Scott Burton

Timely Warning

Revisado: 11-21-23

Our era of gig-work, wage theft and labor automation provides the starkest parallel of the plight of the Luddites that I’ve seen in my lifetime. Brian Merchant connects the rise of capital, “enclosure”, chattel slave plantations and child labor to the act of “framebreaking”, placing the enterprise in a new light.

The Luddites are renewed and recontextualized as victims of predatory capital. While their name ultimately became an epithet for ignorance and backwardness, the author reveals the cloth workers as clear-eyed about what the new machines and factories would mean to their families and livelihoods, and their actions as purely rational and community-minded. It wouldn’t have been as effective without Uber/Lift/DoorDash providing such vivid modern examples.

The author spends a great deal of time Lord Byron and Percy and Mary Shelley, as contemporary defenders of the Luddites, and connects them with the latter Shelley’s most famous creation. This was ambitious, but it’s a bit of an eye-roll; one can imagine a modern day Byron tossing a Like to a Luddite social post before doomscrolling on, a 19th century #hashtagactivisim.

Still, absolutely recommended and timely.

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Come Again?

Revisado: 09-18-23

I speak English, and this book is ostensibly written in English, and read by someone obviously schooled in the language of kings. But none of those things makes this book intelligible for me.

I’m sure it’s my failing: I came to it without much knowledge of Indian history or the British East India Company, hoping to find something foundational. This book is for someone a step or two beyond that - it’s comfortable in its jargon, and starts its building upon what I assume is expert-level knowledge of the region, its geography, historical figures, politics, etc etc. The author tosses out words like “sepoys” (a kind of conscript I guess?) “nabob” (some form of leader? idk) as though they have commonly understood meanings. I bought a hard copy just to find the words I needed to Google.

If it was just my ignorance I’d be more understanding, but the author also deploys plenty of those frustrating backwards sentences stuffed with negations and frilly metaphors that are so common amongst imminently locker-stuffable British authors. “I needn’t have the slightest predilection wouldst though to blah blah” shut up nerd.

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Right Intellectuals: "See, this guy is a commie"

Revisado: 07-24-23

If you look over all of the one- and two-star reviews of this audiobook, they share a tone you'll be familiar with from the crudest corners of social media, so I don't want to simply amplify that kind of ugliness, but if you know what's wrong with this book (or what's right with it, depending on your point of view), it's that Malcolm Harris is a communist. I'll explain.

On Twitter earlier this month, Mr. Harris (@BigMeanInternet) recently engaged in a discussion of the idea of "degrowth", earning widespread mockery and some rather baffling support ("my cocaine habit will have to change", "it will take six months by boat to Europe but so worth it") that made the whole idea a little hard to take seriously.

The specific example he chose - bananas are too ubiquitous and it's good if we have less of them - was polarizing because it's everything the Right says about communists ("they'll take your stuff") illustrated clearly, but at the same time, he's right, the specific example of bananas and their colonialist supply chain, did destabilize the global south and enrich capitalists in North America, and most people don't appreciate that when they peel one open in North Dakota in February.

The whole book is basically this argument, to which you can answer "bananas are good, actually", except instead of bananas its the United States winning World War 2.

Structurally, it's a tremendously satisfying audiobook. If, like me, you are not inclined towards communism, but enjoy a good rewrite of history, it's worth your time for the scholarship and craftwork alone. Harris shows his research as he pins down each villain: Leland Stanford, the Union Pacific Railroad, Herbert Hoover, William Shockley, on it goes. It's extremely satisfying to see each of these Great Men dissected, especially in the context of a complete re-examination of the period from 1880 - 1930, where a lot of capitalist domination and inequality began to crystalize.

He does all of this through the lens of "Alto California", explaining the extreme gravity of the place as a "haunted" nexus of the world's problems. He continues through the wartime industrialization of California, the Civil Rights struggles and abandonment, the Black Panthers, the malaise period (which he attributes to War Capitalism stalling), the Reagan years, Iran Contra, and the entire Silicon Valley era. It covers a lot of bases and deconstructs California and its place in them well.

And all along, you're treated to the magnificent performance of narrator Patrick Harrison, who's cutting voice lands every punch Harris throws, even taking on a bit of showman hype as when he introduces villain Alan "Greeeeenspaaaaan". I could almost hear the crowd at a socialist Wrestlemania boo in unison.

It's always satisfyingly written, even if the hunt for villains and their ties to Palo Alto seems forced. By the time the dizzying Silicon Valley era we're most familiar with (Gates and Jobs) comes around, it's hard to know what we're all supposed to be mad about. Is it that Ethernet switches became ubiquitous? Why should I look askance at small business owners with Macintoshes, again? A lot of people in America and abroad have already accepted that globalization has made a lot of rich guys by exploiting the world's poorest, and that they fit somewhere in between, and they're not eager to forgo bananas to make guys like Malcom Harris more comfortable with it all.

To me, his tendency to rope in little-known communists in as substitute heroes makes it feel a bit more like communist history fanfiction. That and the teleological arguments ("person A did B, so now we have C") unintentionally undermines the Great Man takedowns it's trying to achieve, by centering so many individuals as powerful agents of forces, rather than the agents of powerful forces, as explained in his lengthy excerpt of Frank Norris.

And as I said, I think it's good that we won World War 2, and I think it's good that the Soviets lost the Cold War, so a lot of the time I found myself agreeing with the villains in this book ("b*sed", the kids would say).

Absolutely worth it for Harrison's performance, for Harris's completeness, or if you're a committed socialist (hopefully you can afford to buy a copy).

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I Don’t Know What I Expected

Revisado: 06-30-23

There’s a very funny and underrated tweet by John Ganz that can be summarized as: Left scholars read Right scholars and make scrapbooks and develop crushes, where Right scholars reading Left scholars say “these guys are all Jews”.

There’s something to that in this book. It’s a kind of scrapbook of the kooks played from a loving distance. I think he did it with sincerity and portrayed the kooks honestly, but there’s an admiration that comes across where abject dismissal is warranted.

Don’t get me wrong — the people he portrays are trying to be scary, and sometimes are. But I wondered more than once why Sharlet wrote this and why I listened to it.

As far as style goes, it’s dreamlike and “rootless” (ha!) - shifting l impressions of Fox News viewers he encountered on a cross country trip, saying the kinds of utterly predictable things they say. Sharlet is told, in whispers, and at gunpoint, the kinds of things any Twitter troll is fully versed in at this point.

I don’t wish to fault Jeff - the book I thought I’d get is probably closer to what Seth Abramson wrote in his, no credit to the latter writer - but what’s here isn’t a masterpiece. It is very well written, to its credit.

As for the reading, Sharlet offers up the voices in his memory and in his head, that’s all I’ll say.

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From an earlier time

Revisado: 06-17-22

This was a bit of a comical read to start in March 2022 but by May its almost obscene. The world of cryptocurrency, from Bitcoin to “algo-stables” (this book’s preoccupation), is a tragic farce, and it’s lies are quickly being exposed. A book for the dustbin.

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Needs an update

Revisado: 05-24-20

I wonder if today, 5/21/2020, nearing the utterly avoidable loss of 100,000 American lives, the author would still feel that concerns about the Trump Presidency’s destructiveness were overblown. I wonder how the last chapter might read after we witnessed the president try to extort US states over PPE the way he did with the Ukrainian President last year that resulted in his impeachment.

I wonder.

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Awkward and Self-Serving

Revisado: 01-01-20

It’s important to realize that the goal of this book is to serve Simpson and Fritsch’s side of the story. It’s by no means a comprehensive accounting of 2016 election meddling by Russia, nor a searing indictment of Trump’s ties to that country. Instead, it seems to be an effort to clear the authors of the many conspiracy theories their work to investigate Trump/Russia has spawned.

Occasionally the effort compounds the awkward decision to write the book in the third person. It’s extremely weird to hear the authors speak about themselves, their pithy conversations (IIRC one dialog response was “Totally.”) and their actions from this detached perspective. It provides an unearned degree of credibility, as if a crack New Yorker essayist had fact-checked all of these exculpatory clapbacks aimed at their accusers, as opposed to the authors themselves.

All of that said, it weaves together the bits and pieces of this story into a compelling timeline, and benefits the authors’ suspicion of Trump/Russia ties. I don’t think you can accuse the authors of malicious, partisan intent: there was just too much smoke not to be fire, and they weren’t wrong to track it down, even if it was a bit bloodthirsty and entrepreneurial.

A mixed bag IMO. It’s important to have their side of the story, and they have a good framework of investigative reporting, but it sometimes comes across as self-servicing. I don’t question their honesty, but I wouldn’t call this an impartial work.

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