The Third Reich of Dreams

 
 
The Third Reich of Dreams
The Nightmares of a Nation
by Charlotte Beradt
translated by Damion Searls

Princeton University Press

1966, reprinted 2025 
 
 

The Third Reich of Dreams is a work of social science by the German journalist Charlotte Beradt. Between 1933, when Hitler came to power, and 1939, when Beradt fled the country for refuge abroad, she collected over 300 accounts of people's dreams that seemed to be inspired by fears about the Nazi government. In this novella-length book, Beradt identifies about a dozen recurring themes and describes each along with examples and a bit of anaysis about the connection between the dreams and life under Nazi rule. Beradt wrote the accounts in code in the bindings of books, which she then mailed to friends overseas. She finally wrote her own book in 1966; it was recently republished by Princeton.
 
The first dream in the book is the one that led Beradt to start her project. A socialist factory-owner dreamt the Goebbels visited his factory. In the dream, the man knew that if he did not give Goebbels the Nazi salute that he would lose his factory, and if he did he would lose the respect of all his workers. He dreamt he spent an agonizing eternity raising his arm in salute, and as soon as he finished, his back broke from the effort. Most of the dreams are like this, they are dreams of submission and defeat. In one chapter near the end, Beradt discusses the handful of dreams from people who dreamt of defying the Nazis. All the rest are from people whose unconscious minds could imagine only terror, not resistence.
 
There were dreams of surveillance and snitching. People imagined being arrested for having private thoughts against Hitler that they never spoke aloud, they dreamt that ordinary household objects were listening to every word that was said and then speaking the most incriminating passages aloud in deafening voices. They dreamt of failed resistance, of writing a letter of complaint but, even in the dream being so afraid of punishment that they mailed a blank page, or of speaking out to denounce the Nazis, but choosing to speak in a made-up language so no one could understand them.
 
Some dreamt of new propaganda or new restrictions, new punishments for Jewish Germans. Beradt notes that many of these dreams seem prophetic, they anticipate real political events that happened later, years after they were dreamt. It is as though, Beradt claims, people subconsciously understood the direction the Nazis were taking the country in, and imagined likely signposts along the way. It is also as though living under the Nazi government was a waking nightmare, governed by a regime that operated on dream logic, that demanded and often received total obedience, so that people were afraid even to imagine themselves saying what they really thought. Some of the people Beradt spoke to had partial Jewish ancestry but dreamt that it defined them totally and led to them being treated exactly like other Jews, which was indeed what eventually happened.
 
The most shameful dreams are by those who imagined themselves knowing Hitler or some other Nazi official personally, who dreamt of wanting some form of praise or affection, of receiving it, and then in the dream of feeling inordinately proud after.
 
As a work of social science, this is a fascinating document precisely because it's so unusual. Beradt was a journalist rather than an academic, but this is not just a collection of interviews, and someone hoping for only the dreams, or a transcription of all of them, is going to be disappointed. Beradt quotes several dozen dreams in full, but these are examples. They show us the patterns she found, and they allow her to perform close-readings, looking for meaning. 
 
The strangeness of this as a study owes both to Beradt's status as an outsider to the academy and to the conditions of its production. Obviously Beradt has no strategy for sampling, beyond collecting whatever she can; her methodology is idiosyncratic, her theory minimal. But her subject was urgent and her data were collected under duress. It reminds me of mass observation, another early 20th century attempt to learn from directly from members of the public by compiling first-hand accounts of important events, a way of knowing that takes advantage of exigence, but is mostly overshadowed by more formalized academic approaches. There are good reasons to prefer rigor when it's possible, but I think there's also real value in projects like this, that manage to snatch something from the lion's mouth before it closes. 

Destined for Greatness

 
Destined for Greatness
Passions, Dreams, and Aspirations in a College Music Town

by Michael Ramirez

photos by Mike White

Rutgers University Press

2018 

 

 
Destined for Greatness is a sociological study of rock musicians in Athens, Georgia. Ramirez interviewed 48 musicians across 22 bands about how they got started in music, what their music career has been like, how they imagine their future. His interest here isn't in the artistic content of the songs, but in the job of being a musician. The book is organized around the stages of the lifecourse (and their intersection with the stages of having a career) with a special emphasis on differences between men's and women's experiences.
 
Although all Ramirez's interviewees were based in the same town, his research is not ethnographic, and there's no thick description of the Athens music scene, of what it's like to play or listen there, of what any of this music sounds like, beyond that it's rock rather than some other genre. If you go into the book expecting that, you'll be disappointed. His study is written up much as it would be if he interviewed people from across the country, about almost any kind of work. Though just as Ramirez isn't trying to be Gary Alan Fine, he's also not trying to be Michele Lamont, so there are no elaborate selection criteria for making a half-dozen comparisons between various 'halves' of the sample. Gender is the main point of difference between the musicians. Most of the rest of what Ramirez finds is similarity across them (or differences with little systematic basis).
 
The musicians Ramirez talked to aren't nationally famous; most are probable little known outside of Athens. Their level of success varies. A few make enough from playing local shows and regional tours to treat music as their full-time job; most are musicians in addition to other work, usually service jobs, occasionally office work. To be included, the band had to rehearse and perform regularly, and to either tour or have an album. The weakest part of each chapter is actually the introduction, when Ramirez tries to link whatever he's talking about to something a nationally famous musician has said in a public statement. He's on far firmer footing writing about his actual interviewees.
 
Ramirez frames his work primarily from a lifecourse perspective, and he's especially interested in the idea of emerging adulthood - supposedly a recent stage of life that sits between the end of adolescence and the start of full adulthood, when people have mostly achieved independence from their parents, but not yet achieved a marriage, mortgage, career, and children of their own. (As I understand it from authors other than Ramirez, the idea that people commonly wed and start having kids in their late teens or very early twenties is an expectation set in the historically abnormal 1950s. We hold ourselves to an imaginary standard set at a weird time.) 
 
Like many people their age, young adult musicians tend to delay forming their own families. Unlike most, their chosen career isn't seen as a 'real' or 'grown-up' job by others, so they have added difficulties in feeling like full adults, rather than like they've 'fallen behind' their peers. I think the extended apprenticeship of grad school might produce a similar feeling, and there are probably other career trajectories with the same problem, particularly in any creative field.
 
As I mentioned, the organization of the book centers on the stages of the lifecourse. We get a chapter about how they discovered their love of music, how they learned to play an instrument, and how they started playing rock music. We get a chapter about forming their first bands and playing their first shows. We get a chapter about the challenges of making a career out of music, especially for those who have to integrate musicianship with other employment, and about how they think about their identities as musicians and as adults. We get two chapters about gender - one about men in rock music, and one about women. And we get a chapter about how musicians envision their futures, whether they'll keep performing, and how they plan to continue their careers.
 
I started reading this hoping for an ethnography of the Athens music scene, but I appreciate Ramirez's research, and his insights into how people negotiate informal careers in creative industries. There are a handful of black and white photos of the scene; I sort of assume these are from around the same time Ramirez was doing his interviews, but that they probably don't show anyone he actually spoke to.

Twisty Little Passages

 
 

Twisty Little Passages 
An Approach to Interactive Fiction

by Nick Montfort

MIT Press

2003 

 

 

Twisty Little Passages is an academic history of interactive fiction from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. The title is a pun, referring to the passages of text that make up interactive fiction and the maze-like underground passages that the fiction frequently describes. Interactive fiction is abbreviated IF in the same way that roleplaying games are abbreviated RPGs. Nick Monfort explains what interactive fiction is, gives a history of its origins and rise to commercial success in the 1980s, and discusses how independent implementers - the people who write interactive fiction - took over the form once again in the 90s when it was no longer especially commercially successful.
 
What we today call interactive fiction was originally known as text-based adventure games. The name change reflects a certain amount of legitimacy seeking by its creators, but it also reflects the growing complexity and maturity of their literary efforts. The basis of interactive fiction is a kind of turn-taking between text displayed by the computer and text entered by the interactor - the reader or player of the fiction. The simplest commands are just two words, things like 'go north' or 'take key'. Unlike the Choose Your Own Adventure books, where the reader can only choose from 2-3 options at each decision point, interactive fiction is more open-ended. You can try more things, especially moving and interacting with objects, though you're still limited by the parser, the part of the software that interprets and responds to commands. The setting of the fiction, the setting the interactor moves their character through is called its world.
 
When I was a kid, my family had a Commodore 64, and among our game collection we had some text-based adventure games of the type Montfort is describing, and some kid-friendly graphic adventure games that had a single still image for each location in addition to the descriptive text, and sometimes had an on-screen menu of command words to choose from. (When there was no menu, I recall sometimes being frustrated by the parser's limited vocabulary, like if it only knew 'go' but not 'walk', or 'take' but not 'pick up'.) Monfort focuses on the purely textual games. Commercially, I suspect there was a 'video killed the radio star' situation where graphics and point-and-click interfaces supplanted text, even as the basic type of game remained the same. I think Myst is a lot like some of the games in this book, for example, except that it's puzzles and world are all image-based rather than text-based.
 
Monfort identifies several lenses for understanding interactive fiction. They can be understood as literature, as games, as procedures for producing narratives (like the I Ching or some of the experimental writing of the Ouilipo authors), as software, and as riddles. He spends a whole chapter very early on belaboring the comparison to riddles, which nearly exhausted my patience, but I found each of the other lenses more useful.
 
Probably the first interactive fiction was Adventure (sometimes called Colossal Cave). It inspired a number of similar adventure games, including Zork (sometimes called Dungeon), which in turn inspired the first flowering of commercially successful interactive fiction. Adventure and Zork both take place in cave systems and involve exploration; Zork also incorporates a mix of fantasy and technology. Both have maze-like areas and other navigational challenges, and puzzles that require using items found in the caves. They both came out a few years after Dungeons & Dragons, and were somewhat influenced by it (the back-and-forth conversation between interactor and parser resembles the dialogue between player and Dungeon Master, for example), but they're definitely not direct copies. These early games were written on mainframe computers, accessed on terminals, and shared over the internet at a time when you mostly had to be a university or on a military base to access it. 
 
The creators of Zork were based at MIT, and they formed the company Infocom to sell copies of their games to the owners of then-new personal computers. Montfort describes several. The two that interested me most are kind of about the relationship between people and technology, and both add an extra layer of metafictional distance between the player and the game. In Suspended, the interactor takes on the role of a human in a cryogenic hibernation chamber, who must in turn telepathically command several robots to explore the moon base and repair problems. Each robot has different senses and tools, so each describes the rooms differently and contribute in different ways to puzzle-solving. You can even tell a robot to break your cryo-chamber, killing you instantly! 
 
In A Mind Forever Voyaging, you take on the role of a sentient computer who's been assigned to simulate a small town and itself as a resident of the town, so the main character is essentially playing its own interactive fiction. The simulation is repeated several times, showing the increasingly dire effects of right-wing policies on the townspeople over several decades. According to Montfort, this setup humanizes the computer, who can sometimes help simulated people in the game-within-the-game, but is helpless to convince its programmers not to go forward with the policy changes.
 
Montfort gives us a quicker tour of the other interactive fiction companies of the 80s. In Britain, they seem to have been especially fond of literary adaptations, including Gateway and Rendezvous with Rama, getting Douglas Adams to help adapt The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and bringing in Daniel Pinsky and Thomas Disch to work with programmers on unique new works. 
 
By the 1990s, these companies could no longer really profitably sell text adventures to mass audiences; they either moved on to graphical adventure games or closed. But since then, Montfort notes that a dedicated audience of implementers and interactors continue to make and play interactive fiction purely for love of the genre. Monfort compares this to poetry, which is too niche for anyone to make a living writing poetry alone, but which also continues to have enough interest from both writers and readers to persist as a living scene and medium. I'm a little curious about what's new in interactive fiction since Montfort wrote this ... and also a bit interested in revisiting some of the text and graphic adventure games I played as a kid. 

The Last Human Job

 
 
The Last Human Job
The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World

by Allison Pugh

Princeton University Press

2024

 

 

The Last Human Job is social theory that's deeply grounded in interviews and ethnographic research that author Allison Pugh conducted with people in a wide variety of caregiving professions, including hair dressers, home health aides, teachers, chaplains, and medical doctors. Pugh has two goals - first to name and describe the work of making an authentic connection with another person, and second to show how this necessary labor (and the workers who do it) are being degraded by various attempts to accelerate and automate it.
 
Pugh identifies what she calls connective labor, which is work we do while interacting with another person. It's the work of listening to them and responding back to them so that they feel understood, they feel seen. Care work often requires connective labor as part of the job - but so do lots of other kinds of work too. Pugh thinks we often fail to recognize this as a kind of work, and she thinks that for many jobs, how well the worker can connect with the client determines how well the actual job will go. A good hairdresser, for example, isn't just good at styling hair, but at knowing how each person wants their hair to be styled, understanding how they wants others to see them. For some jobs, the 'real' work can't happen at all unless the worker can make a connection first. 
 
For one person to see another can sometimes be a powerful, profound experience, for both of them. It can also be draining for the worker. Jobs that require connective labor often have high rates of burnout. People probably vary in their innate talent for making connections, but Pugh thinks it's also a skill that can be learned, practiced, and improved on. Ultimately Pugh thinks that it's the organization of the workplace, much more so than the qualities of the individual worker, that determine whether they are able to successfully connect with their clients, and whether they can do so consistently and sustainably, without using themselves up. 
 
Pugh identifies three characteristics of workplaces that make it possible for workers to successfully provide connective labor to clients. First, they're set up so that workers are supported by leaders and supervisors who believe in the value of connection, mentors who can help them learn what to do, and peers who can act as sounding boards. To keep doing this kind of work, people need advice, encouragement, the ability to admit mistakes and learn from them. Second, workplaces support connective labor by making relationships an official priority. They recognize that they need to make a connection first, before they can do their 'real' work.Third, they support this work with resources - enough workers to meet client demand and enough time with each client to do the job well.
 
That last requirement gets at the heart of what Pugh thinks is the biggest threat to our collective ability to connect with one another. Connective labor often costs too much for the people who need it most to afford it, it pays too little for many of the workers to keep at it. There is too much work to be done, too many people in need, and not enough staff or time to do it all. And meanwhile workers are under constant pressure to see more people, spend less time with them, do the job faster, get more done, to do it without actually connecting at all. Collectively, these pressures threaten to reserve high-quality connective labor for the rich, while everyone else gets worsening service. And the worse the service becomes, the more tempting it is to replace it with some form of automation.
 
Pugh finds a few really common arrangements for workplaces that deliver connective labor to clients. There are mission-driven facilities located in poor areas, where staff are called on to be heroes, and there's always a backlog of unmet need. Workers here are often able to connect well, but become burned out from simply having to do too much, for too long each day. Corporate facilities have more resources and allow workers to have a home-life separate from their work, but they schedule lots of very short appointments. Workers are still overworked, and they're denied the ability to make meaningful connections. The personal service model is a luxury for the well-off. Workers have time and resources, but get treated like servants, and often feel bad about the people who can't afford their help. Set-ups that provide concierge-level resources to workplaces that serve the neediest people do exist, but they're much rarer.
 
From the outside, it seems like there wouldn't be quite so much unmet need if we didn't organize this work in such a way that it continuously burns people out and uses them up. I have to suspect that people vary somewhat in their need for connective labor. We might not be able to give everyone the concierge treatment, but not everyone needs it. But also, the people who need it most are probably the least able to afford it. Again from the outside, government funding seems like the obvious solution to this mismatch. Especially because programs like housing-first approaches to homelessness, or assigning care coordinators to patients with complex conditions, or experiments with unconditional basic income always produce better results and cost less long-term than the way we usually do things.
 
The threat to connective labor comes primarily from corporations, governments, and other leaders who all want to find ways to spend less money on it. Inevitably, these plans involve some form of automation. By automation, Pugh does not primarily mean things like replacing therapists with genAI chatbots - although she does explicitly consider that companies might try to deprive poorer clients of any human contact at all. Automation here refers to any attempt to use technology or organization to divide work into smaller components so that they can be performed more efficiently. Pugh argues that leaders are currently trying to do to care work and connective labor what the Industrial Revolution and the assembly line did for manufacturing.
 
Automation promises to save workers from burnout by helping them work more efficiently, but mostly worsens it by raising expectations for how much they should be able to do while draining their work of autonomy and meaning - the things that make it satisfying. And despite their promises, automation schemes often actually add tasks and take more time - but that time is moved away from clients and onto the work of following and documenting the automation protocols.
 
The most common forms of automation for this kind of work are scripting and counting. By scripting, Pugh means a whole variety of ways that work can be standardized by employing scripts, templates, manuals, checklists, flowcharts, etc. The goal is to make it go faster by making it go the same way every time (this is also a hedge against incomplete or low-quality interactions). But of course clients' lives and problems aren't scripted, and might need more time or a different approach than has been allotted to them. 
 
Counting refers to various forms of data collection. It's meant to track what's being done (especially useful for billing purposes) and to demonstrate that it's being done well. Customer satisfaction surveys and standardized tests for students are two common examples. Counting imposes its own problems - it's time consuming, it can focus attention away from things that are important but difficult to quantify, and it tempts workers and bosses alike to focus on getting the right number rather than doing whatever the number is supposed to represent.
 
The social theories we use as the basis of sociology were all about changes in the way people interact, know each other, and form communities in the wake of mass urbanization as people moved into cities, and about the ways they were affected by industrialization and the reorganization of work. Pugh is very much addressing those same topics, as they are relevant in the contemporary context.

The Forest

 
The Forest

A Fable of America in the 1830s

by Alexander Nemerov

Princeton University Press

2023

 

 

The Forest is a rather unusual work of creative nonfiction. Nemerov is a professional historian, and everything he's written is supported by primary documents, very often diaries. At the same time, rather than the usual register of academic writing, Nemerov narrates in the close third person, creating an intimate sense of understanding each person's interiority in a way that's usually reserved for literature. The Forest also lacks any explicit central thesis or obvious connection between its parts. What Nemerov has written are a series of factually true vignettes that read like short stories.
 
There are themes here though, even if they don't coalesce into a clear argument about what life was like in America in the 1830s. Essentially all the vignettes are set in the forest, where people work or visit for leisure or travel through on the way to somewhere else or depict in art. Most of the vignettes include someone who is an artist or a craftsperson. Another theme is a growing sense of loss and disconnection from 'the wilderness' and 'the frontier,' from the founding ideas and myths of America in a country that is increasingly populated and settled, and especially, increasingly industrialized. You get a real sense of how wood was harvested and used at this time, a view of pretty much every stage of the process. A final theme are precursors to the Civil War, incidents that reveal a populace uncomfortable with the compromises and contradictions of allowing slavery in half the states in a country that is supposedly an embodiment of freedom. In the afterward, Nemerov explains his writing philosophy, though predictable, he does so by relating a parable.
 
Many of the vignettes are about people who are anonymous (though Nemerov may know their names and simply choose not to use them), others are about people who were famous or infamous at the time, whose names might also appear in other histories, but were unknown to me. A few of the vignettes are about incidents involving people who are still famous today - Alexis de Tocqueville, James Audubon, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Andrew Jackson. Several also include thorough descriptions of specific works of art. There's a section of color plates where all the illustrations are gathered. They're well marked, though I wished for some indication in the text that you ought to go look at the next one.
 
In most vignettes, Nemerov combines at least two, sometimes more perspectives, from people who were in about the same place at around the same time, even if they might not've known or even encountered each other. These chapters, 'fables,' as he calls them, are mostly between 3 and 10 pages long, and I think mostly on the shorter side. The chapter the includes Harriet Tubman, for example, finds her still a child, sneaking out at night to visit her mother on a different plantation, awed by the sight of the thousands of meteors in a uniquely bright Leonid shower. On the same night, nearby, a slave-owning doctor traveled to a friend's plantation to treat his friend's sick daughter and, when she died, to comfort the grieving family.
 
If I have one complaint about the book, it's that I frequently felt like Nemerov's writing was overwrought. Everything is epic, everything portends something else, every little detail and incident reveals the essential nature of humanity, etc. Axe chops echo forward through the years, the current of a river propels events forward, conversations make a cathedral of words. The latter half, at least, of every single vignette is written like the concluding sentences of The Great Gatsby. It's just too much. It's probably fine in small doses, but it's overwhelming if you read more than one or two chapters in a row with no break.This is clearly a stylistic choice Nemerov is making, but I did wonder how much it was solely his own voice coming through, and how much, perhaps, people at this time might've written their diaries full of metaphor and apocalyptic intensity about every little thing. It's possible that what, to me, seems like Nemerov overdoing it is in fact an accurate representation of how high-minded people often sounded at that time when recording their experiences.

The Unaccountability Machine

 
 
The Unaccountability Machine

Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - And How the World Lost its Mind

by Dan Davies

Profile Books

2024

 

 

The Unaccountability Machine starts with with author Dan Davies introducing the relatively accessible idea of 'accountability sinks.' The paradigmatic example of an accountability sink is a gate agent at the airport. Your flight is delayed or canceled, your plans are upended, you might incur significant costs, and the only person you have access to, to complain about all this, is the gate agent, who has no control over the situation, no ability to change your fate, and possibly no way to escalate your complaint to a higher level, beyond a direct supervisor who can only remind you that all this is company policy, and can you please stop being rude to the human shield?
 
Davies, an economist by training, who used to work for the Bank of England, and who is clearly trying to translate complex academic and legal ideas into accessible prose that can be understood by a broad public audience, makes two moves from there. First, he diagnoses this kind of breakdown in accountability, when a problem is caused by 'a decision no one made' with no one to blame or even complain to, as a problem of organizational structure, where there is a break in what should be a feedback loop, and the acted-upon have no way to communicate with the actors and the people who decide how they should act. Second, he broadens outward to a claim that broken feedback loops and the absence of accountability are why we live in a society where nothing seems to work, and for example, the biggest banks in the country can crash the global economy by selling bad mortgages that make people lose their homes, allegedly without any crimes being committed.
 
The rest of the book is Davies' intellectual history of how we got here. I found this account interesting, and I'm going to give a basic outline in a moment, but I kind of disagree with his equation of certain things. I think there are meaningful differences between companies using their lowest level employees as accountability sinks, the unintended consequences of 'decisions no one made,' and the inability (or I think more accurately, the refusal) of our law-enforcement to punish executives for the harms caused by the companies they lead.
 
Davies thinks that unaccountability is an unavoidable but accidental consequence of certain organizational structures. I would argue that assigning (or withholding) accountability and blame is always a choice. Executives may deliberately set up their 'customer service' points to avoid actually hearing from their customers, and may generally structure their companies to allow profitable law-breaking while avoiding the creation of incriminating evidence because they want to avoid both public scrutiny and prosecution, but it's not actually impossible, or even unfair, to hold them accountable - to blame and punish them. That's a choice, and it could be made differently.
 
There's also a difference between true 'decisions no one made' and when decision-makers try to hide their role to escape accountability. Things like central banks worldwide setting 2% as their inflation target happen because of what sociologists DiMaggio and Powell called 'institutional isomorphism' - the leaders of one organization copying another until the copied choice becomes an unofficial standard by default. Situations like that can arise by accident, but we're not necessarily just stuck with them. People can meet to discuss, negotiate, and change the standard. They can do this more than once, even routinely! But that's different from Boeing executives showing callous disregard for safety by rushing crash-prone MAX jets to market, and I think Davies errs when he conflates the two.
 
When companies decide to seek profit in ways they know will cause harm or even death, to their workers, customers, or just unfortunate bystanders, that too is a choice. When a leader, whether political or organizational, decides that they have a right to act, and that the acted-upon do not have or deserve a right to have a say in the decisions that affect them, that is also a choice, and an ideology, not an accident. And, as recent events have reminded me, while a government or an organization can made it impossible to give meaningful feedback through official channels, people still retain the ability to go around those channels, as whistleblowers, or protesters, or through direct action.
 
Anyway, those critiques aside, I was interested in the intellectual history Davies presented to explain how we got here. In brief, after WWII, two different schools of thought developed theories if how organizations work and how they ought to behave - the interdisciplinary field of cybernetics, and the newly invigorated discipline of economics. Cybernetics accidentally undid itself by developing the information theory behind modern computing (which then proved to be an attractive alternative career), while economics embedded itself in government and industry, eventually providing both the instructions and intellectual justification for neoliberalism and rising inequality. In Davies' telling, the decisive victory of economics (and if he's lucky enough that his book gets a Big Short style Hollywood adaptation, the moment that will definitely be the climax of the movie) occurs when the democratic Chilean government of Salvador Allende, advised by cybernetician Stafford Beer, is overthrown by dictator Augusto Pinochet, backed by the CIA and advised by economist Milton Friedman, on September 11th, 1973. Afterward, we get Reagan and Thatcher, private equity conducting leveraged buy-outs, and the general rise in corporate leaders focusing on quarterly profits at the expense of long-term sustainability, which culminates in the Great Recession in 2008, and the post housing bubble world of today, where nothing works but no one is to blame.
 
Today when we think of the term 'cybernetics,' we think of human-machine hybrids, but as an intellectual field, it refers to the study of complex systems, including the ways that they regulate themselves in response to a changing environment. The paradigmatic cybernetic process is the feedback loop - the system acts based on input from its environment, its actions change the environment, and that change becomes an input that affects the next action. A stable system helps to maintain its own environment, unstable systems eventually destroy themselves by changing the environment in ways that are not survivable. Think of an ecosystem.
 
Many disciplines contributed to cybernetic thought, including medicine, computing, and sociology. One of my favorite theory books, Anthony Giddens' Modernity and Self-Identity is all about the 'reflexivity' of modern organizations, the way they collect data and change their behavior in response to it - that is, the way they incorporate feedback loops. In the 1940s through 60s it seems to have been a respectable field, but ironically, the great success of some of the projects led to the coalition separating back into its component parts.
 
I think Davies is at his best when he's explaining this part, which is unfamiliar to him too. His discussion of economics benefits from his insider-knowledge, but it felt like he assumed a bit too much familiarity with terms and concepts, despite his efforts to make the book accessible to non-expert readers.

Genesis

 
 

Genesis

The Evolution of Biology

by Jan Sapp

Oxford University Press

2003 

 

 

My reading this month got off to kind of a slow start because I was finishing kind of a heavier text, Genesis: The Evolution of Biology by Jan Sapp, which is both a history and a historiography, a look at how others have told this same history, of the science of biology, from the Lamarck and Darwin, through Mendel, and up to the start of the 21st century.
 
Along the way, Sapp describes key experiments and explains the prevailing consensus that governed various eras of research. He tells us what biologists thought, and how they came to be convinced of it, again and again, as the way they understood the natural world changed over the course of about 150 years. He notes major disagreements and competing paradigms alongside times of scientific consensus, and gives a lot of attention to why biologists believed various things, and how they sought to convince one another, both with empirical evidence, and with stories told to one another about other scientists. Sapp looks at not only how scientific ideas changed, but how the reputations and the accounts shared about important scientists changed, as their role in the history of the discipline got reimagined in light of current beliefs.
 
Sapp divides his book into four sections, and the two longest are about Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics. Those were also the two sections where I was already most familiar with the popular, textbook version of the history, and so probably the sections that were easiest to read and that I felt like I got the most out of. The other two sections - about cell biology between Darwin and Mendel, and about the search for a molecular basis for genes after Mendel, plus all the discoveries that became possible once we found DNA - were more new to me, so I was introduced to a lot of ideas, but Sapp's approach makes Genesis not the ideal format for a novice learner.
 
Sapp gives Darwin credit for the thoroughness and quality of his research. The idea that species change over time and new species emerge due to evolution was already a hypothesis by Darwin's time. One thing he provided was a mechanism, natural selection, that would provide a reason why evolution occurs - an idea he got while thinking about Malthus. In turn, social theorists later used Darwin to justify domestic inequality and international colonialism as necessary forms of competition. Throughout the book, I was struck by how conservative (and often racist) biologists have been whenever they've talked about politics. Darwin himself was probably a Social Darwinist too.
 
The other thing Darwin's work provided was a lot of meticulous evidence, combining paleontology and field biology. One of the biggest changes he proposed was that the traits individual are real while 'species' are just statistical averages, as opposed to the older Aristotelian idea that each species had an set ideal form with individuals exhibiting variations due to imperfection. Darwin specifically thought that mutations that gave advantages were the main cause of speciation. By the mid-20th century, the consensus was that each species contains a lot of variation, and that geographic isolation is the main cause of the formation of new species, as each population randomly ends up with a different mix of those variant genes, which then diverge further when they can't remix by interbreeding.
 
Cell theory came later. It holds that cells are the basic unit of life - they're the simplest, smallest thing that can truly be said to be 'alive,' and every living thing is made up of cells. It also holds that every cell that exists came from the division of an earlier cell. (Sapp doesn't say, but it seems to me that you have to believe in evolution to accept that.) Cell biologists wondered how genetically identical cells, all born from the same egg cell, could give rise to all the differentiated tissues of the human body. For generations, they believed it was the cytoplasmic structure of the cell, not the genes in the nucleus, that was responsible for successful cell division. That was another thing I noticed - scientists arguing that their specific object of study was the single most important thing, the ultimate cause that everything else followed from.
 
Amazingly, to me at least, biologists theorized 'genes' as things that hold and transmit information before they knew any of the physical basis of genetics. A gene was a tiny little black box for a long time before anyone knew what it was made of or how it worked. Which reminds me, at least, of some of the black box concepts in contemporary physics, like dark matter.
 
Mendel is remembered as a virtual hermit, a monk who conducted experiments on pea plants and discovered dominant and recessive genes, only to be ignored at the time and forgotten until he was rediscovered much later. Sapp notes that Mendel was a Lamarckian, and though a monk, he was 'isolated' by the dominance of Darwinism, not because he was at a monastery instead of a university. And he was 'rediscovered' by two competing scientists doing lit reviews only after they'd both independently replicated Mendel's findings. Both were happy to credit the dead guy rather than let their living rival get the glory, but if I understand correctly, we'd still have the finding even if Mendel had never published at all.
 
The last section, about molecular biology, which uses methods borrowed from chemistry and physics to understand what's going on inside cells at the level of proteins, enzymes, and acids, including DNA and RNA. Sapp gives a chapter to the discovery of the double helix, but spends more time on the revolutionary discoveries enabled by these techniques, including figuring out how genes actually cause anything to happen, sequencing the human genome, and a whole host of discoveries made by finally expanding away from mostly studying plants and animals to paying a lot more attention to bacteria.
 
The study of microbial life is really fascinating to me. It was sequencing bacterial genes that revealed the existence of the archaea, extremophiles that thrive in Earth's least hospitable environments; that proved lateral gene transfer; that showed that eukaryotes came into existence when certain bacteria started living inside other cells as permanent internal symbionts, eventually becoming our mitochondria and plants' chloroplasts; and that showed the importance of bacterial and fungal symbionts in the microbiome of every multicellular organism. That last idea really was ignored! Someone thought of it in 1918, and Sapp goes on for about 2-3 pages showing all the times someone else reconsidered the hypothesis and dismissed it, only for it to become orthodoxy 80 years later.
 
I feel like I've had a good overview of the major discoveries and successive theories of the science of biology. I also feel like this was maybe not the best way for me, a non-expert, to try learning these things. I would've gotten more out of Genesis if I were already more familiar with that history, and using Sapp to supplement and enrich my existing knowledge.

Status and Culture

 
 

Status and Culture 

How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change

by David Marx

Viking

2022

 

 

David Marx is not a professional sociologist, but his book Status and Culture very effectively summarizes and synthesizes existing social theory and research into an account of the human desire for status, how we all use cultural objects to signal our status to each other, and how the way that we navigate each others' signals helps to drive cultural change. He marshals a lot of examples, connects dots that are often left separate, and writes accessibly for an educated but non-expert audience. There's real value in this kind of science writing, though it's more common to see a journalist sharing insights from physics or biology this way, and I think Marx has made a contribution here by bringing these things together and showing the steps of the larger process.
 
Marx's overall goal is to solve what he calls 'the grand mystery of culture' - basically, why do we agree to do some things and not others, and why does what we agree on keep changing, particularly in areas of life where we can't possibly point to a linear narrative of scientific advancement or technological improvement as an explanation? And his answer is status. High status people make certain choices to distinguish themselves, most of the rest of us try to imitate them to try to attain higher status for ourselves, us doing so reduces the status-value of those choices, and so those high status people move on to something new, starting the next lap of the chase. Some lower status people who don't have much hope of doing well in the race try new things that let them gain a bit of status locally, and a few of those attempts end up well-known when higher status people choose them for their own next round of distinction.
 
In the first part of the book, Marx talks about status, which is like, the esteem your fellow humans feel for you. You can have normal status, high status which means others consider you a 'good person,' or low status which means you're considered 'bad.' One source of status is possessing rare talents that are beneficial to the group; then higher esteem is your reward for helping everyone, and an incentive for others to do the same. But also, a lot of our status is determined by group membership, which we're likely born into, and only modified somewhat by our behavior. A mediocre aristocrat still outranks an excellent peasant. How much each component matters varies over time and place. The rewards of status are things like respect, deference, attention, praise, and access to scarce resources. Status feels good, so everyone has an incentive to want to maintain at least normal status, and to try to improve their position.
 
Among people who know you well, your status is determined by your category and actions, but among strangers and acquaintances, it's going to be based on who they think you are from the limited information they have available. So it's going to be based on cultural signals. It's difficult to lie with your signals, because you probably lack the knowledge and money to depict yourself as much higher status than you are, and being perceived as false or inauthentic is discrediting. But everyone has an incentive to present the best plausible version of themselves, to try to secure as much good treatment from others as they can.
 
In part two, Marx looks at the most common strategies for using culture to signal status, based on social class. People with new money fortunes signal their status with things that are obviously expensive and have low symbolic complexity, and thus can be understood by anyone who sees them - things like big houses, sports cars, flashy jewelry.
 
People with old money have less liquid cash, but more cultural knowledge, and have the prestige of having had their fortunes for a long time. They signal with things that are expensive but in ways that are less obvious to people with less knowledge - art, antiquities, and things that are very well-made. This provides what Marx calls an 'alibi' - they can tell themselves and others that they aren't buying these things for their status value, but for their high quality.
 
Professionals tend to imitate old money; they can afford some artisanal goods but mostly at the lower end, and not like, family estates. People without much capital tend to imitate the new rich, with things like sports logos, pricey sneakers, custom-decorated cars.
 
Historically, old money and professionals have insisted on the inherent superiority of high-complexity symbols, though as Marx notes (as did Bourdieu before him,) people with low capital have been denied the opportunity to receive the education needed to enjoy complex cultural objects. Low-complexity symbols require no special training to enjoy.
 
Attempting to increase your status outside of these strategies is riskier. It can pay off if you do something innovative that ultimately gets accepted, or it can result in lowered status if people think what you're doing is ugly or immoral. Subcultures are usually low-status young people trying to invent a new criteria for judgment, one that favors them. Although Marx doesn't mention it, sociologist Shyon Baumann has written about how both social movements and art movements are attempts to claim greater respect by elevating a particular social group or artistic medium up into normal status.
 
In the third section Marx shows how status drives cultural change, following the steps of Everett Rogers' model of the diffusion of innovations. Marx argues that while new cultural innovations can occur anywhere, it's only when they follow the path he's describing that they end up as society-wide trends. Already high-status people start the cycle by innovating some new cultural symbol as a mark of distinction. Historically, anything that uses rare materials or is expensive to make - because it needs a lot of time, labor, or skill - is a promising starting point. The innovation could also be lifted from a subculture or an artist. The point of every new trend is to mark its trendsetters as different, and better, than everyone else.
 
In order to reach a larger audience, the trend has to be reported on in the mass media. Initially, these reports will be limited to elite, tastemaking publications, where they will be seen by people outside the elite who want to emulate them. As a book critic, I'm participating in this step of the process, albeit in the least effectual way possible. Because the trend, in its initial form, is probably too complex and too expensive, it will be simplified as it passes from its innovators to the early adopters. It becomes a bit more standardized and defined. One of Marx's original insights is that trends necessarily change as they pass to larger audiences.
 
Once a trend is established among the early adopters, companies realize there's money to be made in mass production. This involves simplifying and cheapening again, but also allows a proliferation of (more-or-less formulaic) variants. The early majority mostly doesn't take their cues from the press, but from what they see on the shelves. To they extent they are reading reviews, they don't want to know that something is cool, they want to know that it's good, and why. (Actually, it's possible that my reviews fall here...) The early majority are people who fear losing respect due to following a trend that their peers will think is bad, but are happy to engage with something that is itself sliding down from high status to normal status.
 
Once something is fully normalized, it's also picked up by the late majority, who adopt the trend because they fear being perceived as low status if they don't. By this point, the original elite innovators have already jumped ship to the next new thing that will give them distinction again. At this point the trend has reached its simplest form and become ubiquitous as mass culture.
 
In Marx's final section, he talks about status and culture in the age of the internet, when trends no longer seem to mark the passage of time by replacing each other in succession, but instead appear to pile up in a perpetual now.
 
I thought this was a really effective overview of what social scientists have learned about status and culture, and that Marx put these ideas together in a more complete way than you usually see them. He also drew attention to lesser-discussed features of theories, and added his own insights, in ways that enlarged the value of the project. He also used a wealth of examples from nearly every domain of culture - fashion, music and art, food, etc in a way that helped illustrate the processes he described.

The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

 
 
The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

by Jane Ward

NYU Press

2020

 

 

The straights are not okay. Or at least, so says Jane Ward, only half in jest, in The Tragedy of Heterosexuality. Ward's writing mixes academic prolixity, Jezebelian snark, and Twitter-style hot takes in an unstable blend to diagnose the paradoxes of straight culture, empathize in feminist solidarity with straight women, and give heterosexuality a taste of the same medicine queerness is so often served in the form of deliberately patronizing hand-wringing and concern-trolling.
 
How well all that works depends on whether you think those goals are compatible or at odds. I'm not straight, so I didn't feel defensive or personally attacked by any part of this book - but my guess is that if you did get your hackles up in response to some of what Ward says, you'd be less receptive to any of the rest of it. If what seems to me like gentle teasing strikes you as an existential threat, or even just mean-spirited, then you're going to see this book very differently than I did, and like it an awful lot less.
 
In brief, Ward diagnoses the key problem with heterosexuality today as what she calls the 'misogyny paradox' - that straight men desire women's bodies and services, but collectively don't seem to respect or even particularly like women. Some heterosexual couples have good relationships on an individual basis, but dissatisfaction is widespread. It's also asymmetric. In the public square, straight women lament that men mistreat them, neglect them, leave the too much of what should be shared work, sometimes abuse and rape them, and generally fail to acknowledge their full personhood. Straight men's public grievances are that women complain too much and don't offer condition-free sex-on-demand as often or as easily as they'd like.
 
I myself have noticed how often straight women will say something to the effect of 'I wish I could be a lesbian,' a sentiment I've literally never heard reciprocated. There are essentially no straight men who wish they were gay, as far as I can tell. That imbalance in dissatisfaction is at the heart of Ward's critique. The problem with heterosexuality is that it's much worse for women than for men; the problem with heterosexuality is a problem with masculinity, a problem with straight men.
 
Ward presents us with three social scientific projects - two sound bits of research, and one methodologically suspect poll of her internet friends.

 
First she content analyzes texts from what she calls the 'heterosexual repair industry,' ranging from eugenics texts at the start of the 20th century to self-help books today. Modern straightness emerges, at least among White Americans, as an alternative to the previous system where fathers and husbands essentially owned 'their' women. The challenge these books address is that straight men and women mostly socialize with same-gender peers, and end up with few interests in common with their potential spouses. The solution is usually for straight women to change (men are almost never the target audience here) - to be more empathetic and accommodating, to try harder to bridge the gap, and be more willing to accept overwork and neglect as the price of remaining in a relationship.

Reading this chapter, I thought of the latest batch of pro-marriage scolds, who started their current round of hectoring after Ward finished her book, and who seem weirdly uninterested in even trying to make heterosexual marriage sound pleasurable, only profitable. Just get married, the latest sales pitch argues, so you can have more money to raise your children. Never mind whether you like it, do it anyway, make the sacrifice, society demands it. (The modern scolds may not be explicit eugenicists, but their fear of White population decline and minority electoral power within a democratic system seem to me to be only barely, and poorly, concealed.)

For the next chapter, Ward attended pick-up artist classes for sexually frustrated men. Some are lonely and genuinely romantically unsuccessful; others are uninterested in the sort of women who want to sleep with them, and want to learn how to 'upgrade' to their ideal - young, White, blonde, thin. In Ward's view, these courses are the masculine counterpart to the women's self-help books. One thing the classes teach is simply a different repertoire of pick-up lines and techniques than whatever the conventional wisdom is at the time, thus setting these men apart simply by making them different from most of their peers in the bars and nightclubs. But the other thing they teach is how men can make themselves attractive to women simply by not acting like misogynists, to empathize with straight women's viewpoint and perspective, or at least convincingly fake it.

Next, Ward solicits anonymous responses to her own thesis from her friends on social media, then analyses these qualitative data points to extract themes. I don't know if I can take this part seriously as research; it feels more like eavesdropping on a trash-talking session at an entertaining queer dinner party. Besides calling out straight culture as boring, Ward's respondents most often report a kind of sadness at seeing so many of the straight women they know get treated so badly by their boyfriends and husbands.

Finally, Ward offers her suggestion for a solution. She contrasts herself to other feminist scholars who've encouraged straight people to try becoming queer, or to give up on long-term romantic relationships and rely on the camaraderie and support of same-gender friendships to help raise one's children and otherwise help carry one through the difficulties of life. Instead, Ward proposes a kind of leaning in to heterosexuality. She calls on straight men to 'like women so much that they actually like women,' and to desire women's full personhood, not only their (idealized) bodies and the benefits of their unpaid labor.

Pricing the Priceless Child

 
 
Pricing the Priceless Child

The Changing Social Value of Children

by Viviana Zelizer

Basic Books

1985

 

 

Pricing the Priceless Child is something of a classic in sociology. It's an important look at the social construction of childhood, and Zelizer is also important for her studies, including this one, that show how cultural, non-economic factors influence how people think about money, markets, and other topics that professional economists try to lay exclusive claim to.
 
Zelizer looks at a series of inter-related changes that took place in the US between the 1870s and the 1930s, when American children went from 'useful' - contributing economically to their families by performing either significant housework or farmwork or wage labor outside the home - to 'useless' - contributing only love and affection. In Zelizer's words, by the 1930s, children had become sacred, economically worthless, and emotionally priceless.
 
The backstory to all this is declining childhood mortality in the 19th century, due in part to medical improvements like the discovery of antibiotics and invention of vaccines. When every parent expected about half their kids to die before reaching adulthood, often in infancy, I think there must have been a certain degree of emotional distancing that was almost universal. As children become more likely to live, it becomes safer to love them more, and with that love comes a new concept of childhood as a sacred time that deserves to be protected from adult realities.
 
One thing people (eventually) decided their children needed to be protected from was child labor. Middle class reformers decided this first, and child labor remained more common among the working class for longer, in part because those families truly needed the extra money.
 
What followed was a clash of class-based cultures, as reformers accused working-class parents of exploiting their kids and failing to love them, and poorer parents, who'd grown up learning trades in childhood themselves, argued that it was important for kids to learn industry and a work ethic and avoid the vice of idleness. But after decades of controversy, obviously, the movement against child labor won definitively. Children would work in order to learn how to, and receive an allowance to learn how to spend and save money.
 
Throughout this period, people came increasingly to believe that the economic value and the emotional value of children were in conflict, that any price attached to kids in the market somehow subtracted from their worth as members of their families. Zelizer argues that a lot of what was happening here was people figuring out how to think about money differently, so that it no longer seemed to profane the sacredness of childhood.
 
Also during this time, insurance companies began offering child insurance, not to replace a kid's lost wages if they died, but to pay for a funeral and headstone- instead of the anonymous mass graves that were poor kids' previous burying places.
 
As kids stopped being wage earners, the theory of damages in wrongful death lawsuits had to change too. Parents could no longer sue for lost future income; instead, they asked for compensation for what they'd already invested, and for the emotional pain of the loss.
 
Foster care and adoption changed too. Working teens used to routinely live with another family, earn room and board, and learn a trade by working for them. Parents who couldn't take care of younger kids had to pay someone - often a 'baby farmer' - to take over the childcare. Essentially these children were sold. Kids too young to work often died.
 
But as children became expected to provide only love and affection, adoptive parents stopped wanting teens and started wanting infants, and became willing to pay to take them, a total reversal of the earlier situation. But also, by this time, the public was no longer comfortable with the idea of parents 'buying' a child. In the same way that allowance is not supposed to be pay for housework, adoption fees became a way to pay for the work done to transfer custody of a child without actually paying for the child.

For the Birds

 
For the Birds

Protecting Wildlife through the Naturalist Gaze

by Elizabeth Cherry

Rutgers University Press

2019

 

 

A few years ago, my friend Liz Cherry wrote a book about birdwatchers. For the Birds is an ethnographic study of people who enjoy birdwatching as a hobby. Cherry spent 3 years going on weekly birding walks with several local Audubon Society chapters, attended a number of special birding events during that time, and interviewed about 30 birdwatchers.

 
The first thing I learned is that I should probably say that Cherry studied 'birders' rather than 'birdwatchers,' since that's how the hobbyists prefer to identify themselves. I also learned just how popular a hobby it is, with something like 30% of American adults over the age off 55 participating to some extent. (It's less popular among younger people.)

 
Cherry argues that birders, especially ones who go on weekly Audubon Society walks, develop what she calls the 'naturalist gaze' as a result of their hobby. The naturalist gaze is a way of looking at the world that is attuned to the sight  (and sound!) of birds and their habitat. It incorporates advice about what to pay attention to, knowledge about the meanings of the things seen, and standards for evaluating how things could be better. Cherry describes what the birders learn, how they learn it, and what the consequences are.
 

The initial chapters primarily focus on Cherry's ethnographic observations about what birders do and how they learn to do it. Color photographs taken on bird walks enliven the text by illustrating birds that are mentioned as they appear in nature.

 
In addition to learning how to see and identify birds, birders start learning about birds, which affects the way they think about them. Initially, birders might want to see 'rare' or very brightly colored birds, but as they learn, they start to appreciate the common birds that they're able to see every day, and the plain-looking birds that are at home in their native environment.

 
Birders make moral judgments, scorning 'bad birds' like European Starlings and House Sparrows, which are invasive, non-native species that were brought to North America in the 1800s, and cowbirds, which lay their eggs in other birds' nests.

 
Many birders participate in citizen science efforts, like the annual Christmas Bird Count, initially developed to supplant traditional Christmas bird shoots. Although scientists who don't use citizen data (and birders who don't have scientific training) tend to be instinctively skeptical of the quality of data collected by citizen science, Cherry finds that birders are quite conscientious, and the data they collect is of high quality. And because of their numbers, professional ornithologists could never come close to matching their currently available data without the efforts of citizen scientists.

 
Birders also tend to become interested in environmental conservation as a consequence of their affinity for birds. They often grow native plants and set up feeders and nest boxes in their yards. They also often become interested in habitat preservation and restoration, and may become involved in activism, especially at the local level. One finding that surprised Cherry though, is that relatively few birders are vegetarians, although this dietary change would impact natural habitat.

We Have Never Been Modern

 
 
We Have Never Been Modern
by Bruno Latour
translated by Catherine Porter
Harvard University Press

1991, reprinted 1993

 

 

When Bruno Latour died recently, I thought I might want to read one of his books. I think We Have Never Been Modern is his most famous, and fortuitously, I already owned a copy. (Sorry, Laboratory Life... maybe next time...)
 

Latour is writing primarily to an audience of other social theorists. He claims that in light of two phenomena, we can no longer maintain the absolute divide between Society and Nature, which he dates back to Hobbes (whose Leviathan begets social science) and Boyle (whose studies of the vacuum establish laboratory science.)
 

The first phenomenon is the proliferation of what Latour calls 'hybrids' or 'quasi-object quasi-subjects,' things that cannot be understood as purely natural or purely social, such as climate change. 

 
The second phenomenon is science studies, or the application of social science research methods to study how laboratory scientists do their work. Latour claims that in such studies, we can see that scientists aren't 'just' discovering transcendent truths about the universe, but we also can't believe that they are 'just' imposing whatever concepts and labels they want either.

 
In light of those two phenomena, Latour says that social scientists can no longer carry on as before, and some have fallen into 'postmodern despair.' (Latour HATES the postmodernists, and his criticism of them is some of his liveliest writing.) What he wants instead is something like an anthropology of Western society, based on his understanding of how anthropologists study 'premodern' societies.

 
So rather than taking a 'hybrid' and trying to divide it up into parts that are purely social or purely natural, Latour thinks we would understand them (and ourselves) better if we start by acknowledging the inseparability of both aspects, and try to understand what each hybrid teaches us about nature and about society.

 
I'm trying my best to give a simplified account here. Latour isn't just talking about how to conduct social science, he's criticizing and reconstructing the whole modern Western self-image. And while he's a fairly clear writer, and easier to read than Bourdieu, this is still not what I'd call an easy text. It was 150 pages, but it's dense with ideas, arguments, and yes, schematic diagrams.

 
I think my next reading in this vein, rather than another primary work by a French theorist, will be a book I found about French social theory, which I'm hoping will give me a nice overview. (I'm also hoping it will be written for a slightly less expert audience!)

The Subplot

 
The Subplot
What China is Reading and Why It Matters
by Megan Walsh

Columbia Global Reports
2022
 

 

The Subplot is a very recent review of fiction written by mainland Chinese authors and read primarily by Chinese audiences. This is a short work, a little over 100 pages, and each chapter covers a different popular genre. Regardless of genre, authors who publish in China are required to treat certain topics as off-limits, and cannot openly disagree with the government's official position on others. Part of the creativity of Chinese literature is trying to write around what's not allowed to be said.

 
Walsh explains her project by noting that Western audiences are usually most interested in books that have been banned outright by the CCP, often by authors living in exile. Meanwhile, in China, fiction accounts for a much smaller proportion of book sales than in the West, and fiction writers have come under renewed scrutiny and censorship after a period of relative openness in the 2000s and 2010s, in the time of Covid and President Xi's increasing authoritarianism.

 
Books by authors who grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and have experienced the rapid change of capitalism, tend to be the most overtly political, and the best known to Western audiences. Authors like Mo Yan and Lan Yianke write historical fiction that incorporates as much criticism of past governments as the censors will allow.

 
Authors who grew up in the first generation to be raised under capitalism (people my age) write about urban life and its amenities, and the pursuit of love and sex, unimaginable under Mao. These writers are often criticized for being vapid, or not sufficiently critical or political. Rural migrants in this age group, who moved to the cities for work, but lack the rights of people born in the city, have a thriving poetry scene that describes the harsh conditions of their lives.

 
Online fiction, roughly equivalent to American fanfic, is extremely popular. The two most common plots are about young men who repeatedly 'level up' in business, defeating foe after foe, until they attain super powers, and eventually godhood, and about young women competing to become the love interest of someone like that. These stories tend to be very, VERY long, some the equivalent of millions of printed pages. Online writers on platforms like Chinese Literature hope to gain enough readers to quit their low-paying day jobs, and dream of maybe scoring an anime adaptation. This genre has been the subject of a recent crackdown, directed by Xi, that's left many writers locked out of their own stories.

 
China also has a print-only underground comics scene that remains offline to try to avoid censorship. Books by non-Han ethnic minorities are subject to much more intense government scrutiny, because authors identifying themselves with their own ethnic group is treated as akin to protest or terrorism. Women are the most common readers of the 'boy's love' genre, whose homosexuality is often among the least transgressive elements, written by self-proclaimed 'rotten girls,' some of whom have been jailed for their writing. Ironically, despite the government's displeasure with these stories, they're a popular source for tv and movie adaptations, as long as the two central men can be officially recast as just friends or just coworkers.

 
Crime fiction was banned under Mao, and Western-style mysteries involving criminals who outsmart the police are still not really allowed. (In both cases because they're seen as implicitly criticizing the government.) Crime writing usually takes the form of police procedurals. During Xi's anti-corruption campaign in the 2000s, crime writers were allowed to depict corrupt officials as the criminals being caught.

 
There's a rich tradition of Chinese science fiction, which can sometimes use imaginary future societies as a basis for political critique. Cixin Liu and Chen Qiufan are currently the best known scifi authors. Pastoral 'cottagecore' style rural utopias have also recently become a popular topic, possibly as a reaction against Covid lockdowns.

Finite and Infinite Games

 
Finite and Infinite Games
by James Carse
Ballantine Books
1987

 

 

About halfway though the first chapter of "Finite and Infinite Games," I got a sinking feeling that was quickly confirmed. Unfortunately, Carse isn't really writing about game-games, he's writing about society.

 
A finite game is a game you play with the goal of winning; an infinite game is a game you play with the goal of continuing to play. So anything where people compete with each other, and/or anything that comes to a definite end is a finite game. Going to school and earning a degree, getting a job in a particular profession, winning an election, successfully seducing someone - all these are finite games. Society is a finite game that contains other finite games. Human culture, writ large, is the one and only infinite game, that contains everything else within it.

 
Of  course, where there are games, there are players, and this is where Carse displays his big 'man thinking about society' energy. This book was published in 1987, but feels like it should have been written 20-40 years earlier, when this kind of social theory was more fashionable. 

 
The book is full of declarations like 'finite players do THIS; infinite players do THAT,' that sound profound, I guess, but also don't really sound like real people. Finite players take their games seriously. Infinite player are some sort of enlightened individuals who somehow float above all the petty squabbles beneath them. They sometimes join in finite games, but always with a wink and a nudge, because they know it's just a game.

 
It's a short book, and it's written in short declarative sentences. You could tweet this book, and it would seem normal there, just another steady stream of hot takes on Twitter. Carse goes in for brevity and wordplay in a way that's sort of poetic, but also isn't really the best way to communicate. Nothing needs to be justified, nothing qualified; it's all just true because he says it like it is.

 
I find this book interesting and frustrating because there are glimpses of truth in what he's saying, but he usually states them in such a way that there simply must be a better source for the same insight. 

 
I also find his morality troubling. Every action is judged based on its relation to games and their rules. He's fortunately able to say that (successful?) genocide is bad because it erases a portion of human culture (but not because it hurts or kills people?) But slavery, he claims, is just another finite game, which often have rules that let players torture each other, and that's not immoral, because everyone freely chooses to play. Sure, maybe you 'chose' because the alternative was being murdered, but that was still your choice, player! The cooperation of the oppressed is real, and understanding it is necessary to learning how oppression works, but Carse's description of it is facile, simplified to the point of absurdity and falsehood.
 

I don't recommend this one. If you're really interested in applying his ideas to actual games, just read part 1 and stop there. If you're interested in a good 'man thinks about society' book, read Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life or Anthony Giddens's Modernity and Self-Identity instead. Read something where the author seems to understand what people are actually like, where his commitments to concise writing, binary opposition, and deducing everything from the first principles of a metaphor don't totally overwhelm his commitment to saying something truthful.

Nutcracker Nation

 
 
Nutcracker Nation

How an Old World Ballet Became a Christmas Tradition in the New World

by Jennifer Fisher

Yale University Press

2003

 

 

In Nutcracker Nation, Fisher looks at the history of The Nutcracker in America and the meaning it holds for both dancers and audiences.

 
In America, The Nutcracker is an annual Christmas tradition, the single biggest money-maker for dance companies, the one ballet that nearly every dance student has performed, the ballet that people are most likely to have attended as an audience member, and the show that critics and 'serious' ballet fans and performers feel the most ambivalent about. So it's popular, loaded with extra meaning as a holiday tradition and childhood rite of passage, and as a result, a bit maligned by the people most interested in ballet for its aesthetic qualities and association with status.

 
Fisher starts with a history of The Nutcracker. It was first produced in Russia in the 1890s, but had little commercial or critical success there. An animated version was included in Disney's Fantasia. In the postwar years, it began to become an annual tradition in the US, helped along by several tv specials in the late 1950s. It acts as an 'invented tradition' - a relatively recent ritual that has the appearance of being much older, in part because it uses symbols that represent contemporary ideas about the past.

 
Fisher then discusses both the 'traditional' Nutcracker and some of the many variations meant to modernize it, or address gender issues, or make it more appealing to aesthetes, or make it more relatable, either to popular audiences or specific ethnic communities. She also explores the ethnic stereotypes that are usually incorporated into certain dances, and some of the ways ballet companies have tried to change those. This section draws on her observations attending a really wide variety of performances.

 
Fisher also conducted ethnographic research, attending rehearsals and performances for one amateur suburban dance company and one major urban one. She interviewed dancers, the stage crews, volunteers, and audience members.

 
The Nutcracker is always a community production. In addition to the roles for professionals, there are parts for children and teen ballet students, and sometimes extras of all ages to fill out certain crowd scenes. There is no one canonical choreography. Although certain arrangements are more or less handed down from key early productions, each dance troupe is essentially forced to interpret it in their own way. And many enjoy the chance to do something specific and local.

 
For ballet students, The Nutcracker is an opportunity to see themselves advancing in both age and skill. Many adult women have memories of ballet lessons and dancing The Nutcracker when they were girls, and it's often something from their own childhood that mothers can share with daughters.

 
Despite their artistic ambivalence, dance companies like the revenue the show brings in, often like the ritual aspect as well, and sometimes like the chance to do something lower stakes, fun, and universally beloved. And while most dance students move on to other careers, essentially every professional ballet dancer was once a mouse, a snowflake, a flower.