nigini wants to read Slow Down by Brian Bergstrom

Slow Down by Brian Bergstrom, Kohei Saito
Why, in our affluent society, do so many people live in poverty, without access to health care, working multiple jobs …
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Why, in our affluent society, do so many people live in poverty, without access to health care, working multiple jobs …
"A political theory of coöperism seeks, first, to extend existing forms of cooperation to other dimensions of our lives, but second, and perhaps more important, to concentrate cooperation. (...) Coöperism privileges and promotes those forms of cooperation that are most beneficial and combines them to create an integrated network of cooperation."
Liberal democracy is in crisis around the world, unable to address pressing problems such as climate change. There is, however, …
"Where the capitalist class sees education as a means to an end, the vectoralist class sees it as an end in itself. It sees opportunities to make education a profitable industry in its own right, based on securing of intellectual property as a form of private property. It seeks to privatize knowledge as a resource, just as it privatizes science and culture, in order to guarantee the scarcity and their value. To the vectoralists, education is more “content” for commodification as “communication.”" #066
A bold rethinking of the most powerful political idea in the world--democracy--and the story of how radical democracy can yet …
The renowned activist and public intellectual David Graeber teams up with the professor of comparative archaeology David Wengrow to deliver …
"If something did go terribly wrong in human history — and given the current state of the world, it’s hard to deny something did — then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history."
"Those ideas about liberty had a profound impact on the world. In other words, not only did indigenous North Americans manage almost entirely to sidestep the evolutionary trap that we assume must always lead, eventually, from agriculture to the rise of some all-powerful state or empire; but in doing so they developed political sensibilities that were ultimately to have a deep influence on Enlightenment thinkers and, through them, are still with us today."
"Information, like land or capital, becomes a form of property monopolized by a class, a class of vectoralists, so named because they control the vectors along which information is abstracted, just as capitalists control the material means with which goods are produced, and pastoralists the land with which food is produced." [029]
This was published 20 years ago! It is scary how much sense the "vectoralists" term makes when one considers the status quo of big-tech and the data-rush to train vector-based statistical models that some call AI.
"Even if you shoot the trespassers yourself, you still need others to agree you were within your rights to do so. In other words, ‘landed property’ is not actual soil, rocks or grass. It is a legal understanding, maintained by a subtle mix of morality and the threat of violence. In fact, land ownership illustrates perfectly the logic of what Rudolf von Ihering called the state’s monopoly of violence within a territory — just within a much smaller territory than a nation state."
It's an average work day. You've been wrapped up in a task, and you check the clock when you come …
Escutei o livro em duas pegadas, enquanto dirigia por dois dias. Estória interessante e diferente, mas acho que não se decidiu entre ciência ficção e fantasia. Os diálogos da protagonista são as vezes irritantes e repetitivos, a estória chega num final meio rápido demais, mas eu fiquei bem vidrado na estória.
This book is not easy: it contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow, and gives no ready-made answers. …