Based on the title I expected a collection of essays (mostly from crypto-anarchists or their opponents), similar to the kind of thing one would find iBased on the title I expected a collection of essays (mostly from crypto-anarchists or their opponents), similar to the kind of thing one would find in the Agorist Primer, but more historical-analytical rather than ideological.
What I got instead for the most part was a majority of essays that I could only describe as boring. Even doing my notes was a chore. The essays range from the ideological declarations of crypto-anarchists and libertarians to stuffy professors sobbing and seething about how the internet is making governments more subject to market forces, or how it makes taxation, law imposement and other forms of state control increasingly difficult, or doing dry historical analyses and waxing poetic about how a specific internet community many of them focused on (LamdaMOO) could be legally recognized as a country or a club or something or other.
A lot of flexing of muscles, a lot of big words aimed more at justifying a professorial salary than at providing anything useful. The only useful takeaway is maybe Hakim Bey's TAZ essay, and seeing how some of the predictions made turned out. It was interesting for example, that in the 1990s people thought it was ever possible to regulate cryptographic software, and waxed poetic in complete ignorance about how it could be controlled, when such control was impossible.
I would not recommend it, unless you are really into the author or the type of essays this book provides....more
I already knew the gist of Agorism before reading the book, this short book expanded on that knowledge only by a few tidbits of interesting informatioI already knew the gist of Agorism before reading the book, this short book expanded on that knowledge only by a few tidbits of interesting information and arguments.
Overall I would recommend this book to anyone who has already been convinced of Anarchism and wants a good groundwork for a consistent praxis. In fact, I was gladdened to see Konkin's repeated insistence on consistency, as this was one of the biggest selling points of Agorism for me. If you're not convinced of Anarchism, Rothbard's Anatomy of the State is a good place to start, on economics I'd recommend something like Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, on the thinkers mentioned in the book Malice's Anarchist Handbook.
I'm not sure how useful the intro to economics could have been, I didn't really have any a-ha moments, but I did go into it with an existing basic understanding of Austrian economics. The part of motivation of human action being to remove felt unease was new to me, so it did patch a few holes in my understanding. This part also repeats the essential Rothbardian idea of Economics (among other sciences) being put forth by a paid intellectual class whose explicit job is to uphold the legitimacy of the State, and provides historical examples of this happening, such as Lysenko's pseudo-biology being taught in the Soviet Union. Overall for this I'd recommend something like Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt for a more thorough and convincing read on economics, before reading this for the more theoretical part.
The book goes on to provide real-life examples of counter-economies working even without ideological basis, and how technology is increasingly enabling counter-economies to form. It makes a prediction of businesses being able to use electronic cash and encrypted data would almost completely remove the State's ability to control, which should be of great interest considering encryption is now widespread and this electronic cash now exists and is increasingly adapted.
One interesting tidbit demonstrating the state's impotence and the power of the counter-economy was the 1974 federal speed limit of 55 mph, which was almost immediately destroyed by truckers who, working together with anyone else who wanted to speed, created a radio network warning each other of police lying in wait.
This is followed by a short history of libertarianism and what preceded it, from Godwin, Stirner and Warren, through Spooner and von Mises, ending in Rothbard and the birth of the modern Liberty Movement. Although this was a useful summation for me as someone who knew most of the names mentioned (from reading Michael Malice's Anarchist Handbook, which I recommend to find out more about these names), it's a good summation overall.
The book then explains how a Libertarian Party's contradiction with a "party line" lead to infighting and eventual break with Rothbard. This is followed by an explanation of how states came to be, which is more or less the same summation seen in Rothbard's Anatomy of the State.
The general discussion about national defense was quite interesting, with theories backed up by examples such as the Makhnovtchina for mustering a defensive militia or Hong Kong in how it's not strictly in the interest of states to conquer defenseless areas even though they could.
The final chapters deal with how Konkin thinks the State would transition into the Agora, with counter-economic activity becoming ever easier and more successful, which would lead to more people turning to it as well as more infrastructure being built to support it. This would then lead to parts of the Agora operating more and more openly, and while most would remain vulnerable to being crushed by the State, eventually one of them would grow strong enough to defend itself from State aggression. This would set in motion a death spiral where the Agora's sound money is more and more openly accepted and the State loses its monopoly on the currency. This in turn leads to more and more people abandoning the bribes and protection of the State, which it can provide less and less, until it eventually loses its ability to tax, and finally being unable to properly pay their thugs, their monopoly of violence, which marks the collapse of the State.
Finally, we get a bit of insight into how the State never really had the all-encompassing power that we think it does, and the first step should be to reject the state in our hearts and minds, going as far as to suggest "Agorist psychology", similar to the kind of psychological help abuse victims get to remove their Stockholm-syndrome....more
I don't often get engrossed in a non-fiction book quite like this, but this one was definitely a page-turner in the strictest sense. Many other reviewI don't often get engrossed in a non-fiction book quite like this, but this one was definitely a page-turner in the strictest sense. Many other reviewers complained about the sporadic organization of the book, and if you're looking for something neatly organized that can later be used as an indexed reference, you might want to look elsewhere, such as books mentioned by other reviewers. It is, like the title says, a journey: Meant to read from beginning to end.
But the sporadic nature is essential to the conversational tone of the book, which is very similar in nature to a literal conversation. That doesn't mean the book was without organization though, one of my favorite devices of the book is Malice's tendency to approach an idea or concept from a mile out, providing explanations, context and examples so that by the time he presents the actual idea, you have the same context as him and can therefore sympathize with his point of view.
He often does this in podcasts as well, but having the luxury of a book these "tangents" (as other reviewers might think of them as) are a bit longer and more involved, but never boring or completely off-topic. If you are willing to follow his train of thought, they are always tied back into the discussion at hand. Because all things in the world are related, this type of strategy is essential for a non-expert to understand beyond a shallow surface level.
Some of the discussions and explanations are of ideas that many people would find objectionable, and although when Malice disagrees with them you will certainly know, no attempt is made to do the mandatory pearl-clutching ritual about how the ideas are of course horrible and racist etc. I suspect this is done partially just because it's not in the author's nature to ever pander to an audience, nor does he want such an audience, and partially by design to aggressively filter out any such person from ever consuming his content.
To finally mention the actual content: The information in this book has certainly been enriching, I haven't heard of the Trollboard and its role in the movement, or of Mark Shea's strategy to mess with journalists, which was certainly a function of understanding of the media as an enemy to be strategized against, nor have I ever heard of the "gay virus" theory. I learned more about the Rothbard/Buchanan alliance which I knew only in name before. I have heard of William F. Buckley's (whose name I keep forgetting) National Review, but I had no idea of the way they overtook Conservatism and started decreeing what is and isn't part of that movement. Motte and Bailey is another thing I hadn't heard of before, surprisingly, nor was the idea that some people have a complete lack of empathy and as a result are incapable of differentiating between universally accepted views and views that are exclusive to themselves. Here I would add that I think many of them are perfectly capable but won't - due to a similar character flaw that causes many people to eat horribly despite fully acknowledging that a healthy diet would probably save their lives in the long run, due to the simple fact that it's easier.
Jonathan Haidt's insights and Malice's conclusions on them were also fairly interesting, another person whose work I surprisingly haven't read yet. Pointing out how Obama openly said that he would serve a higher ideal ("fairness") even if it made everyone worse off was pretty eye opening. However here I would point out that having a higher ideal and sticking to it despite the apparent contradictory facts has a very good evolutionary purpose. If you had done well believing what you do for years, but now find contradictory information, it is much more likely that the information is incorrect, incomplete, or you simply don't see how it's wrong, than it is that it actually proves your beliefs (which have worked all these years) wrong.
This is actually explicitly stated in stock trading strategies. The number one factor in whether you'll succeed in day trading is how well you can stick to your pre-written strategy. If the market turns against you and you are taking a loss on a trade - the idealized "rational" thing to do would be to accept that this proves your strategy wrong and change your mind. In reality, it is stressed that even a losing trade is a good trade if it was made in service of the "greater ideal" of your strategy. In other words, the successful thing to do is to serve the ideal with a zeal some might call delusional, and not "rationally" change your mind every second on the winds of contradictory information. True belief in a higher ideal is the shield that guards you against turning tail and giving up at the slightest sign that things aren't working out.
This is actually my problem with Haidt's sterilized, strictly short term, perfect information moral dilemmas. It's implying that the world outside the perfect information system doesn't exist in terms of either space or time. Instead of his difficult dilemmas, let me posit my above day trading scenario in an extremely easy dilemma: Should a hedge fund manager following a strategy make a trade he know will lose his client money even though the strategy calls for the trade being made? The answer is obviously no, why would you deliberately lose your client money? But I just explained why it is a good strategy to serve the strategy even with a losing trade, so why this answer? This is exactly the problem with these dilemmas. Morality works on the real world, not on idealized scenarios. In the real world, you don't, in fact, 100% know that the trade will be a loss, and your action to act against your strategy will have effects on your trading psychology down the line which could result in more losses. The people trying to rewrite these scenarios aren't doing it to fit their worldview, they're trying to rewrite them into something that represents their understanding of reality (which after all is kind of the same thing).
Of course, sometimes your higher ideals and moral beliefs are just wrong.
I have heard of his Pistachio Paradox before, but I ran the numbers and they don't add up (if I recall correctly, you'd end up eating Pistachio some 3.7% of the time), but regardless it's a great point.
The rest of the chapter of The Case Against Democracy makes a pretty good case for why Democracy works neither in theory nor practice. His description of the anti-democratic techno-anarchist view was more or less my own views being repeated back to me, which I suppose is proof of how much of a free thinker I am.
Jim Goad was a name I haven't heard before, but reading about him and his work was certainly interesting, as was reading about the history of Gavin McInnes. These kinds of stories of the history (both old and contemporary) of the cultural zeitgeist were some of my favorite moments in the book.
The history of suppression of free speech and how technical free speech - the actual ability to communicate and spread information regardless of others' opinions or government policy - has never been greater before and is increasing (although I've heard these argument in fragments) was also very enriching to read.
When Michael disagrees, especially with white nationalists, he always spends a disproportionate amount of time arguing against their views. While these parts are by no means boring or uninteresting, I think they are some of the low points of the book (which are not very low).
Descriptions of contemporary events and figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos were interesting but not much new was learned as I sort of paid attention to it as it was happening. Some of the behind the scenes stuff though was always interesting, as was the lucid explainer that underlying the actions of a lot of these new right figures was the recognition of the Corporate Press as their enemy, who is engaging in strategy against them, and examples, such as Alex Jones' successful strategy against Megan Kelly, of how they strategized against the Corporate Press in turn.
Ann Coulter was someone I didn't know very much about, so it was interesting to learn about her.
Another really interesting tidbit was Ryan Holiday, who recognized his own marketing strategy in Milo's approach, and has pointed out and warned the his critics about this. The idea of getting canceled actually being a marketing and publicity boon has become more mainstream since then, (and "no such thing as bad publicity" has been around longer still) but it's nevertheless great to know that this has been a formalized strategy for a while and to know its history. In fact, I just now remembered the 2015 video game Hatred, a mediocre game whose marketing and appeal rested almost entirely in the massive controversy (one might say massive triggering) its announcement caused in one of history's earliest instances of what today we'd called cancelling. Maybe they've read Ryan's book.
As mentioned in my updates, the part on how low-brow culture induces cultural dominance was easily one of my favorite parts of this book. The explanation of how the lowest common denominator, mass-appeal nature of this media makes it effective to spread and for people to voluntarily and eager to consume makes it the perfect propaganda tool was really illuminating, as was how these ostensibly apolitical media can inject the politics of the west into places like the Soviet Union or north Korea by showing that even the lowest of the low in the west have fur coats while they have newspapers for toilet paper. Another one I thought of is Korean dramas showing the idea that individual motivations are not just the primary object of the story, but the curiosity about whether these individual goals are achieved is the hook that keeps you coming back. As such, a north Korean's interest in such media is already defined in terms of Western individualism, which is already turning him away from the collectivism of the Nation and the Dear Leader. Like Malice often says, the north Korean regime is not crazy, and everything they do is for a reason. Here too, their motivation to kill anyone caught with things as simple as trashy Korean dramas is not informed by some demented zealous rage against Western decadence, but a very informed, grounded-in-reality strategic realization that it is one of the most effective tools for radicalizing the people against them.
Continued in this same bit is a short explanation of what I think is the thesis of Thadeus Russel's book A Renegade History of the United States, in how the marginalized invent and popularize not just culture, but rights and freedoms as well. An interesting bit of trivia here that I liked was how the drag queen Divine was the inspiration for Ursule the Sea Witch fifteen years later.
All of these were tangential to the Jarod Taylor interview, and while it's good to know about him, I didn't find the actual interview terribly interesting, except for the funny fact that he would accept Thomas Sowell as hwite if he said he was.
Finally, in The Road Ahead, Malice describes several organs of the Cathedral the New Right is opposed to, and how each of these organs are breaking and losing their grip on power. What used to be a country with near universal consensus with a small group of elites having a monopoly on the microphone is quickly turning into a place where anyone is free to speak their mind to any audience they can muster, universities are increasingly seen as bad investments, corporations are increasingly defying the state either out of ideology or market reasons, and States themselves are increasingly defiant towards the Federal Government, and where this shattering of the illusion of universal consensus is leading to more and more division and independence and to more and more people recognizing these uniting organs as the enemy.
Overall I would recommend this book to anyone who is into politics enough to care and wants to have an engaging, cursory understanding of this political phenomenon. I would not recommend it to scholars who want a neatly organized, indexable treatment of the subject with no more or less information or fluff than necessary.
Books mentioned in this book that I might look into: The Machiavellians Illiberal Reformers Trust Me I'm Lying The Renegade History of the United States Death and Life of Great American Cities...more
Introduces Elm as you develop a non-trivial application with it. Introduces the basics of the language fairly well, although I had minimal experience Introduces Elm as you develop a non-trivial application with it. Introduces the basics of the language fairly well, although I had minimal experience in the language previously, this helped fill in some gaps in my knowledge and exercise/clarify certain practices, but I didn't learn anything earth shatteringly new or revelatory. I bought the book to get a solid grounding in the practices surrounding the Elm framework and I feel like I managed to accomplish that, but not more.
I also cannot comment on most of the explanations of the basics of the language, having read through Haskell Programming from First Principles and being generally familiar with Haskell and derived languages I can't say how effective the book is at explaining currying, the simplified version of Hindley-Millner type system that Elm uses, etc.
The final book is dated for Elm 0.19 and I was able to follow through the book with that Elm version with no problem. Fair warning that the book and the application you'll build as part of this book relies on json services provided by a third party (elm-in-action.com), so if that goes down you're mostly SoL for the second half of the book onwards, unless you can spin up your own server. The book is a long tutorial so it's not very useful as reference.
The quality of the book in terms of being well put together is severely lacking and in fact more fitting of something you'd find in Manning's MEAP program, except unlike other reviewers I've read the final version. Especially towards the end of the book, inline monospace text is sliced up for no reason, there are typos and at one point neglects to tell you to re-enter JavaScript boilerplate that it previously had you comment out. Thankfully if you're paying attention this is pretty easy to figure out on your own, and despite the subpar quality I had no real problems following along with the book.
If you - like me - feel the need for a structured tutorial to follow in order to get an overall grounding in a new language or framework *and* don't mind some significant (but not especially crippling) deficiencies in quality, then I can recommend this book to get a good grounding in the language and ecosystem. Otherwise, there's not much in here that you couldn't learn on your own....more
My approach to reading is to try and mine the text for information, to abstract the concrete points made and try to apply them to situations I would uMy approach to reading is to try and mine the text for information, to abstract the concrete points made and try to apply them to situations I would use them in. In this way, it doesn't matter if I agree with the text or not, I am able to see the "truth" of a point I completely disagree with.
Industrial Society and Its Future was a great exercise of this approach. There is a number of useful nuggets of information that can be extracted from this essay. Chief among them is the power process and how he uses it to explain behaviors of both human beings and the technological-industrial system that he just refers to as "the system".
His analysis of the behavior of what he calls "leftists" (I understand what he means by it but don't agree with the use of the term) is illuminating and holds up today, including the tendency of the movement to totalitarianism and total social control. His segment on oversocialization and how "leftists" of this oversocialized type aren't actually rebels is spot on. However, I personally don't think this is particularly a leftist phenomenon in the proper sense, rather it's a long standing phenomenon in the United States that clothed itself in left or right-wing packaging depending on what was more prudent (it started with people like Woodrow Wilson). Many in the original left-wing tradition (Emma Goldman, Bakunin, Kropotkin etc.) would have been disgusted by the people Kaczynski describes as "leftists", but he himself admits the possibility of as much. To me, the people he calls "leftists" I would call moral busybodies, who just in the last two decades have manifested themselves in both a right-wing (post-9/11 USA) and left-wing (2010s onward) form.
He then goes on to describe how industrial society disrupts the power process. He describes three categories of goals: those that are trivial to obtain, those that can be obtained with significant struggle, and those that are near impossible to obtain. He calls these categories one, two and three respectively, and remarks how industrial society had shifted most goals into either category one (having basic needs met and even some pleasures require nothing more than continued conformity and obedience), or category three (acquiring true influence over one's surroundings rather than being controlled by them, by starting one's own successful business or mass movement is night impossible and requires struggle against the system inherently). The point here being that category two serves the power process the best, but this is specifically the category of goals being eroded by "the system".
I think this is somewhat true in that life is becoming easier and easier, but so has becoming independent of the social systems surrounding you. It wasn't so long ago that conformity and obedience were your *only* choice, even if this conformity still came at some physical struggle and therefore did more to satisfy the power process. All a medieval peasant could hope is to move to work under a different feudal lord, at great cost and sacrifice to himself. Today, it is comparatively trivially easy to change jobs or even careers.
Kaczynski defines freedom as the opportunity to go through the power process, with a nontrivial degree of autonomy. It's the erosion of this freedom that he finds objectionable.
The author lays down some principles of history and shows how "the system" erodes freedom as defined above, and how "the system" cannot be reformed, nor the good separated from the bad parts. Here I took out my thinking cap and I think most of these principles apply in actual truth to the state, rather than some technological society.
The claim that "Technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom" stood out to me, and to me is a very important principle of anarchist praxis in a positive sense - if this is true, then technology (such as blockchain) can be developed as instruments of freedom.
Kaczynski points out the censorship that made it nigh impossible for him to get his ideas out there, and that he had had to commit acts of terrorism in order for his message to be heard. I think despite his ideology and actions this is an excellent example of the censoriousness of the corporate press that made sure only opinions it approved of ever saw the light of day, and made sure all others were silenced. I think the late success and popularity of this essay and Kaczynski's prominence in popular culture (especially meme culture) is a testament to the fact that today the monopoly and power of the corporate press is a husk of its former self, and the author would not have had to resort to such methods today in order to have an audience.
The chapter on strategy was particularly intriguing. He makes the point that a revolution must not only destroy the existing order but establish a new one, and therefore the motivating ideology has to be for something, not just against something. Kaczynski posits nature as the ideal to strive for in his ideology. Propaganda-wise, he makes a distinction between propagandizing intellectuals and people of more modest intelligence. He also echoes the sentiment that it's better to have a smaller group of deeply loyal people than to build up a huge mass of "followers" running on hype who will abandon your movement for the next cool thing. He also points out that revolutionaries should not expect to have the majority on their side until after the struggle starts in earnest. This is historically sound as the machinators of revolutions consisted of only a tiny minority of any given population, and it was only after the battle was won by the revolutionaries did the "majority opinion" side with them. I would object that a real violent struggle would not be necessary for revolutionaries who are on the side of good, and they should not expect to ever have majority support, but instead work to peacefully demonstrate the illegitimacy of the existing system while building a parallel, better alternative.
Ultimately I think this is the core reason why Kaczynski's ideology is wrong. So many ideologies advocate for a violent replacement of the old system with their new one, but only an ideology in the right can do it peacefully.
Kaczinsky also warns against working with "leftists" (or moral busybodies) who are only motivated in their struggle for power and not for actual ideals. This I agree with, although again I do not agree with describing such people as leftists. He also points out that the core goal of the ideology must be the number one priority of the revolution, as having any other secondary goal introduces the temptation to use and empower the enemy concept to achieve that goal. I have seen this many times, as people who are ostensibly against state power advocate for using state power because they want to enjoy the state's bribes in peace.
The last interesting thing I'd point out is Kaczynski's distinction between small-scale and organization-dependent technology. He argues that small-scale technology (which can be developed and used in isolation or by small communities) will survive, but large scale technology (such as modern electronics, refrigerators etc. that require power, manufacturing plants and international commerce systems to function) will die without a supportive infrastructure in place. I thought this was a really interesting distinction and I hope technology moves toward more independent, small-scale technology in the future. We're already seeing this with things like 3D printers.
Overall I enjoyed reading this and applying some of his points to my own worldview, and can definitely say it was worth finding out what the fuss was about....more
A good introduction to Ayn Rand's philosophy, and definitely better than her fiction.A good introduction to Ayn Rand's philosophy, and definitely better than her fiction....more
Loading...
