Greg
overall i think I'm mostly in agreeance with Davies' perspective on economics and economists, and I appreciated the critical application of systems thinking to questions of accountability in institutional design. but this is still a book written by an economist toward an audience of people who are primarily concerned about economics; it remains subject to its own critique.
Ultimately, he did briefly touch down where I expected this to go: an assessment of widespread institutional failure that has resulted from the flood of information. Organizations as they were conceived in the 20th century are simply not able to learn and adapt amid the information landscape of the 21st century. But he really only takes this wide view in passing; the bulk of the text is focused on the question of largescale businesses and the entwined fiduciary and managerial paradoxes that result in various forms of foolishness and harm. Which might be fine as a lense for the broader phenomenon of endemic institutional failure, but then the book’s main proposed solution (”any entity taking control of an operating company should have to guarantee its debts” ) drops with a meep; very well may be good and fine on the merits but it's laughably small beans given the scale of our crises.
and his concluding idea about LLMs as democratic input processing machines is sorta interesting – and especially given that he wrote it just as the current era of popular LLM use is dawning, I actually don't totally hate it as a possible use case. it's just neither necessary nor sufficient to be a good idea without a broader theory of power. which he's a bit too reflexively dismissive of collective action to ever quite take the time to think through and develop such a framework. (at several points he refers to Allende or Marx half-approvingly, in like an ironical way?)
Still I appreciated the walkthrough of cybernetics (it wasn't quite thorough enough to be truly useful, but he gives pointers to deeper readings) and the framing of the Ricardian Vice. not sure i fully followed the description of business accounting hallucinations; i might need to reread that section.
we do need a treatment of all institutional failure in the Age of Information Flood (which as far as I can tell is effectively ubiquitous) and a look into what kinds of institutional design might not fail. Layer this with Laloux and run it through David Harvey is what i'm saying.
Worthwhile read, absolutely critical topic, but pretty repetitive and ultimately doesn't really transcend its nature as an academic artifact.
makes the case that the whole current mode of insurance ends up individualizing risk, which will actually accelerate inequality in a climate-changing world, whereas a different paradigm for insurance could be an opportunity to establish new forms of solidarity amid chaos.
The book is a history / case study of the National Flood Insruance Program as-is, and there are important lessons to learn in that all within the individualizing paradigm (and some lessons to learn about the possibility of alternative solidaristic paradigm) so it's not really fair to expect it to do more work to venture in the direction of what could be rather than what has been. but that's what I wanted as a reader, and I got a taste of it only at the very end. so. three stars.
read this maybe 30+ years ago, remembered a single paragraph very vividly— turned out to be the one hinge of action in this, so it clearly left an impression. but i cant imagine i could have properly appreciated the rest of this spectacular story, the master at her peak.
interesting reflection from her in the documentary, Worlds of Ursula K LeGuin, about how she did not realize until later that she was unable to conceive of a hero as female, even in this story, saddled even as she was with the literary inheritance of patriarchy. but Tenar is a triumph. a story about the cost of freedom.
Really reflects so many of the failings of the environmental movement of its era, strung between different modes of performativity, and uninterested in thinking through actual power. From small stuff (like characters throwing their cigarette butts and beer cans into the nature that they profess to want to take radical action to protect) to the big stuff (like casual, cynical denigration of native people who are their actual allies and most significant potential partners).
Not dismissing the value of knowing "how to blow up a pipeline" etc, just don't have patience for the macho martyrdom even when it's packaged in camaraderie and hijinks, especially when it's "all in good fun, nobody gets hurt" or has to grapple with the consequences of their cockamamie strategy. Sorry yall! I share your cause but this weren't it chiefs.
in between the first and last chapters it’s kinda boring— but you can learn most of what there is to know in the first few pages of each chapter plus the conclusion— and the end is a doozy. basically we are in a lot of trouble. aside from the repetition, it’s really interesting to see yet another example of human knowledge and relationships dangerously erased by capital’s relentless concentration.
the followup book, Disaster Insurance Reimagined, is an essential read and points to ways forward.
having been learning about NZ / Aotearoa history and politics, i appreciated the metaphor. the prose and plot and the worldbuilding are pretty rudimentary, but he does enough interesting things that i held on til the end and i’m glad i did. but i am a sucker for stories about constitutional governance and public administration.
I was very into the first half! but it started to bore me in the second half — the latter day storyline seemed to belabor itself with little payoff — and then the climax felt rushed.
But as an atheist, the central question of the book was not super interesting to me. and with a passing sense of astrobiology, the alien civilization felt more like fantasy than sci-fi. Oh well!
like a lot of climate fiction, it picks one focal point to hone in on, which i think flattens the hyperobject. And i think the politics are a bit confused. I liked the thread of community emerging amid collapse, but it ended up not really trusting in that either? So i wasnt left with much other than grief.
Notably, published before the wildfire threat really kicked up in gear…
Credulous econospeak that already felt naive and dated when it came out, now seems outright dopey. Reminds me of the Lean Startup in how it's oblivious to the problems of its pat framework. What are the successful platforms that we trust and celebrate today? I can think of a few that aren't outright villains (Etsy, Kickstarter) but for the most part this concept seems like a dud whose time has come and gone.
This was a real disappointment after Eghbal’s excellent ‘roads and bridges’ report. the author seems to have bent right in the direction of macho developer culture that overvalues engineering wizardry and underinvests in maintenance and community. Rather than seek to learn how to sustain investment in maintenance and community, Working in Public turns against its own namesake value and instead calls for acceleration of the heroic individualism that has left the internet a wretched husk of what we imagined it would be.
accessible read about the most important topic around, but i wish he’d worked a little harder for insight as to what can be done. Reads like a long set of magazine articles. I fully agree with his conclusion — to have anything like a functioning society for anyone other than the filthy rich, we will need to establish a universal right to housing — but he lands there on the fifth to last page of the book. Come on my dude
