I did a summer reading list about 6 months ago. In fact, I did two of them. Let’s try a winter reading list! And this time I’ll combine fiction and non-fiction into a single list. Here’s what I’ve been reading this winter, along with an upcoming book or two.
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There’s a certain line of thought out there in the political ether. The idea goes something like this. People use their identity to take political action, win offices, pass legislation, steer conversations, or direct movements. Or, to put it more simply, they use identity as political currency.
Now, when people say this, they often speak ominously or conspiratorially. By ‘people’ here, they have in mind members of marginalized groups. They think those sorts of people (i.e., others) use their identity as political currency. That’s something we should keep at the back of our minds, because people (and here I mean ‘white people, usually white men’) tend to overlook cases where members of their own group do things like this.
So…what is it to use identity as political currency? How’s it done? Is it a good thing, a bad thing, or both/neither?
I recently read Kate Eichhorn’s book The End of Forgetting: Growing Up with Social Media. In fact, I picked it up while I was at the 4S conference in New Orleans. It seemed to offer the best of science studies, namely careful analytical work around important issues in science and technology. Good stuff.
I’m curious about the effects of social media on childhood. I’ve seen plenty of evidence social media changes – and perhaps distorts – childhood. What kind of evidence? Young people carefully curating their social media profiles, grandstanding or engaging in other attention-seeking behavior online, using temporary and/or anonymous chat apps, and propagating oddly insular and distorted views about most Americans.
We’re at the final debate before the primaries begin. At this point, our question is no longer ‘who’s in the race, and what are they saying?’. Rather, it’s ‘who can still win the Democratic nomination?’. The time for candidates to make their case is mostly over, and the time to start voting is near.
The Democrats started with about 25 candidates, and now they’re down to 13. 13! It still seems like too many for January 2020. Even now, I say it’s too early to predict the winner. But it’s not too early to start making some cuts. And so, I’ll start not with the question of who will win the Democratic nomination, but rather the question of who can win it. Among the 13 remaining candidates, which ones have a notably nonzero chance of victory?
Beware Silicon Valley and its tech dreams. But you (hopefully) already knew that. What else? Or, perhaps, what (aside from the obvious) falls under the Valley’s scope? For one, the eerily dystopian utopia of its Ted Talks and its free beer and free dinner in recently gentrified utopian spaces. And for another, the young, disaffected men currently embracing Andrew Yang‘s UBI snake oil. Any discussion of coworking spaces starts here.
But it hardly ends here. What comes next?
