Some Interesting Things I Read Today (8 September)

related tags: #ShortReading

The result is a fundamentally conservative, almost Burkean critique: Whatever structural problems society has, its catastrophic collapse comes not from those structural issues but from the violation of long-standing norms of behavior.

This is... very true. It's also a very common theme in Nolan's work, as he always finds ways to have conservative critiques that wrap back around to “the structure is fine, but it is us who have failed.” He never wants to think about how “we” (for it is always “we” and never the people responsible) can so consistently fail as a result of the structure. I wish Devereaux would point this out. Many people have, but it bears repeating.

Anyway, lots of interesting conversation due to the inclusion of history... as expected of Devereaux's writing. His blog posts are far more interesting, though.

An interesting audio setup discussing LifeLog, which was a system that had been built by the Pentagon to effectively collect evidence about and index everyone's lives. It also connects a lot of what has happened with modern “social” media (e.g., Facebook) and other services (e.g., Google Pay) and how they have operated as surveillance for our whole lives. We've been indexing everything just as the Pentagon wanted.

LifeLog is not a story about a program that died. It's a story about who is allowed to build it.

Found in another post, this was a review of Gloria Steinem's much less known The Beach Book. Despite my many frustrations with her, this is at least in some part adorable. It was found in the next short read:

With Gloria Steinem's death, it's important to hold an actual picture of who she was and what she did in our minds. Sophie Lewis does just that with her theses about Steinem. I do think it is occasionally more polite than I'd justify, but it is among the best pieces to hold a lot of these thoughts in one place.

It's an interesting read that holds a lot more space for the complexities of Norma Jean/Marilyn Monroe than are ever really present in most places.

While I think that calling fash and fash-adjacent people “weird” undermines the seriousness of what they do and how they impact communities, it's a decent list of blokes who hold harmful politics and fund others who do (and have power over us).