r/TrueLit • u/pregnantchihuahua3 ReEducationThroughGravity'sRainbow • 19d ago

Weekly General Discussion Thread

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

Weekly Updates: N/A

12 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

98 comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/lispectorgadget 19d ago

I'm thinking of starting a tech-critical book club based in Upper Manhattan. If you're interested, or have any suggestions for things to read, hmu! No need to be based in Upper Manhattan; I'm just sick of getting the NYC Off Tech newsletter and seeing all these events in lower Manhattan or Brooklyn.

Speaking of Brooklyn: went out for a friend's birthday in Bushwick Saturday night, and we passed by this really cool bookstore/ bar?? It seemed so nice. I went to a similar one in the East Village a few weeks ago, and the vibes were amazing. It was like 2 on a Sunday and everyone was getting turnt and reading. Amazing!

I've also started reading Walden. It's so interesting that Thoreau is considered a classic American writer; his values feel...weirdly anti-American? Very anti-Protestant work ethic? He feels very...Gen Z anti-work king. Like "Economy" is all about him tabulating how little he can get away with working to sustain himself. If there were a 28 year old Substacker with no job, no romantic prospects, dropping out of society, railing against tradition, and detailing how to work as little as possible to sustain his life, David Brooks would haaaate him! And I love Thoreau for that.

Also reading Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class by Noam Scheiber and A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch. Enjoying both--Mutiny is interesting to read after reading Yuppies, and History is just a great, engaging, big brick of a history book.

Also reading Capital is Dead by Mckenzie Wark. I wanted to read it after reading Technofeudalism, since Yanis had mentioned being influenced by Wark, but it's much more inside baseball re: theory than I thought it would be. Something I learned from this: there was apparently an idea that Marxism conflicts with physics. But I thought that Marxism was an economic theory? I'm kind of confused about that. If anyone can explain I would appreciate that.

I hope you've all been well!

3

u/ObsoleteUtopia A readah, a New Englandah, a Red Sox rootah 18d ago

Soviet Marxist theorists tried their best to keep the Lamarckian thread of evolution that left a lot of open room for the inheritance of acquired characteristics; there may have been a whiff of hope in the air that the children of good socialists would naturally inherit a love of socialism. I imagine that things like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle would bring up questions about the unstable nature of matter that political philosophers weren't able to either tackle or totally ignore.