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Lots of entrepreneurial suggestions here already, so I'm going do something different by suggesting more humanities-focused books/papers that could help round o
by elvinyung 8y ago
Lots of entrepreneurial suggestions here already, so I'm going do something different by suggesting more humanities-focused books/papers that could help round out our understanding of the state of things:
* Status Update by Alice Marwick - an ethnography of the SF tech scene in the mid-late 2000s, a very detailed examination of the status structures in Silicon Valley and how we were changed by the rise of social media.
* Postscript on the Societies of Control by Deleuze - short, insightful, somewhat prescient paper on the evolution of "control" mechanisms in postindustrial, capitalist societies.
* Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher - a very compelling analysis of the neoliberal postmodern condition, and how the cultural milieu has changed since the fall of the Soviet Union, and free-market capitalism became the only extant economic system in the world.
* Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs - this probably needs no introduction; it was an extremely transformative treatise on urban form, vitality, diversity, and completely overturned the urban planning field when it was originally published. I think everyone who plans on living in a city should read this book.
* Hollow City by Rebecca Solnit - an ethnography of the gentrification and bohemian displacement in San Francisco during the dot-com boom of the 1990s. She doesn't just blame "the techies" for the gentrification, but rather uses the gentrification as a lens to examine the culture around urbanism has changed in the recent decades.
- oscarpas 8y agoOn the same note I’d recommend Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond. Written in research driven prose, it details the relationships between a handfull of landlords and tenants in some of the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee.
- elvinyung 8y agoThanks for the recommend! I just read the excerpt in the New Yorker [1]. Geez, this is some heartbreaking stuff, a an even more sobering account of the neoliberalization of urbanism than Solnit's book. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/forced-out https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/forced-out