It’s time for another monthly reading list! For this month, I’ve been turning to a bit more fiction, as well as some more literary non-fiction. Now that we’re more than a year into COVID-19, I’m thinking a bit about what I’d be reading in a coffee shop. I think most of these would make great coffee shop books.
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I’ve focused quite a bit in this blog on issues of political language: how what we say affects us, and how our concepts of, say, intersectionality, privilege, or equity guide the things we do. Often whether we know it or not. I write about these issues in the service, of course, of deeper leftist projects.
In this post, I’ll shift a bit to giving advice on political language. What should we keep in mind when using political language as a part of our organizing efforts?
Social Media Erodes Trust
For a post on April Fools’ Day (but not an April Fools’ Day post), I wanted to touch on the sense many people have that social media is bad for activism. When I try to put this idea in its most plausible form, I come up with the claim that social media erodes trust. Whether it also does other things, its erosion of trust stands out as key.
Let’s roll with that and see where it takes us.
I’ve written about how the tech industry serves and reinforces negative trends in the job market. Specifically, it encourages coworking spaces for white-collar precariat workers, and it promotes a culture of endless talk and meetings. In this post, I want to move on to something a bit more everyday and immediate: the open office.
So, let’s talk about the open office.
I was reading Nathan J. Robinson’s short article about Age of Empires the other day with more than a bit of nostalgia. Robinson enjoyed revisiting Age of Empires after 20 years. But he took us to task as a society for our obsession with conquest games over cooperative ones.
Robinson draws all the obvious connections between Age of Empires (or Risk, or a million other games) and mindless war. No, players don’t really do anything constructive in these games. They even do destructive things.
Nevertheless, I’ll admit once again that I don’t really need my cultural consumption or choices to line up with my politics. For the most part, I think it doesn’t matter. Sometimes, I think it’s fine to just enjoy something.
Perhaps this is a long-winded way of pointing out that I remember many years of enjoying Age of Empires with my friends. And, more recently, I started playing a game called O A.D. While it’s superficially different enough to have a different title, it’s basically an AoE knockoff. And you can play it for free.
