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what i'm reading wednesday 20/8/2025
What I finished:
+ Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka, the guy who wrote that article a few years ago about how disconcerting it is that you can find coffee shops with the exact same aesthetic everywhere in the world.
I have rarely read (er...listened to, as this was an audiobook) a book I agree with so strongly. Chayka hates algorithmically-driven platforms as much as I do--perhaps more! Which is saying something! He basically thinks they're destroying culture, and I do not think he is wrong!
This book is both a "wow, this thing is fucked up and I hate it!" book and also a love letter to human curation and the development of your own taste. Lots of examples, a chapter about his own relationship with these platforms, a chapter about human curation in the real world and one about the people who are trying to do something similar online. This isn't a book that hates the internet--instead, like me, he's very nostalgic for certain things about the 90s/early 2000s internet before social media ruined everything. His discussions of discovering obscure anime through forums in the early 2000s made me very happy. I think he does a good job balancing the bigger picture with his own experiences--there are some writers who just include too much of themselves in their books that are allegedly about wider phenomena, but I didn't get annoyed with him in the way I sometimes do, so he must have done okay with the balance.
I really enjoyed this, but I do not recommend the audiobook. The reader has a decent enough voice, but he does this weird thing where he chops up sentences strangely in a way that they were not written, inserting the pause and emphasis in ways that I know Chakya didn't intend. It only happened a few times, but it really annoyed me. Does this person not know how sentences work? The way he read them made so much less sense! I wish I could remember examples to share, but alas I do not. On top of that, he mispronounced several things that matter to me personally (though I can't remember what they are right now) so I just got annoyed with him. I really need to stick to books read by their authors.
+ I also finished my reread of The Dawn of Everything for book club. I know I wrote a review of it the first time I read it, but I can't find it now. I'll keep looking and update this with a link if I can find it.
Graeber and Wengrow's main project is dismantling the cultural ideas that there is a certain, linear way that human societies develop and that if you scale them up large enough, they can no longer be democratic (which they define much more strongly than we usually use it) and must instead involve state brutality, bureaucracy, etc. Their main project is saying, "No, this is not true, just look at past cultures that were large without (probably) developing states as we think of them today. People have arranged themselves in countless different ways over the course of history, they did it purposefully, and we can do the same if we only have the imagination and will." Obviously, this speaks to me deeply.
This time around, I especially appreciated how much emphasis they put on how people have always been people--that people in the past didn't live in some atemporal way where they sort of drifted along and as technologies arose (who developed them? this is usually left unspoken) and climate/geography changed, they changed in response. The authors very much believe that people have always had agency and used it, that they've thought of themselves as and indeed been conscious political actors all along, that societies could be headed on a certain trajectory and then their people could decide to take a different turn instead. They're less clear on just how people made these collective decisions and took different turns, which is the most frustrating thing about the book imo--I want to apply what I've learned here, but I don't know how!
The core of Graeber's worldview is that quote of his (from a different work): "The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently." I think he is right about this. But I think the time scale matters, which is not something they explore deeply in this book. These decisions are mostly not made (with a few exceptions) on the scale of a human life but over the course of generations, which I'm sure is true but is also dissatisfying for those us who want people to suffer less now. And again, the actual mechanisms through which societies made these decisions are not included in the book, mostly because there's no way to know how most of them did it and also because telling us how they did it is not the point of this book.
Perhaps some of this would have been addressed in later books if Graeber hadn't left us so soon. Last I heard (several years ago) Wengrow was still working on the second book of their planned three or four, but who knows if we'll ever see it and how different it will be without Graeber's input.
I'll add this: I am much more aware this time of the book as (as someone else in the book club described it) historical midrash. The writers are pretty clear about the fact that some of what they're saying is conjecture--they think a good case can be made from the historical record, especially the archaeological one, but we can't know for sure. Still, every historian/archaeologist/anthropologist/whatever comes to conclusions despite us not knowing things for sure, and the authors are sick of the conclusions that are derived from the main narratives of a) humans having always been terrible or b) there being some sort of Fall (usually related to scale, agriculture, and cities).
They're saying, "We can't know for sure that X is true, but a case can certainly be made, so let's make it and then ask ourselves what we can learn about human societies--what can we imagine about our own futures--if it is true?" This is a very ideological (and anarchist) book, but most books are, and they're upfront about it, and also their ideology is much more in line with my own than most.
If nothing else, my mind continues to be blown by the fact that five thousand years passed between human beings first learning how to cultivate crops (a development they believe was women's work) and the rise of actual domestication and reliance on agriculture as the primary form of feeding communities. You heard that correctly! The Agricultural "Revolution" was five thousand years long!
What I'm currently reading:
+ After such books, I needed a palate cleanser, so of course I picked up a golden age mystery. This one is A Miss Marple book, Sleeping Murder. In middle school, I read all the Hercule Poirot books, but I didn't do something comparable with Miss Marple, so this one is entirely new to me (instead of just read so long ago that I've forgotten most of it). Very absorbingly written!
+ Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka, the guy who wrote that article a few years ago about how disconcerting it is that you can find coffee shops with the exact same aesthetic everywhere in the world.
I have rarely read (er...listened to, as this was an audiobook) a book I agree with so strongly. Chayka hates algorithmically-driven platforms as much as I do--perhaps more! Which is saying something! He basically thinks they're destroying culture, and I do not think he is wrong!
This book is both a "wow, this thing is fucked up and I hate it!" book and also a love letter to human curation and the development of your own taste. Lots of examples, a chapter about his own relationship with these platforms, a chapter about human curation in the real world and one about the people who are trying to do something similar online. This isn't a book that hates the internet--instead, like me, he's very nostalgic for certain things about the 90s/early 2000s internet before social media ruined everything. His discussions of discovering obscure anime through forums in the early 2000s made me very happy. I think he does a good job balancing the bigger picture with his own experiences--there are some writers who just include too much of themselves in their books that are allegedly about wider phenomena, but I didn't get annoyed with him in the way I sometimes do, so he must have done okay with the balance.
I really enjoyed this, but I do not recommend the audiobook. The reader has a decent enough voice, but he does this weird thing where he chops up sentences strangely in a way that they were not written, inserting the pause and emphasis in ways that I know Chakya didn't intend. It only happened a few times, but it really annoyed me. Does this person not know how sentences work? The way he read them made so much less sense! I wish I could remember examples to share, but alas I do not. On top of that, he mispronounced several things that matter to me personally (though I can't remember what they are right now) so I just got annoyed with him. I really need to stick to books read by their authors.
+ I also finished my reread of The Dawn of Everything for book club. I know I wrote a review of it the first time I read it, but I can't find it now. I'll keep looking and update this with a link if I can find it.
Graeber and Wengrow's main project is dismantling the cultural ideas that there is a certain, linear way that human societies develop and that if you scale them up large enough, they can no longer be democratic (which they define much more strongly than we usually use it) and must instead involve state brutality, bureaucracy, etc. Their main project is saying, "No, this is not true, just look at past cultures that were large without (probably) developing states as we think of them today. People have arranged themselves in countless different ways over the course of history, they did it purposefully, and we can do the same if we only have the imagination and will." Obviously, this speaks to me deeply.
This time around, I especially appreciated how much emphasis they put on how people have always been people--that people in the past didn't live in some atemporal way where they sort of drifted along and as technologies arose (who developed them? this is usually left unspoken) and climate/geography changed, they changed in response. The authors very much believe that people have always had agency and used it, that they've thought of themselves as and indeed been conscious political actors all along, that societies could be headed on a certain trajectory and then their people could decide to take a different turn instead. They're less clear on just how people made these collective decisions and took different turns, which is the most frustrating thing about the book imo--I want to apply what I've learned here, but I don't know how!
The core of Graeber's worldview is that quote of his (from a different work): "The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently." I think he is right about this. But I think the time scale matters, which is not something they explore deeply in this book. These decisions are mostly not made (with a few exceptions) on the scale of a human life but over the course of generations, which I'm sure is true but is also dissatisfying for those us who want people to suffer less now. And again, the actual mechanisms through which societies made these decisions are not included in the book, mostly because there's no way to know how most of them did it and also because telling us how they did it is not the point of this book.
Perhaps some of this would have been addressed in later books if Graeber hadn't left us so soon. Last I heard (several years ago) Wengrow was still working on the second book of their planned three or four, but who knows if we'll ever see it and how different it will be without Graeber's input.
I'll add this: I am much more aware this time of the book as (as someone else in the book club described it) historical midrash. The writers are pretty clear about the fact that some of what they're saying is conjecture--they think a good case can be made from the historical record, especially the archaeological one, but we can't know for sure. Still, every historian/archaeologist/anthropologist/whatever comes to conclusions despite us not knowing things for sure, and the authors are sick of the conclusions that are derived from the main narratives of a) humans having always been terrible or b) there being some sort of Fall (usually related to scale, agriculture, and cities).
They're saying, "We can't know for sure that X is true, but a case can certainly be made, so let's make it and then ask ourselves what we can learn about human societies--what can we imagine about our own futures--if it is true?" This is a very ideological (and anarchist) book, but most books are, and they're upfront about it, and also their ideology is much more in line with my own than most.
If nothing else, my mind continues to be blown by the fact that five thousand years passed between human beings first learning how to cultivate crops (a development they believe was women's work) and the rise of actual domestication and reliance on agriculture as the primary form of feeding communities. You heard that correctly! The Agricultural "Revolution" was five thousand years long!
What I'm currently reading:
+ After such books, I needed a palate cleanser, so of course I picked up a golden age mystery. This one is A Miss Marple book, Sleeping Murder. In middle school, I read all the Hercule Poirot books, but I didn't do something comparable with Miss Marple, so this one is entirely new to me (instead of just read so long ago that I've forgotten most of it). Very absorbingly written!
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The persistence of technological maintenance in a non-state society is something I wonder about frequently. Like, people invented states not just out of the will to power but because they are useful. They do things well that other forms of social organization just don't do as efficiently. One of those this is, well, educating scientists, bringing them across long distances to scientific hotspots, supplying them with the tangible and intangible materials they need to maintain and innovate "technological development" as an output of scientific method (rather than pure empiricism), and then broadcasting those innovations.
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But did more traditional states back then have lower child mortality rates? Because I really thought that nobody was doing great on that front back then, and yes, the technology to overcome that did emerge within the state system, and it's possible that it could only have emerged within it, though I think G&W would argue that we simply can't know that, so why assume so?
And I am with you in genuinely wondering if the kinds of large-scale non-state societies they talk about are possible! I don't know! Could we do all the good things we do in a non-state society while also having less of the bad stuff that state societies do? I do think they're right that it's better to believe that they are and work towards it than to assume that they aren't and just be happy with the status quo (though I know that isn't your position at all!).
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