Shared reading list

[Frijol]

Idea

Shared reading list from DWeb Camp– I talked to a ton of people and shared and received many book and blog post recommendations! I'd love to collaboratively bring together some of those recommendations here as links to continue that conversation.

Labels

discussion-topic, library

[Frijol]

@rangermauve already shared a post along a similar line, cross-linking!

[RangerMauve]

I'm also going to be adding in recommendations from people responding to my post on Twitter and SSB at %ZHGN7B3XnQnSiBOmRmCOSpNZeEvmkPp+YlgkjvFJYCQ=.sha256

Sadly I totally forgot to take a picture of the list that @Frijol started in the Dome. 😿

[Frijol]

Kelsey's (absurdly long) book list

Books

I've read this & can personally recommend it

• Seeing Like a State – about centralized ways of seeing, the difference between things that look orderly when viewed from above/legibility as a means of control and taxation, vs. messy-looking processes that may not be or seem efficient but are collaborative and participatory. I'm not doing it a lot of justice in this summary but hope to write a blog post on it sometime soonish.
• Compendium for the Civic Economy – a set of examples of places, mostly in the UK, that have undertaken collaborative and initiative-driven civic participation. Good for flipping through and getting inspired about local work you could do.
• The Singularity is Near (Kurzweil) – There's a lot here and I don't recommend the whole book, but it talks about the inherent fragility of born-digital data, the pace of technological change, and the ethical questions that may be relevant in a potential transhumanist future
• Radicalized – a fiction anthology of Cory Doctorow short stories showcasing ways in which the system as it is can radicalize good and reasonable people out of perverse rulemaking. The first story, primarily around the ethics & incentives of digital locks, seems to be a riff on the ideas in Doctorow's book Information Doesn't Want to be Free (aimed at content creators), which I'm currently reading, which I also recommend.
• Walkaway, another Cory Doctorow novel that builds a world I want to live in
• Manufacturing Consent (Chomsky) is a solid example of some of the ways things go wrong when power is centralized. If you don't want to read the whole book, the point is pretty well made in the introduction.
• Reinventing Organizations (Laloux) – full of really great use cases of communities and companies that organize for greater individual empowerment and less centralized control
• Emergent Strategy – adrienne maree brown is an organizer/activist who writes & speaks powerfully also on the theme of decentralized power structures, thinking outside existing systems, and ways of being that open pathways to personal growth
• The Problem with Work (Weeks) – this book is so good it makes me want to go to grad school and study this: a history of work and labor and what's wrong with the way these things are handled in modern society and ways that system has been challenged
• Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest (Brunton & Nissenbaum) – half academic historical examples of obfuscation techniques, half pragmatic
• Better Work Together out of Enspiral (some crossover with SSB) is one of the best books I've read this year. It ranges from philosophical to pragmatic on the subject of doing work that matters with the majority of your resources (time, energy, etc).
• Raising the Floor (Stern) is a labor organizer's journey into fixing economics, landing on universal basic income– though in case you're not into that, he also gives some good detail around other proposed solutions to our dying economic paradigm
• Octavia Butler's various imaginaries around possible futures and ways of being, in particular Parable of the Sower
• Labyrinths (Borges) and especially Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

There are probably a lot more novels not currently coming to mind. I'll add them if I think of them; imaginaries are crucial to the building of a new world.

I want to read this

• Charles Eisenstein: Sacred Economics on gift economies etc and The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible which has more about ecology
• Honeybee Democracy on collective decision-making
• Debt h/t @ezragoss
• The Grid h/t @ezragoss
• This Civilisation Is Finished
• What If This Were Enough?
• Take Back the Economy
• Our Commons: Political Ideas for a New Europe
• You Are Not a Gadget
• Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age
• Your Money Or Your Life: Feminist Perspectives on Economy
• The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone
• Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency
• The Real World of Technology
• Understanding Knowledge as a Commons
• Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet
• Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora
• Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era

Blog posts

I've read this & can personally recommend it

• Various posts by Richard Bartlett on people and organizing and communicating
• Notes on Climate Change that I wrote
• Data Together's blog posts on Knowledge Commons and Civics

I want to read this

• How to run a small social network site for you and your friends h/t @gregmarra
• Homebrew computing before the PC by @sbw
• Transforming Ourselves to Transform Our Networks by @maisutton
• Local-first software h/t @gregmarra

[cinnamon-bun]

The Data Together group has a reading list

Covers topics like Knowledge Commons, Civics, Alternatives to Capitalist Structures, Stewardship

[cinnamon-bun]

Oh, @Frijol is part of the Data Together group! :)