contraption-year-end-review.txt

Meeting Title: Contraption Book Club year end roundup
Date: Dec 19

Transcript:
 
Them: All right. Hello. Hello, team. Hey, yeah, Maybe you can complete the round of introduction since I think a few people don't know. Others. Yeah. So Sean just introduced himself. Maybe you can go left on my screen. So, Randy, then, John? Hey, so, Randy Lubin. Backgrounds in early stage tech startups based in the Bay Area, and now I make a lot of serious games that help folks explore possible features and explain complex systems. John. Hi, john. Very, very huge Venkat stand first and foremost, longtime reader. Yeah, I guess I'm a professional speculator at this point. Used to be in San Francisco Bay tech startups and DC politics, so. Not sure what else to say. All right, kyle.  
Me: Yeah. Also longtime reader. Not first time caller, I guess. But, yeah, I'm a startup person, I guess. Startup engineering, whatever. So I was in Bayer for a long time. Have family and kids now. So moved out to the bourbs in salt lake city. But, yeah, still doing same old stuff. And, yeah, glad to be here.  
Them: Anish. Yep. Hi. Long, long time. Reader background is the biophysics. Did a bit of. Startup stuff nowadays. I'm into AI and then Organon, chip based leap drug discovery. Remind me, aren't you also a doctor? Or used to be. No. PhD. PhD. Wrong kind of doctor. I'm thinking somebody else. Oh, yeah? Yeah.  
Me: No more doctor than you. Event kit.  
Them: Exactly. Fake kind? Yes. Yeah.  
Me: Take doctors.  
Them: Doctors. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah, so I guess. 12 books kind of done. Some of you can go around share both like how many you actually finished and sort of some highlights for you. So I would say eleven and a half of the official reads I finished. I'm still a third left with the 1493 book. I did do at least three or four side reads, though, so I can play more points than on the official thing. I think I read an extra Venice book. I read an extra Step no Man's Book. I read a book about Buenos Aires that was for a trip, but it turned out to be quite connected to the reading team. So I'm counting that to what else? I read the Chivalric Turn, which was probably my most interesting side read. It was unexpectedly interesting. So that's my inventory. And I would say I don't have any particular standout that I particularly liked. Yeah, they were all kind of interesting triangulations. I don't have favorites. I learned something from all of them. Anyway. Yeah, maybe go the other. I'll go from left to right. Now, John. Yeah. All right. I just unmuted. Okay? Let's see. In terms of the books, I at least skimmed most of them that were on Kindle. I read the whole. City of Fortune 1 actually, multiple times. That was quite interesting. Not sure it was necessarily a standout. It was like in terms of having new content. It just was a compelling sort of narrative and fun to listen to. I also just got into mail, something that Kyle posted about in the chat before European hegemony book. So looking forward to that. What was the rest of the prompt like? Reactions. How many of the books did you read? And just the highlights for you through the year. Oh, man. Okay, so let's go with. I mean, this is a little different.  
Me: Give yourself a score, you know, Great.  
Them: Oh, well, I think in terms of. Yeah, in terms of following the book club, I'd give myself, like, a B plus. I think that one interesting rabbit trail that I went on, if that's the term we use, is kind of the City of Fortune book just got me thinking. What about the Renaissance? The Renaissance is under discussed other than what's highlighted in your blog's Venkat, like kind of one of your major claims seems to be that, you know, modernity is not only a sort of Western Italian phenomenon in where it arose. So that's a. That's a big point where I took it was just learning and brushing up about like, the quote, unquote, Northern Renaissance. And there's just so much that was completely opaque. About that and, you know, in terms of, like, learning how to see, which is. I think what you said is part of modernity. I think, you know, Northern Europe was one of the main contributors to that dynamic. So might leave it there for now, but, yeah, just kind of going off on that side trail. Yeah, randy. I think I scored a 10 and a half plus a few bonus side reads. Favorites for me. I mean, I loved before European hegemony, and I really liked inventing the Renaissance. I feel like inventing the Renaissance for European hegemony gave me a big, like, world system contraption y view, which was great, but was more economic focused. And then inventing the Renaissance, I feel like just gave me such a rich slice of, like, what was going on in Italy and surrounding areas during that time. And also, like, the, you know, disabusing a bunch of, like, previous notions of what, what the Renaissance may have included. And it's just some fun contraptions that I hadn't really thought about. Like the, the, like the fractal patron client system stuff that, like, I associated with ancient Rome, but not necessarily with continuing through the Italian Renaissance. Like, that was all. I was all really great. But I don't know, I. Just love so many of them. And they're also different. It's been a pleasure. Sean. I'd probably score myself. Yeah, around a nine. But a couple of those are a couple halves. So, yeah, right in the middle of the. Of the year, I did, you know, between Montaigne and Don Quixote, I kind of finished Don Quixote, got halfway through Montaigne, but it was hard to. It was sort of hard to recover. I did just finish utopia, like, about 20 minutes ago, and then. And then I have to go back to 1493, which I'm actually very much enjoying. I was. I like anything that says that Western cult, you know, a lot of this is dependent on, like, the potato, you know, or like, what? Like, I live in Maryland and, like, right south of me, Malaria was the nut was. The dominating concern about why culture is the way it is. North of me, not so much, you know, so. Yeah, I really. And then it also, being part of the book club, also made a trip to Rome that I took in the middle of the year. Very meaningful just to kind of be able to see. You know, just all the statuary and all the kinds of things, it just made it sort of like, oh, this really was a. And the fact it was made over a hundred years, and you could kind of see what, what the earlier parts were, and then sort of how Bernini takes over and, you know, a lot of other things like that. It was. They made that very meaningful. I agree. No, no. One book seemed much better, much better than the others. The one I was most surprised at was probably Monkey King, which I. I did not see coming, for how much I enjoyed it. But, yeah, that. That was my experience. Anish. Yeah, I think I read all the books except for one tail, which. Which I think I'll take a few more months to. To actually finish. Finish. Besides that, I think I read five more books. I mean, like, yeah, as usual, no, no, single one was. Was. Was amazing. But I did find, like, Kingdoms of Faith very nice. In terms of, like, giving me a good orientation, especially, like, how much stuff depended on, like, before Spain was Spain. And, like, a lot of the stuff that happens in 1493 feels like it's a reaction. To the whole, whole, whole Muslim period which was there in Spain. Before the. That. That time. Besides that, all of the books which were, like. Which would have led on to the Asian side, were nice to me personally, because I moved to San Diego just, like, a couple of years ago from Singapore. And so I had been exposed to all of those parts, and I was like, oh, yeah, things, things. Things, things were happening things which, I mean like places, place, place, place, place. Bali and stuff where I have been. But I didn't appreciate until I read like, like, like these things. Other than that. Yeah, I mean like I, I, I, I, I haven't yet read it before book by. But. But I should. I should actually order it. And it sounds like a really nice read. Y.  
Me: Last but not least. So I read all the books at the beginning of the year. But then we had a baby in August, which, sorry, the book club was dropped. For the next while. But I'm back. So I also got lucky because 1493 had already read, so I sort of like got a freebie there and then going to try to pick up a utopia uber Christmas holidays and stuff. And then, yeah, I read before, you know, before European tournament. How you said that word. Anyways, that was super interesting. Well, in general, my impression of the whole year was like, I've put this in the chat roundup thing, but it's sort of like, you know, the modernarity is already here, but unevenly distributed sort of thing. Because, you know, I read a lot of fairy tales growing up. Like, medieval fairy tales. Like, for whatever reason, my. My parents had a bunch of books, so I read them all. And, you know, scattered other stuff from a bunch of different things. And it was always very charming, but, like, the people just seemed. Weird, you know, like, not really like me. Like, they're like. Okay, they're like, recognizable human, but their concerns and interest in how they think about things. Where felt very foreign. And it was just surprising, like, starting with, like, the first book about, you know, Venice, like, all the, like, key characters and the Venetian history were just, like, very, like. They didn't seem different. They seemed just, you know, very, very similar to me. And then. Yeah, and it kept cropping up in other. Places, too, where the. You know, different. Different people in different places. And so, yeah, so it's just kind of like. Yeah. And I think also it's just. The printing press book, whatever it's called. Did a really good job. It just kind of like, you know, the. The medium is the massage. Like, how did. How did printing warp people's brains? And it's interesting because, like, the same conditions of, like, having broad information. Having to make lots of decisions. Whatever. Those did exist in isolation in various different places. So I think, like, Venice was interesting because Venice had, like, this huge archive. They were, like, trading with everybody. So they. They kind of had like, that. That huge diversity of information that an individual could sit there and sift across all these things. And, like, you know, like, okay, these are, like, real things, and this. Anyways, they could have a coherent view of the world that wasn't shaped by some sort of little myopic. You know, thing that they couldn't escape from some sort of a gravity well of culture, you know, that they couldn't escape from. And so anyways, in printing sort of made that broadly possible for the elites who can now have a library all of a sudden and read a bunch of ancient books and contemporary books. And then, like, printing press has got really cheap and like 1700s, 1800s, which then kind of forced everyone to that. And then, of course, tv. Kind of like obliterated any remaining remnants of people who weren't seen abroad. You know, sort of selection of stuff. I also picked up another book which I have not read very much of, but it seems also related A Secular Age by Charles Taylor. Which he kind of traces the same sort of, you know, going from like more religious dominated thinking to broadly secular. But anyways, this, this, I guess, I guess here, what, what does a modern brain, it's like broadly cosmopolitan, knows a lot about a lot of things. More secular than sort of religious. Whatever. Yeah, it's just a very fascinating. I've always been interested in just sort of how did ideas develop, like, how do. How did things develop? And so this was a really nice kind of case study this year. A bunch of case studies. To kind of throw in that how it saw happened.  
Them: Eah. So I guess we have kind of initial impressions on the table. So the floor is kind of open, so feel free to, like, unmute and bring up anything you kind of want to air. Couple of things for me. One is since I'm just finishing before 1493 book, it strikes me that even within the West. The story is unreasonably Anglo laden, like the shaping of the Americas seems to be much more strongly driven by what the Spanish were doing in Central and Southern America, which then percolated upwards rather than, like, you know, the Anglo. So that's been a kind of big reset for me. I'm still wrapping my head around that because it's so at odds with the way things are now, because those regions are much weaker now. The other interesting thing, also from 1493, so 1493 is one of those. If I were to do the book club again, it might be worth scheduling up front because it's one of those bigger canvas books, I think. But the other one was, it was an interesting triangulation of China, right? We got one inside out view of China through the Monkey King, which is the kind of imaginative stories they were doing. Very backward looking, telling a 9th century story in the 16th century and then you've got the 1493 version of what was happening in the same era, which is like, you know, currency crisis, weird shit happening with Silver. All that was like a totally fascinating disconnect between inside and outside psyches to me. So those are two Spain, inside versus outside views. And the third thing I think. I think is another version of what Kyle just said, which is my starting thesis was modernity's clock should be started 300 years earlier than we normally do. So 1200 instead of, say, 1500. I think that thesis was roughly validated. But if you wanted to, like, put. Numbers on it. Like put a number on. Like future is on. Modernity is unevenly distributed. How would you measure that? Like one pair of data points. That struck me was before this year I read the a book about Istanbul. So it's called Istanbul A Tale of Three Cities and. Istanbul slash Byzantium at the time and Venice were kind of like, Power centers that had a flippening, basically, at the early part of history, Venice was looking up to Constantinople as sort of the center of civilization. By 1200, when our story starts, the book we read, it kind of flipped. They realized that the Byzantines were a bunch of, I don't know, backwards idiots and that they were really the frontier of reality, and they started ruling that whole region. Right? So that flippening was kind of interesting. And you see it in the two books itself, like attitudes were more modern. It was the same era. It was like, you know, 1200 or whatever, but one group looked like they were living 800. Years in the past. The other group looked like they were living 800 years in the future. And many of the technical things were the same, like they had similar ship capabilities, building and construction capabilities, road building or whatever. So you wouldn't have spotted it maybe on like the material know how, but almost at the cultural software. Level, it was worlds apart. Like, these guys were inventing bookkeeping and like, I guess, a kind of republican form of governance, whereas the Byzantines were, like, still stuck in, like, Roman era governance, things like that. And it struck me that an interesting exercise would be to almost define a metric of how unevenly modernity is. Distributed and run it across the globe. In a scan line from 1200 to 1600 and see what you get. Like, India is an interesting example because I would say modernity arrived with Islam, like the Hindu right in India. Would absolutely hate to hear this, but literally everything modern about India started arriving from gunpowder to modern courts. And like the legal code of the Islamic system, lots of things basically modernized with Islamic rule in India. So that would be, I would say, like, as Islamic rule goes in, you get more modern things happening. Right. So that would be an interesting, I don't know, research project of sorts defining this.  
Me: Now. It's interesting, even just, like, contemporary, like the last. You know, hundred years because, like the post world war ii leadership and like the americas and Europe, Were like, very. Reality. I. I kind of think aesthetist is like. It's like, how modern Yard. Maybe it doesn't even matter. It's English. It's just how in touch you are with reality is like how closely are you hewing to reality? And, like, how much of reality can you consume? So, because, like, if you compare, like, Post World War II leaders to. To say, the leaders of now, you know, people now, they seem like they're in, like, these fairy tales and they're just sort of wandering around. They look like they've completely lost touch with reality. And world war ii was kind of forced everyone to. To actually. And that was also just an explosion of, like, science and engineering and literature, and cultures are out the world, cultures all unifying. So it's sort of like 30, 40 years of just like. Anyways, so. So, so, yeah. So it's like, I think, like in the past, it's like Venice was both very reality focused. They were like, we're just out to make money, so we don't really care about any other metric other than just like, you know, dominating trading. So they had sort of. The very like, are we succeeded or not? Reality tests that they, they, everyone paid very close attention to. Plus they're in contact with all of Europe, you know, all the Middle east, and they knew a lot about the rest of Asia and so forth. So they just had a ton of reality information flowing in because you could think, like, so if you look at that metric, it's like, because, I mean, I've read, like, you know, there's various Roman. Period, like, whatever, people that seemed also very recognizably modern in a way. So it's almost like if you have enough reality, information that's diverse enough, it just sort of turns your brain into a certain sort of modernish type thinker. Is maybe sort of a unified. Way of saying this.  
Them: Yeah, go ahead, Venkat. Oh, just a footnote to that. I think the Indonesia book particularly outlined that that was an extremely reality. The Majapahit was like they were living in ghosts and magic. Even though interesting ships and powerful trade networks, they were living in fairy tale land.  
Me: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they happen to be good at building ships or something, but it didn't really seem to impact them. They just were in this, like, very. Yeah, they had all the tropical foods. You know, they had tons of trees. They were like in the middle of, like, the center of trading. Like, everyone had to go through them, you know, so they, they. It was just sort of there on easy, easy, easy road. I mean, it's kind of also sort of the barbarian civilized sort of thing. It's like. Barbanga's come over, they get fat and stupid and, like, lose touch with reality. And then they get dominated again by barbarians. So it's sort of like they get dumbified. By their success.  
Them: The more monopoly you have on, like, wealth, trade, resources or anything, the less you need to be in touch with reality in the short run. Exactly.  
Me: Yeah.  
Them: One of the things I was going to throw out there, I think this came from inventing the Renaissance for me, but was one of the first dominoes on modernity. On the more intellectual side was Petrarch, who I knew pretty much nothing about, but he was like early 1300s. Yeah, early through. And basically his big project because I don't remember him coming up in any of the other readings, but was basically like, hey, we're in decline. Like, we're in the Middle Ages. We're down from the heights of Rome or whatever. What if we just get, like, all our kids reading the classics, and then they'll. Learn how to be virtuous people, and then they'll create a golden age. And that kind of kicked off a, like, several generation program that ended up leading to this, like, intellectual milieu of, like, early Renaissance, where everyone had read all these classics. And that led a lot more intellectual, philosophical diversity beyond, I guess, what the Catholic Church would have been providing at the time.  
Me: Yeah. Yeah, I started a biography with him, too, this year. And, like, it talked a lot about just their manuscript hunting. You know, are they, like. They're like, okay, where's all the different monasteries and stuff? You know, scattered all over and, like, okay, you're gonna. They, like, organize themselves to go on, like, manuscript finding. You know, searches, and they'd, like, hunt through all these, like, moldy old manuscripts, and they're like, I found this one. Like, we never. Anyways, it was very, like, I don't know, some sort of, I don't know, online club or something.  
Them: Yeah. And likewise, I feel like there'd be like, we found this dude from the Byzantine Empire who speaks ancient Greek. Everybody learned ancient Greek.  
Me: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because this was. That was also in the. The printing book, right?  
Them: That sounds right to me.  
Me: Like. Yes, you talk. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah.  
Them: Actually. I also felt like a theme in many of the Spain and then like east books that basically if they could import good management all of a sushi, they could do it better. Like for example, between Cecilia Ottomans and then India suffer with and if I get the other one. But essentially, at some point at time they started totally run out of land, I think. And my hypothesis is that the only way that they were able to improve is because they had better ways of gathering wealth. Which until then had not been an issue. But then, as. Were then. Were then within like, what they having, like, much more control. These guys started to feel that, okay, how can we do more with what we have? Which, of course, the equator did not have those issues at all because they said food all the time. But yeah, I think how management improved could be. I mean, like my hypothesis is, is that for the scanline, where you want to find out where, where we are the most modern could be linked to where the best LI management was. At the time. But. But I haven't found any books about that. But then I haven't searched either. So the book I think you're referencing now, you read the gunpowder empires as well, right? Yes, yes. And Mughals. So, yeah. Yeah. That's an interesting preliminary stage as gunpowder and paper and stuff for making their way to Europe. There's an interesting middle period there. And. And that was an interesting one, I think the. What is the Maghrebi book. I'm blanking on the name. Kaldur. Yeah. Ian Kaldun. Yeah. That was kind of an interesting almost alt history of how much cultural settings matter. Like I would say around 1000 to 1180. Islam and Europe were actually, this is a more interesting comparison than Western China. Islam and Europe around 10 AD were equally poised to go on like, you know, modernity trajectories. Why did Islam falter whereas Europe took off? Is an interesting question, but it's kind of interesting, and you get glimpses of an answer with the Ibn Khaldun book, which is they develop some of the operating system, like a strong legal kind of like culture and ways of talking about due process and governance and stuff, but I think partly because they were in very scarcity constrained environments of like, deserts and North Africa and stuff, they simply didn't have.  
Me: Yeah.  
Them: As many like ways to express what their operating system had enabled. Maybe that's. That might be my theory, I don't know.  
Me: Yeah. Well, the Printypress book also just talked about, like, Northern Europe versus Southern Europe, where the Catholic Church kind of like cracked down on printing. And, like, sort of suppressed cultural diversity and development, which, you know, I mean, people. I mean, Northern Europe or Southern Europe is still very distinct. Cultural regions. And Southern Europe is quite a bit poorer than Northern Europe. Et cetera, et cetera. So it's like. I mean, there's a lot of things going on, but it is interesting because, like, Southern Europe was, like, the leading edge, like Italy and Spain and yada, and then somehow it flipped over the next few hundred years.  
Them: I think you can extrapolate that pattern down to the Islamic belt, because the Islamic clergy were even more resistant to the printing press, right? The Quran be printed to, like, several centuries. And even though they had the printing press, they didn't let the Quran specifically be printed. So something interesting going on there.  
Me: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because, I mean, the printing press, the book was just. Was like, she kind of. Was it a she? I don't remember what it's.  
Them: Yeah.  
Me: Okay?  
Them: Princely cross.  
Me: The person, the writer anyways. Yeah. Just like, she really just put it like the, the key difference of printing press was like, you could literally just have multiple books open at the same time and could be comparing the two. And that, that, like, rapid comparison is what sort of led to that insights. And. Yeah. And just like suppressing that ability to do the rapid sort of compare and contrast, it just sort of prevents anyone from. Seeing the. The problems with their current space because it's sort of like, well, that's all there is. You can't really see a problem if that's just what it is.  
Them: I feel like the other adjacent thing is the pamphlets and letters being circulated, creating an intellectual network where suddenly, even if it's a tiny percent of any one city that's intellectually engaged now that's magnified on continent scale, and you can get lots of eyes on the problem, lots more experiments in parallel. It was also interesting to see how Eisenstein contrasted not having to remember things. Like, there's another Francis Yates book about just the immensity of things that people could remember, Giordano Bruno being one of them and everything. And so that was also a fun synchronicity to see her directly responding. To Francis Yates reading that, Having just read that, I think just read those two books right in a row. That was very fun.  
Me: Yeah. Well, it's funny, like, now with, like, LLMs, like, I find myself not writing down notes ever. I don't know if other people have done this, but, like, I just never write notes because, like, I can recreate any sort of random thought by just sort of putting a loose prompt in the chat, and it's like pops out again. So, like, why take notes when I can recreate a much more extensive thing as a drop of a hat? So yeah.  
Them: The flip side of that, Automatic transcripts and node generation. Like, I think that the assistant is running on this, so I should get, like, a summary of our conversation that's notetaking and it's enough of a prompt. And then you kind of like, if you want to continue exploring that, you pump that into an LLM and, like, you know, vivify the conversation.  
Me: I critique everything we said, pick out all the silly comments.  
Them: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh. A couple of other interesting thought trails that started for me. I mean, John was asking me, like, a month ago. About the idea of a post modernity machine, right? So my hypothesis is there's like this 400 year cycle where it takes like, you know, a couple of hundred years to like just install a machine of 400 years actually to go from like a cold start to like, you can say the machine is fully deployed. So that was my hypothesis. 1200 to 1600, all the elements of modernity came together. And by 1600, you could say that reasonable parts of the world were running modernity os right? So something like that. And then you could say that for the next 400 years, that was the dominant or increasingly dominant operating system. In the world, but then another operating system was starting to be built under it, right? So 1600-2000 I would call it the postmodernity machine, being constructed but still only being unevenly distributed. And now we are entering the era with Postmodernity machine is starting to become the default and the modernity machine, I would say is on a very much quicker decline trajectory. So it's a very complicated wave pattern I'm drawing which is 400 year ramp, 400 year plateau and probably just a hundred year collapse because collapse is always much faster than building a machine. Right. And similar 400 years with like a little half cycle overlap of postmodernity. Maybe 400 years, but. Yeah, I've been thinking about. Could we do a similar book club about postmodernity? I think that would be difficult because it's so much more complex. Like the population of the world itself is like an order of magnitude or too higher. And the postponed training machine is a way bigger but. One thread of it I think is simple enough to pull on, actually emerged on the margins of this year's stuff. Right. Like in 1493. One of the things that impressed me was. All the ways he highlighted how. The slave population and Native Americans actually had agency in the margins and not only shaped history, but kind of like shaped their own future. Like so many like, you know, vehicles introduced by slave turned slave owner in Mexico, that kind of like little anecdote of thinking about that, that maybe one of the features of the post modernity machine is you've got reality based groups who are dealing with reality that is too complex for them to handle, so they start approaching. So postmodernity could be talked about as you're not building a machine so much as you're almost like improvising and hacking a complex system around the margins, right? So maybe the original slave and Native American cultures of dealing with being on the wrong side of modernity and being oppressed by it, they innovated. One of the first ways to, like, do post modernity, which is the world is going to inevitably get way too complex to actually, you know, map the machine. Or document how it works and like govern it in a reasonable way. And the only way to exist in post modernity is to. Be under the post modernity machine and hacking it from below or something like that. And if we follow that line of thought through.  
Me: We just read about the cyberpunk books.  
Them: Exactly. That's where I was getting. So the book club idea might be cyberpunk on the fiction side, but on the nonfiction side I'm finding a couple of things. So Henry Farrell has a book called the Underground Economy or something, and then Niels Gilman has edited collection called Deviant Globalization. So it strikes me that where modernity hits its limits and the world's leaders fail to govern the complex beasts they've created, adaptations emerge that are much more organic. And then you ask, how do global criminal gangs govern themselves? How do I know? Click farms in Russia exploit the Internet. How does the underground crypto economy work? How does human trafficking and smuggling work? There's something here. Haven't you thought the theme through? But this might be a tractable way of attacking the post modernity machine. Because I think a direct onslaught the way we did the modernity machine is not going to work. You have to get at it obliquely. Just to break in. I think I agree with that. One of the themes, at least I think tank people have been talking about this for a while, is like declining state capacity. I think this is sort of a subtext of a lot of your writing. Maybe not a lot of, but a decent amount of it. There's notes of us seeing, like, a state legibility in the subaltern. So yeah. That sounds like a really great angle. Not sure if you ever watch the show, but there's a show called the Wire, which was really popular when I was in school. I love it.  
Me: Another way of approaching this, too, is like, how are modern modernist regimes trying to defend themselves? So, like, I mean, that was kind of the China theme. Like, China is pretty interesting case study with the whole great digital firewall and stuff, but they're, like, trying to, like, contain complexity.  
Them: Yep.  
Me: To keep it governable. Which.  
Them: I mean, if you read the Dan Wang book yet. I forget what it's called.  
Me: Is. Yeah, the engineer. Yeah, whatever.  
Them: Breakthrough or break neck. Break neck? Yeah, I started it.  
Me: Yeah. So that could be a good one.  
Them: So that's, like. That would be the flip side of. Pushing the accelerator and trying to make the modernity machine become the postmodernity machine by just sheer force, and my suspicions will fail.  
Me: That's how we can frame America. America is like, innovating in the postmodern, you know, world, you know, like, we're just, you know, plunging headlong into everything, you know? Where Europe and China are trying to like. Like keep it creaking along. And increase.  
Them: Did the other extreme. Which I think we could do is, is, is maybe go and look at, like, tick tocks or, or something of people trying to teach other people how to use tools for free. Or they're like, committing crime. Which, which, which, which, which say, how do you get things off Amazon for free? Because essentially that would be the slave equivalent of today. And then that would be where the, the, the, the, the new world is being built. Because you have the resources. Even things, things, things, things, things like chat GPT. But, but to have access as to how that's actually happening would be interesting and I, I, I feeling it should be there on Tik Tok. Or that is something else. I'm not sure, but. But maybe like a month could be spent just on social media just doing that. I don't know. Yeah. So definitely that should be a topic touched on. But that's making me think like, of the candidates we've talked about modern China, social media, current state of America, pushing on the accelerator. These are all 21st century things. And if my thesis holds, this process should have started 400 years ago. And I hypothesized that slave and Native American reactionary communities were the first example of like post modern adaptations. What are others in the intervening 400 years? Because I think if we are not careful, we'll end up concluding that post modernity was invented in 1950 and it's only 50 years old. And I think that's wrong. I suspect, yeah.  
Me: Spinoza comes to mind.  
Them: Yes. Spinoza is definitely, I think, beginnings of post modernity, like. The philosophical level. Yeah, I read a great book about.  
Me: Really texts like that? Or just our biography, intellectual biographies or something of some early people like that could be interesting.  
Them: I read a book called the Courtier and the Heretic. I blogged about it, like, several years ago. So that's what Spinoza versus Leibniz. And it's really good. So that's an example. Yeah, the Spinoza would be postmodern, whereas Leibniz would be kind of like. Late modern. So he was trying to, like, continue to perpetuate Aristotelian, classical, philosophical attitudes. Spinoza was trying to like, tear it all down. Which is kind of interesting because until you dig into Leibniz's life, you think of him as like a very forward looking guy. He kind of invented the first computer type thing. He did calculus, he did early physics. But in his philosophical and cultural attitude, he was kind of a reactionary, whereas Spinoza was like a philosophical postmodernist of sorts. What else? Anything immediately popped to mind between 1600 to 2000, basically of signs of postmodern adaptation starting to happen. I don't have a specific thing to call out, but I suspect there's something in the mix around the French Revolution where there are certain visions of the future there that were very postmodern. I don't know it whether it's like romanticism of the German romantics and that kind of. Yeah. Romanticism, I think. Like, anytime that phrase comes up, I think of that one painting they used to illustrate. What is it called? Dermon Strong. The guy standing on a cliff, looking on a stormy ocean. That might be the painting. Announcing postmodernity. That was, what, probably 1800 or so, that painting? I think so. That might be a good, immediate one. Oh, I think. Oh, sorry. Just to break in really quickly. Just two threads on post modernity. I don't know the answer, obviously, or I haven't fully thought it through. One component is really. I mean, ironically, given that we're talking about modernity and people associate that with industrialism, just the term post industrialism is pretty well worn as far as I can tell. So there's sort of, like, some basis looking into that. And to me, the example I always throw out when I try to explain what post industrialism sort of means in a concrete example is just the idea of positional goods. So, you know, it's not like, can I feed myself? Or is the electricity on? It's like, where is my house? Is it in the right neighborhood? And a fun kind of case study into positional or, I don't know, just an interesting case study into the idea of positional goods is really just. Modern nightclubs. If you think about it like, you go in, you pay a lot of money. You pay like 3,000 bucks to be in a certain part or whatever. I'm not like, speaking from personal experience, but there's an interesting book written by. I forget her name, but it's published by the Economist. Which just dives into the nightclub economy, which, if you think about it, It's hard to imagine anything more post modern like the product is just temporary status. I guess. And I think, you know, if. I'm trying to think of the word. Not like the marginal, but, like, if the frontier of the economy goes beyond, like, do we have all the stuff that we need? You get to these more nebulous things that drive a lot of the story. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but let me know. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And I'm gonna put up a Google form for people to throw in recommendations once we have this team worked out a little bit. And we can then maybe do, like, some selection process, but I think Yes. Positional goods. And on the margins. I think one way to think of it is it was there in the modern module, but it was a very trading furs and stuff, you know. I'm thinking of the chivalric turn book, because that kind of is like a positional goods economy, but it was restricted to, like, rich nobles and knights and emperors, right? And they would do this kind of thing. But now it's, like, become basically democratized, and now you have, like, people living in slums. Competing over positional goods effectively. So I would say the democratization of positional goods culture is maybe one way to think of it. And I think since you actually brought up a second team there, like you assumed an economic frame for talking about this, and that itself, I think, is a feature of the postmodern machine. Right? Right. Capitalism everywhere, all at once are just thinking of the world. The category of economics, like you go 4, 1600, before Fernand brought Eli capitalism and stuff, there wasn't such a thing as like an economic view of the world. And so I think it's part of like a reality based view, but. Quote, unquote. The economy didn't really exist before 1600 is my hypothesis. Like, people would understand things like goods of costs and there's something like supply and demand. But look at, for example, Ibn Khaldun's attempt to describe what he thought the economy was. It was basically. Alchemy. It was like alchemy to chemistry. He had some vague idea that the sultan does things and therefore things happen in the economy. But his view was very monarchical, fiat economy. He didn't really understand the economy as such. So I think the economy should provide at least one or two good reads on this track, so especially really early stuff like before Adam Smith, maybe, or maybe Adam Smith. I was starting to read a book about Adam Smith's time. So that's the. Oh, Adam Smith was part of the Scottish. What is it called? Scottish Enlightenment. Yeah, yeah.  
Me: Yeah, I read. Yes. Yeah, I read a book about that.  
Them: That one might be a good topic because I think it's a good sort of service. Back onto the Continental Enlightenment. The Scottish Enlightenment had, like, some very postmodern characteristics.  
Me: Yeah.  
Them: I found a book on anthropology recently that I heard about from the philosopher Yukui. About? It's called Beyond Nature. And culture. And it essentially argues that instead of there being one nature, that a way to think about modernity is that there are multiple notions of nature, and that they could be very different from a Chinese point of view, from a Western point of view, from other sort of points of view, as opposed to trying to get people to always adhere to this is the way nature is or this is the way reality is. I don't know. I've just sort of started the book. It's interesting. It's very dense in the French kind of way, but it's in biyou kleit. But he uses this. No, it's. Philippe Desola. Okay. Yeah. So it's. Yeah. I think he mentions this in his Cosmo Techniques or Cosmopolitan. I've heard of this book as well. Okay, I think you're bringing up another interesting point again. I think my standard move here is going to be to take the suggestions and rewind it 400 years. Like, if I ask, what is the corresponding origin of this thread. I go back to like Rousseau and Hobbes, who were both mid 17th century. And again they offer two different theories of nature and the relationship of civilization to nature. Right? Hobbes and the hobbyism view. And Rousseau had kind of like the noble savage type of view. Both are like at odds with each other. They're very different ways of conceptualizing and I think that's also postmodern. Like you have the pre modern style of thinking about nature, which is typically religious. Like, you know, every religion offers basically a mythologization of what nature is, but modernity offered like a few reality based. Myths of nature, so to speak, and then post modernity offers basically a plurality of views of nature. That might be the hypothesis here.  
Me: Another, another, another angle.  
Them: Actually building. On Sean's thing. I'm wondering whether how people took control of literature first said, like, things, things, things, things like Don kick, kick, kick. You have times where he just out in the wild. But then, but then you also have, like, gardens being made. And then Islam also propagated.  
Me: Sorry. Go ahead.  
Them: Basically a specific pattern of the Garden across the world, and that's a way of taking control off nature. For many of the kings, the Garden was the nightclub. For a while. And I mean, like, tracking. That would be interesting. And then at some point, we went from saying, okay, there's going to be where we live inside nature, to being like, okay, we are going to build dams, and now we are going to administer nature as opposed to us being inside it. Is kind of a flipping thing that's kind of interesting, I think, because throughout this 400 year period, I think cultures of gardening are very interesting. So Japan has its unique gardening culture. Persians have their, you know, garden curation stuff. The Victorians had ideas of what gardens should look like. America had its parks movement into the early 20th century. All this is, like, nature is wild outside, and how do we create, like, a more civilized bubble of nature to live in? That's nice. And I think what you're pointing out is the focus shifted from, like, building, bringing a civilized version of nature into your boundary to going outside your boundaries, and. Turning the entire. So basically, the terraforming instinct. It's like you gain enough confidence in your capabilities that you say, I'll do more than just make a pretty little toy garden. I'm going to go out and conquer the whole thing. Right. So that. That impulse. I don't know how to study. The expression of that. But I think, yes, that's something that if you can find a good book about that. The flippening of the gardening tendency, like guarding your backyard to guard in the world tendency. There's something there. Actually, one of the interesting ways to look at that might be people like Alexander von Humboldt. So there's a Humboldt museum, I think, in Berlin or something. And Humboldt, I think, was one of the early people who represents this attitude, like just going out there and starting to think in terms of. Running the world as opposed to running your backyard. So. Yeah, I'll put Humboldt on our list along with. Yeah, if you. Randy mentioned Walter. Yeah, I think there's going to be at least a bunch of, like, biography style candidates, so people who represent the spirit of postmodernity very well. I'm also thinking in terms of are there. World processes, so to speak. Like, you know, the economy is one. Like, thinking of the world as an economy and then thinking in terms of economic lenses, that's one. Are there other Nature is another. Are there other world processes? Basically kind of worth thinking about. Feels like there's probably something on the media side, like, bring up French Revolution earlier. I mean, I feel like what was happening with the press is during the different stages of the French Revolution and with pamphlets and using that like, that's a big flashpoint. Jumping forward quite a bit. I feel like, yeah, propaganda. Is the lens perfect? Yeah.  
Me: Yeah, just propaganda, maybe. That's very, very focused lens on music media.  
Them: Yeah. And, like, going back to, like, Hearst and yellow journalism and like, you give me the photos, I'll give you the war. Like all of that is very, very aligned, I think. Yeah, so the. The sort of handle that again, like sort of think tanky type people. Put on that is just the noosphere. Sort of another term that I know has multiple associations is the term of cathexis, which is. I would struggle to define it, but basically it's being able to take some theoretical concept that's not materially in front of you seriously. So just a few ideas. I think both nosphere and cath axis and the think tank tradition you're referring to in general, I suspect they belong more in the extrapolating modernity as opposed to like theorizing adaptive post modernity site. Because I would put them this is these are things that China might want to do is how I would. I would put my litmus test, as in, like, you know, you feel your control of the machine starting to fray and you're trying to theorize and conceptualize ways to, like, continue it. I think Benjamin Bratton talks about Catholic a lot, so I think, yeah, we should probably do at least maybe one third of the reads on, basically. Resisting what I'm thinking of as a default postmodern pattern, which is the. It's a complex system that's emerging on its own terms, and you can't control or design it. You can only adapt to it from, like, outside or under or something. That's my default plot in narrative hypothesis. But the B plot is there are people who don't agree. They believed you can design, construct an architect, full machines and govern them like you used to, Right. So they, they kind of want to think control can be continued in the modern age. So that tension might be interesting to see. Like that tension itself might suggest some. Good reads. Like I read the first couple of chapters of Dan Davies, the Unaccountability Machine. And that's, I think, right on the border of can you actually build a machine you can control to do all this? So, so sorry. How to fail at Utopia But. But build sicker.  
Me: So another another lens too is, you know, there's a lot of, like, the switching between machines is is very complicated, and there's lots of crisis and disasters and conflict and wars and, you know, whatever, which is all very interesting and illuminating so forth. But it's also, I think be interesting. Like, what if postmodernism succeeds, and it has, like, it's a golden era. You know, everyone's, like, just humming along because, you know, like, the modern era, there's lots of sort of golden ages in the last few hundred years where things are, like, pretty chill and simple and whatever. I mean, there's always crashes. But anyways, so. So I know you mentioned this too, because I think, like, Culture series is like, one of the few people who, like. Ian Banks is one of the few people who have tried to like, what would a very happy system look like? Where everyone can do whatever the hell they want and everyone's prosperous. And so on. And, of course, he spends a lot of time exploring the edges of that, but, you know, there is sort of lots of glimpse of, like, his thoughts on what sort of a happy postmodern. System.  
Them: Has anybody actually written, like, a nonfiction treatment of luxury space communism? Like UNM Banks is kind of the fictional version of luxury space anarchy. But I think luxury space communism is an interesting meme that I don't know that anybody is actually characterized in any.  
Me: Yeah.  
Them: Depth. Star trek.  
Me: Yes.  
Them: But. But I think. Yeah, Star Trek is a little on the nose, but it's like a good default, right? Yeah.  
Me: See what it comes up.  
Them: I think we do the similar structure this year of like doing a couple of months of pick your own fiction reads kind of things in the middle, because fiction in the summer, I think, is a good relaxation point. But yeah, I think you brought up another theme on the side there, which is progress through crises as opposed to progress. Through, like, design and architecture is how I would put it. Yes, there were crises in, like, the modernity, machine, evolution, but a lot of what happened there was, like, relatively planned. Like, you know, Venice set up a particular kind of administrative empire. The Portuguese and Spaniards. Built ships and went out to explore. So there was kind of like a waterfall planning approach to how modern modernity was installed, whereas postmodernity is more. It's being installed in like an agile test driven development, you know, fail fast, crash, early way that it feels to me that that's the case. I don't know how true that is, but, like, colonialism as a project would be. I would say crash. Early crash often, because you had, like, four or five colonial empires going out to, like, very different parts of the world, trying very different playbooks. And it was, like, extremely improvised, usually by people who had been given, like, zero oversight and like a lot of autonomy. And then things happened in a very path dependent, agile way. Right. Like they tried a few things.  
Me: Lots of blood. And horror.  
Them: Lots of blood. And that's true of, I think, agile programming as well, maybe.  
Me: Yeah. Touche.  
Them: Move fast and break things.  
Me: Yeah, yeah.  
Them: Yeah, yeah. So actually that that might be another hypothesis that postmodernity was moved fast and break things and it never actually got to a more careful approach and cannot. But your point about like what is the ideal state. I think we can again do a rhyming question there. If our hypothesis is correct, that moderating machine took between 1200-1600 to get installed. In 1600, it was basically in production, so to speak. And everything after 1600, you would say default is it should happen in the modern way. If not, it's like regressive and like, needs to catch up and modernize. So I would say and you ask then what is kind of the quote, unquote, golden age of modernity machine at its best? I would probably pick.  
Me: Yeah.  
Them: England in the late Victorian era. Like, probably the point I would pick. It's like, this is as good as it gets. If you do modernity, something like that, maybe. Yeah. America never actually fully modernized because it joined the party like a couple of centuries late and then had a couple of very regrets of institutions like slavery. And then leap. America actually did a leapfrog. I would say the United States, like, leapfrogged a lot of the development part of Europe and Asia, and therefore it has this weird mix of like landing on the moon and some things that look like they belong in the 16th century. Something like that is going on. But yeah, I would pick Britain in late 1800s as maybe that's how good modernity gets. But I think we can if again, our 400 year hypothesis is true. The year 2000 should mark the beginning of the mature plateau of postmodernism. Right? So we should look at 1600-2000 as things are happening in various ways that are making post modernity come to Life and Starting 2000. Postmodernity is the default way of being and at the same timeline continues. We should see the best most modernity can develop or can deliver sometime around 2150 and like very literally transposing the timeline right? So. Something like that. So we should think of what's an interesting.  
Me: Mars colony really gets going.  
Them: Yeah. That might be like kind of on the nose symbol of that, kind of like, what would be the symbol of Britain as peak Victorian modernity? Something like actually, Big Ben getting constructed might be the motif I would pick because World Exposition. 1853 or something. The London idea that one the big band occurred to me is it is recurring motif in Virginia Wolf's Mrs. Dalloway, which was the novel that inaugurated modernist literature. The Big Ben keeps striking every 20, 30 pages as like a reminder that, like, you know, the clock has entered your life. The clock might be another interesting thing to look at. The pendulum clock was kind of invented 1607-1650s or something. Somewhere between Galileo and Hygiens. So there's a time angle here.  
Me: Yeah. But, I mean, that was like, interior clocks, because they had, like, church clocks.  
Them: Yeah.  
Me: Earlier.  
Them: No, pendulum clocks are 1600 and later, because Galileo developed the principle of the pendulum. Then before that, you had, like, water clocks and other kinds of weird mechanisms and sun driven sundials. There were, I think, like, junior monks were, like, assigned to watching the sundial and ringing the bell at, like, you know, prayer times and. So proper clocks, I think 1600 and later.  
Me: Okay? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, because they were all off. Because there's. There's often, like, stories of people. You could, like, hear the different villages, you know, ringing at different times, and you're like, oh, there's that one going, and that one. They are just sort of had their own little idiosyncrasy. Timing.  
Them: That one I have a good book on. I keep forgetting the name, but, yeah, there's a big fat book on the history of David Landis, I think. David Landis, Revolution in Time. So that basically traces the history of the clock across this period. So it started out.  
Me: Then you could finish your book on time, and then we could read.  
Them: In the age of LLMs that might get abandoned and turned into, I don't know. An LLM I shared with every that is actually a weird thing that's happening. Like next year I think I'm going to be doing a lot more random wipe coding and experiments with AI rather than writing straight up. Like right now I'm wip coding book out of my Twitter archive, which was like an impossible project two years ago. But now I can just do it myself. So it's almost done. I'll publish that in a couple of weeks.  
Me: Yeah.  
Them: But yeah, time is another access. Anyway, I don't want to keep you guys too long. We have five minutes over, but yeah. I think this is starting to sound like a promising theme. Emergence of post modernity machine looked at through this particular lens.  
Me: Yeah.  
Them: Of adaptation from the outside of the emergent complex beast. That's kind of the hypothesis here, but otherwise still retaining the 400 year. You know, develop and deploy to production hypothesis, right?  
Me: Yeah. Yeah. Just in general. Yeah, it's been really fun just having a book reading, but it's fun. Well, also, it's like book reading club that actually I've joined. I've tried joining book reading clubs and I've never liked any of the books or the people per se, or what they said so anyway, so it's nice to have a good club. But also, yeah, it's very topical. It's just such a weird time in having other people and like, a targeted sort of reading list to. To kind of try to wrap our heads around. It is nice for my peace of mind, you know, it's like, okay, it's not such a. Not quite as chaotic and weird as it seems.  
Them: Yeah. Kind of fun. Been a pleasure. Yeah. This one is going to need a lot more participatory development because it's so much more complex and there's so many more possible candidate books and threads. So I think I'm going to approach it slightly differently, which is a layout the basic thesis of what we discussed in this hour and then open it up to, like Google form recommend teams or books or individuals. And if you don't have a book, just kind of like a pointed query that we can like look for books for things like that and maybe even open it up a little bit in terms of more months having. Pick from multiple selections as opposed to. Actually, that's a procedural question worth maybe discussing for a minute before we sign off. This year, I think nine of the months I defined one book per month. And that has like the advantage of everybody has read the same thing. So it's fun to discuss. I think two or three of the months I did like either a choice of several books or just pick your own. Did that balance feel right? Should we do more? That balance was good.  
Me: Yeah, the mouse was good. Yeah. I mean, it was. Yeah. I think there has to be a spine that connects everyone together.  
Them: Okay?  
Me: To make the conversation actually work.  
Them: All right. So that's going to be slightly more challenging this year, but maybe I'll target something like eight common reads and four with some degree of choice in them.  
Me: Okay?  
Them: Sounds good. Good. And I think, like, the one thing that you did a few times, I think, was you had, like, extra credit books. I think calling those out as, like, hey, these didn't make the cut, but they're different views on the same subtopic, probably effective.  
Me: Then the eager beavers who have weirdly large amounts of free time.  
Them: Yeah.  
Me: Can roll.  
Them: I was actually questioning Anish about that because I think he holds the record for the most side reads. And he was saying he's been so busy, this has been his way of relaxing. So he's, like, relaxing super hard. I don't know how that works, but okay. I mean. I mean, I didn't read books for, like, seven years when I was doing this startup. And, like, once I left, I'm like, hey, man, I could get back to this. So it was like a rebound thing, maybe.  
Me: Yeah.  
Them: All right. Yeah, thanks, guys. This was really fun and a good reflection on the year. And thanks for all the ideas and. Oh, I think Zoom will send me a transcript of this chat. You guys okay with me slightly editing that and just posting that for others?  
Me: Sounds good.  
Them: Absolutely. All right. Thanks, guys. Thanks so much. Have a good one.