Partial list of things that I've seen that have changed the way I've seen things (in chronological order, oldest first)

• Mills Baker - Losing our seat at the table
• Nate Silver - Signal and the Noise
• Douglas Englebart - Improving our Ability to Improve
• Intervention (Video)
• Ways Men in Tech Are Unintentionally Sexist
• Jane Elliot on Race (Video)
• Anecdote from Joy Angela DeGruy (Video)
• Two Asian-Americas
• The Smug style in American Liberalism

• Hamming on Software

  Write psychologically, not logically.

  The problem with programming is humans, not computers.

  Programming is more like novel writing than it is engineering (i.e. phsyical engineering) bc theres no actual constraints besides how the programmer thinks. Engineers run up to the same physical constraints (e.g. Russian and US space programs basically ended up doing the same things, whereas two programmers solving the same prompt write different programs).

• Sick Systems: How to Keep Someone With You Forever

  A sick system has four basic rules:

  • Rule 1: Keep them too busy to think.
  • Rule 2: Keep them tired.
  • Rule 3: Keep them emotionally involved.
  • Rule 4: Reward intermittently.

  How do you do all this?

  • Keep the crises rolling.
  • Things will be better when...
  • Keep real rewards distant.
  • Establish one small semi-occasional success.
  • Chop up their time.
  • Enmesh your success with theirs.
  • Keep everything on the edge.

• In the name of Love

  According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation, but an act of self-love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace.

  Work becomes divided into two opposing classes: that which is lovable (creative, intellectual, socially prestigious) and that which is not (repetitive, unintellectual, undistinguished).

• Cixin Liu - The Dark Forest

• Logistics, Counterlogistics, and the Communist Prospect

  "There is an interesting paradox here... the more transparent and “user-friendly” the computerised processes are, the more opaque the total process they control becomes." — The Hidden Injuries of Class by Richard Sennett

• Tell Me It's Going to be OK

  America’s vast therapeutic brain trust has steadily eradicated the language of solidarity and class consciousness, honed through collective struggle, and replaced it with exhortations to “do what you love” and “live your best life.” Both aphorisms imply that what we’re currently doing is not enough.

  We are denied the ability to seek comfort from colleagues, neighbors, or—heaven forbid—comrades, because neoliberalism has turned them into our competition.

  It is no coincidence that as we become more nervous, “wellness” and “self-care” have become mainstream industries.

• Tools For Conviviality

  The cure for bad management is more management. The cure for specialized research is more costly interdisciplinary research, just as the cure for polluted rivers is more costly nonpolluting detergents... the attempt to overwhelm present problems by the introduction of more science is the ultimate attempt to solve a crisis by escalation

  The crisis can be solved only if we learn to invert the present deep structure of tools; if we give people tools that guarantee their right to work with high, independent efficiency... People need new tools to work with rather than tools that “work” for them. They need technology to make the most of the energy and imagination each has, rather than more well-programmed energy slaves.

  I choose the term “conviviality” to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment.

  Not only has the redefinition of learning as schooling made schools seem necessary, it has also compounded the poverty of the unschooled with discrimination against the uneducated. Once they accept the authority of an agency to define and measure their level of knowledge, they easily go on to accept the authority of other agencies to define for them their level of appropriate health or mobility. It is difficult for them to identify the structural corruption of our major institutions.

• Extra-Curricular / A School Within A School - Jack Henrie Fisher

  In considering a proposal to introduce... design into general education, with the hope that "sound workmapship combined with beauty" might... become a general condition of society, [William] Morris observed that the only possible outcome of a design school would be atemporary fad for well-designed objects which, given the time and skill necessary to produce them, would become commodities available only to the rich. Furthermore, increasing the quality of design would further immiserate the design worker, as more labor hours would be required for production than could be fairly paid in competitive markets. Th is is the contradiction of a design education that purports to enrich the student and society: any attemp to increase the quality of design work can only end up impoverishing the design worker, demanding more work for less money, while simultaneously enriching his bosses.

  An education organized in capitalism cannot afford [to be] an education that is something other than the preparation of fresh minds and docile bodies for future exploitation. This thing that capital cannot aford is the worker's leisure to be unproductive, to be deliberate, and to think and to produce without the requirement that this work be useful to capital down the line.

• How to Do Nothing — Jenny Odell

  ..."peace" is an endless negotiation among free-acting agents whose wills cannot be engineered. Politics necessarily exist between even two individuals with free will; any attempt to reduce politics to design is also an attempt to reduce people to machines.