree with/challenge me, just nothing inappropriate or about my personal life. If you follow my twitter, you know I tweet a lot about cooking and plant-based food, so if you have food questions I'm happy to talk about that too.
-Nick Lutsko interview date locked!!! Assuming nobody gets covid and no cars break down and etc etc no acts of God against my YouTube channel and I can go to Chattanooga and conduct the interview, I should have that up for patrons this month sometime?? Y'all will get the interview way before I make the actual video essay.
-For the video essay I've been reading David Graeber's "The Utopia of Rules" which the Adam Curtis quote I used in a previous update clip is pulled from. I'm really enjoying it and it dovetails with Bowling Alone nicely. Of course it is kind of horrific and depressing too, but interesting to read.
Summary from Wikipedia-
Graeber describes the contemporary era as the "age of total bureaucratisation," in which public and private bureaucracies, now so intertwined as to be effectively indistinguishable, have become the main mechanisms for Wall Street profits, and describes how bureaucratization brings the threat of violence (through legal and police enforcement) into almost every aspect of daily life in wealthy countries.[1] Graeber argues that bureaucracies are no longer analyzed or satirized as they were in Catch-22 or The Castle. The book centers on the "political implications" of bureaucracies and Graeber's solutions.[1]
Graeber notes that Americans largely dislike bureaucracies, but while they are not motivated to change bureaucracies, he thinks they should be. He makes an urgent call to remove the bureaucratic limits that hamper creativity. He argues that the "order and regularity" of bureaucracy is more harmful than valuable, and elaborates that rules do not apply equally in practice and are more "instruments through which the human imagination is smashed and shattered".[1]
-I also started reading the Yurchak book "Hypernormalisation" gets its name from (Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation) but I was really unhappy with some basic factual inaccuracies in the section about The Zone/The Strugatskys so instead of reading the whole thing I'll probably just stick to relevant sections. It's upsetting when a key source feels compromised.
Thanks as always for the support!
Comments
surasshu
rly interested in utopia of rules, i started reading some anarchist writing recently (bolo bolo) and it was fun and a bit enlightening (especially the segments describing the current world), sounds like this can connect to it
Eóin Dooley
Hell yeah Graeber. Love everything he's written.
