aaaa i managed to catch up today; i hope i'm not 'late'. if i have any thoughts, i'm going to make an effort to share them before i read others' comments. part of my goal with this reading group is both to learn me some history and to get better about sharing my thoughts. i'm exhausted so sorry if my thoughts are disjointed.

i'm coming into this straight from a rereading of Blackshirts and Reds. i expected optimism, and to feel quite melancholic from it with the knowledge of what came next, but if anything i'm always atonished at how much history rhymes.

she talks about people digging into the past for answers to the present and succumbing to doomerism. that's honestly why i'm reading this book. there has been a rapid decline in both health and economy in my social circles, and they've responded by taking to neopaganism and ecofascism (in some cases anarcho-primitivism), or a weird kinda orientalist Liberal-Buddhism lmao, like a FIRE lifestyle centred around minimalism and mindfulness, and passive income grifts. this has only gotten worse with language models eroding all of their thinking skills or training them that everything is made up and that nothing is real anynmore. someone from a periphery country basically said to me recently 'socialism or wealth', like 'if i can't have socialism, then i better be rich.' they don't see that there's no alternative where they alone come out on top.

the following quote reminded me of Red Plenty (one of many books my unmedicated AuDHD brain can't read):

Can man master the machines he has made which today threaten increasingly to enslave him? […] ==productive forces which his science and technical knowledge have released, which seem adequate to abolish poverty, yet which at present give increasing unemployment, economic crises, wars==?

i think about Cybersyn and Aladdin and 'big data'. i used to be a software engineer (the formal methods kind, now i'm several years unemployed) and the amount of expertise and infrastructure that could support the kind of planning cyberneticists dreamed of exists, but it's wasted on skinner boxes for proles and fancy dashboards for wealth managers (EDIT: or weapons systems for hurting people). now that expertise is gone. fake products kept alive by a belief in its potential and not by its capability to do anything it promises, but this belief is considered rational by the fact it takes the form of contracts blessed by civic rituals. in a world ruled by fiction, it's no wonder people think TV is theory and that ancient pantheons or anime tulpa can remake the universe and rescue their spirit or some shit.

brings to mind this quote:

There is a strong tendency to speak of the machine as solving problems, when, in fact, really, it is the program which describes to the machine what the machines do. This is overlooked. I think a great deal of confusion arises from this.

It is not that we do not have adequate machines to solve our problems many times, but rather we lack adequate descriptions of how to solve the problem. And this is a very important point to understand.

— Richard Hamming, Computer And The Mind Of Man, Episode 1: Logic By Machine

this quote most of all stung me a little:

In a world whose economic structure fails to reward honesty and altruism, ==a Marxist would not spend his efforts preaching these virtues==, …

i was raised immersed in a water of hatred; i know the people some have to become to survive. but i've lost my patience for the so many people who still see themselves in the bourgeois and whose entire worldview is countryball, flag emoji and the 'clash of civilisations'. my moral high ground is unfortunately what helped me cope with decades of abuse and it's a hard thing to let go of.

but i did come away from this chapter reminded that we're not stuck on this path. i hope the rest of the book can be as therapeutic.