Amongst the books that affected me most in 2021 was Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, a study of communities of mushroom pickers in the Pacific Northwest, Yunnan China and Kyoto Prefecture, Japan. Out of this seemingly obscure topic, out of its obscurity Tsing weaves a dizzying account of capitalist modernity. It is a study, as her subtitle has it, of “the possibility of life in capitalist ruins”.
-- The matsutake community and its connections to the rest of the world is nicely captured as a truffle-hunter in the recent movie "Pig."
__ Something like the patchiness and limits to simplistic scaling is showing up experimentally in machine learning as researchers and entrepreneurs throw almost unlimited computing power and vastly overcomplete representations at apparently endless amounts of data. It works, but in patches, often not scaling fully up to the hoped-for world size and markets.
A potentially useful analogy to help structure this sort of thinking about the world would be modern understanding of evolution and the biological world. That framing captures change and adaptation without buying into an overall notion of progress, either at the global or local level. And it also matches with her argument that areas of disturbance are where change can happen.
And ecology also seems patchy, in her sense, with a focus on the local and particular, and a lack of scalability while still being embedded in larger ecosystems. And the more we learn, the more important cooperative and symbiotic relationships seem to be in the natural world.
'"Immigrants were exhorted to join the “melting pot,” to become full Americans by erasing their pasts.” (101) For those who arrived in the 1980s that was no longer true.'
This narrative seems at odds with reality. It is the working class Asian communities of the mid-century that maintained their particularities and separateness. It's the capitalist exhortations of the recent decades that have integrated a large Asian middle class population into the American mainstream.
Hi Adam, thanks for this article. Did Cameron mention on a recent Ones and Tooze that you had published a "favorite books of 2021" list somewhere, or am I mistaken? I can't find it, and would to see your other recs!
The growing unease in the culture with the idea of progress (or Progress?) reminds me of the thinkers of the Frankfurt School - who, in their time, were witnessing a clear disconnect between their civilisation's ideals and real-world suffering. It makes me wonder if that time - just prior to the cataclysms of World War II - share more in common with ours than we would be comfortable to admit.
Two thoughts --
-- The matsutake community and its connections to the rest of the world is nicely captured as a truffle-hunter in the recent movie "Pig."
__ Something like the patchiness and limits to simplistic scaling is showing up experimentally in machine learning as researchers and entrepreneurs throw almost unlimited computing power and vastly overcomplete representations at apparently endless amounts of data. It works, but in patches, often not scaling fully up to the hoped-for world size and markets.
A potentially useful analogy to help structure this sort of thinking about the world would be modern understanding of evolution and the biological world. That framing captures change and adaptation without buying into an overall notion of progress, either at the global or local level. And it also matches with her argument that areas of disturbance are where change can happen.
And ecology also seems patchy, in her sense, with a focus on the local and particular, and a lack of scalability while still being embedded in larger ecosystems. And the more we learn, the more important cooperative and symbiotic relationships seem to be in the natural world.
'"Immigrants were exhorted to join the “melting pot,” to become full Americans by erasing their pasts.” (101) For those who arrived in the 1980s that was no longer true.'
This narrative seems at odds with reality. It is the working class Asian communities of the mid-century that maintained their particularities and separateness. It's the capitalist exhortations of the recent decades that have integrated a large Asian middle class population into the American mainstream.
Thanks. I take you up on you book suggestions (even your own), and they've all been good.
Hi Adam, thanks for this article. Did Cameron mention on a recent Ones and Tooze that you had published a "favorite books of 2021" list somewhere, or am I mistaken? I can't find it, and would to see your other recs!
The growing unease in the culture with the idea of progress (or Progress?) reminds me of the thinkers of the Frankfurt School - who, in their time, were witnessing a clear disconnect between their civilisation's ideals and real-world suffering. It makes me wonder if that time - just prior to the cataclysms of World War II - share more in common with ours than we would be comfortable to admit.