We’re now deep into the month of May, and summer is arriving! Here’s some of the things I’ve been reading lately.
As usual, let me know what you’re reading. And I hope all of you are ready for the summer.
Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes – Lucky
Allen and Parnes wrote a well known book on the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign called Shattered. This book picks up with the 2020 Joe Biden campaign.
Most leftists set this stuff aside, and I get why they do it. It’s not my favorite book genre, either. But 2020 taught me a lot about the Democratic Party. It laid out the party’s factions and how U.S. primaries and general elections work. It’s a topic leftists should study.
That said, Allen and Parnes aren’t always the best teachers of those lessons. They clearly come at it from mainstream, pro-capitalist politics. But they tell a coherent story, and they tell it well. We can tinker with the details and how to interpret them.
Allen and Parnes also reveal how mainstream political analysts think. For instance, they lay out in detail the case for the claim that the slogan ‘defund the police’ cost Democrats votes in key House races and presidential precincts?
Is the claim true? Probably not. And certainly not in the way political analysts lay it out. But Allen and Parnes reveal the argument in enough detail for us to figure out how to counter it.
Katherine Cross – Log Off
Cross advises us to spend less time on social media, specifically as activists.
I agree. In fact, I’ve said as much for years.
But what reasons does Cross give? She thinks social media provides activists with the illusion that we’re doing things, when we really aren’t. It pushes us toward individualistic solutions and extremely moralistic views disconnected from the everyday concerns of working people. Furthermore, it does so, in part, by making these individualistic solutions appear to be social and/or grounded in solidarity.
At a broad level, her argument works. Cross is quite right about why social media is such a problem for activists and activist movements. She’s also quite right in her point that social media really only ‘solves’ the very problems it creates. I also appreciate her point that we should blame the platform itself rather than its users. In a sense, users of, e.g., Facebook, Twitter, are mostly along for the ride. The platform creates the open spaces for the behavior.
However, the book shares the same greatest strength and weakness. Cross delves deeply into examples from social media platforms in a way that makes it clear she has been steeped in the kind of online culture she advises us to avoid. At times, this makes her the right messenger for those still in it. But her examples tend toward the obscure and nerdy.
In other words, Cross writes a book with a good point. But the point is often pitched at a narrow target audience. It’s unclear whether most readers would be able to locate themselves in the narrative.
Jonathan Haidt – The Anxious Generation
Haidt looks at the effects of 21st century technology on our lives and attention spans. But his perspective, unlike the journalist from last month’s reading list, is that of a social psychologist studying how tech affects childhood.
Haidt’s central claim is that a childhood centered on social media and smartphones caused a rise in mental health problems among teenagers and adults. That rise continues to this day. More broadly, Haidt sees a world where parents under protect their children in the virtual world while overprotecting them in the real world.
Even skeptics have to admit there’s strong evidence for a rise in mental health problems. Haidt drowns the reader in that evidence. Furthermore, the evidence is concentrated in the 2010 to 2015 window in which smartphone use became ubiquitous among teens.
It’s not a 100% lockdown case, but it’s pretty close.
More important, Haidt offers a plausible narrative for why it happens. The smartphone deprives young, developing brains from sleep and social interaction. It fragments their attention and promotes addiction. Companies dropped smartphones on top of a culture already doing too much to ‘protect’ children from a less dangerous world. By overprotecting their children from ‘crime,’ parents opened the door to something else to come along and take their kids’ attention.
How can we overcome the problem? Haidt suggests new regulation of social media use among teens, paired with chances for kids to engage in free play and socialization.
Michel Houellebecq – Serotonin
Following up on last month, I read another Houellebecq novel.
This one tells the story of a breakdown in the life of a middle aged French agricultural bureaucrat. Depression leads him to leave his job, his partner, and his apartment. From there, he disappears from his ordinary life. And he heads out for a road trip to make sense of this new world of his own creation.
That’s basically the story.
But the novel became a hit due to its portrayal of discontent among French farmers. To get to that part of the story, our main character travels to rural France and rents his friend’s house. While there, he witnesses a protest and a fatal confrontation between farmers and riot police.
Having read two Houellebecq novels, it’s fair to say he has a distinct style of dark humor and melancholia. It’s not my favorite style – and the themes of his novels risk appropriation by the far right – but they’re enjoyable enough reads.
Lita Sorensen (editor) – Cancel Culture
This is a collection of short essays in the widely known Opposing Viewpoints series, which presents contrasting views on a hot topic. In general, the series has a primary strength of bringing together competing opinions in order to present a fuller debate. But its primary weakness is that the selected essays are often short, pithy, and full of weak arguments.
In that regard, this book is true to form.
The essays tackle cancel culture from various ideological perspectives – mostly libertarian, progressive, and conservative. They also show competing views on the effectiveness of ‘canceling’ as a way to accomplish practical goals.
At the same time, most of the essays just aren’t very good. Many are poorly argued. And some rely on wildly exaggerated ‘examples’ of cancel culture.
The best essays get underneath the hype to explain why cancel culture arose in the 2010s. For instance, Kat Rosenfield’s essay on cancel culture and trust manages to mostly succeed. As she argues, the erosion of social trust made cancel culture simultaneously necessary and unsuccessful.
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