Reading, Watching 12.17
Books, Movies
This is a (semi) regular feature for paid subscribers where I write about what I’ve recently been reading and/or watching. Hope you enjoy!
Yes, I couldn’t stop myself from posting for long. I decided paid subscribers deserved more content, but this episode is going to be even more niche and specialized than usual: I’m going to write a little about what I’m reading for book research, as much to clarify things for myself as to give you recommendations. That’s because just about no one will actually want to read most of the stuff I’m reading at the moment, which involves a lot of Hegel. And even though this is called “Reading, Watching,” there will be no movies this week. Nothing fun today, just grueling German philosophy. Now you know what I like to do with my spare time. But first, some shameful self-promotion.
My newsletter from April, “The Emerging Tech-Lash,” was quoted by Kevin Roose in the New York Times:
The writer John Ganz has called this worldview “bossism” — a belief that the people who build and run important tech companies have ceded too much power to the entitled, lazy, overly woke people who work for them and need to start clawing it back.
In Mr. Ganz’s telling, Silicon Valley’s leading proponents of bossism — including Mr. Musk and the financiers Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel — are seizing an opportunity to tug the tech industry’s culture sharply to the right, taking leftist workers and worker-sympathizers down a peg while reinstating themselves and their fellow bosses to their rightful places atop the totem pole.
That’s right. I have one tiny, pedantic quibble with Roose’s piece, though. He writes below:
But while some tech C.E.O.s might blame a sleeper cell of gender-studies majors for their problems, many of Mr. Musk’s elite fans adhere to a more straightforward, business-school kind of bossism. They admire him for ruling Twitter with an iron fist and making the kinds of moves that tech executives have resisted for fear of alienating workers — cutting jobs, stripping away perks, punishing internal dissenters, resisting diversity and inclusion efforts, and forcing employees back to the office.
The problem I have is with the word “But.” That’s not really in contradistinction to my argument. What I’m trying to get on is how the economic and political motivations of this class are intertwined and mutually reinforcing. Not a big deal, I’m just very happy people are reading Unpopular Front and finding it illuminating. Now if they’d only all pay for it, too! (Ross Douthat also linked to that same piece in a recent column.)
I also think it’s worth noting how shambolic Musk’s regime is at Twitter. Doesn’t that remind you of Trump? I think this is not so much a bug as a feature, as they like to say in Silicon Valley. His supporters actually enjoy the chaos, which they see disconcerts the people they hate. This reminds me that I need to take another look at Zizek’s For They Know Not what They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor.