Dawn of Everything Book Circle, 2022-03-25

Artifacts

Topics and Key Phrases

  • moral modalities
  • mutual aid
  • exchange
  • hierarchy
  • question the linear views of history and more
  • human social agency vs (materialistic or other) determinism
  • cargo cults
  • yarning
  • centralized vs. federated
  • situatedness of knowledge
  • "the code of objects"
  • "seasonality" to power structures
  • denial of seasonality... until we can't
  • Enlightenment thinkers
  • human-centered design
  • "making the scholarship [a] narrative"
  • Apophatic (Wikipedia) (misuse of the term, and sorry I said apodictic at first: but a lot of the book is negative definitions: Not this determinism, not that determinism...)

Big Questions

  • What "lens" (or lenses) are you reading the book through?
  • What would we learn from this book, that we don't already know from the Era of Enlightenment thinkers like Harari?
    • What can we unlearn?
  • Forms of freedoms
  • Forms of power
  • Initiative and universality of learning (centralized? federated? situated?)
    • dangers of blind transposition of methods from one place, one culture to another. (Anti-TINA. Toolbox approach.)
      • "TINA" - acronym for Thatcher's "There Is No Alternative"
  • What is the (anti-)power structure that prevents the usurpation?
    • Seasonality of power structures
    • Importance of 3 basic freedoms, and hospitality

Cargo Cult People?

Trevor: "I think that when we look at other civilizations and other cultures, we are acting like cargo cult people, because we don't really know what they're doing, why they are doing it. We try to understand it through our own culture, but we don't really get it at all, and everybody's agenda is something completely different that mostly we never understand."

Understanding Somebody Else's Culture

Wendy E.: someone said, "there's something that's wrong about trying even trying to understand something through somebody else's culture, (without being rooted in your own) that it's going to end up broken and bad, because you just don't have the entry point.""

  • what I know and how I know it?

How shall we work together? Suggestions...

  • what is our primary task for each meeting? and for the lifetime of this reading circle?
  • From Wendy's last plea: perhaps the work of this group will be questions, useful questions
  • and artefacts that give other people handholds to walk more swiftly along a path that has been roughly tested in the past - learning from experiments and sharing
  • a chapter every other week? (meet one week, read the next)
  • a chapter as a theme for each month?
  • Pete will set up a website (wiki)
  • there's a CSC Mattermost channel, Dawn of Everything
  • general IP license for what we create together? CC-BY

Writeups of DoE by Others

  • http://www.christian-faure.net/tag/graeber/ (in French)

Graeber Books

  • The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (with David Wengrow)
  • Debt: The First 5000 Years
  • The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
  • Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
  • The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement

Other Books

  • Great Derangement Climate Change, Amitav Ghosh

Other Thinkers

(many criticized in this book!)

  • John Kenneth Galbraith
  • Yuval Noah Harari
  • Jared Diamond
  • Steven Pinker
  • Karl Marx
  • Amitav Ghosh