books – Rastin Mehr

The Art Of Gathering by Priya Parker

The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker illuminates invisible social dynamics that neurodivergent individuals like me often struggle to perceive. It offers insights into how we can attend social gatherings or host our own. Building horizontal relationships and communities is an effective form of resistance against authoritarianism and fascism, and it’s a skill that we can learn and teach each other.

The book also offers valuable advice on hosting events for diverse cultural backgrounds and redefining social conventions that cater to all attendees.

I used to host unconferences where we taught people how to use open-source technologies and build communities. The book was particularly useful when hosting tech and unconference events with colleagues.

Nowadays, I sometimes host gatherings in my home and try to prioritize guests who are single, live alone, queer/trans, or not part of privileged heteronormative couples. The book offers helpful tips and validations for community development and hosting gatherings in personal or professional life.

Your Art Will Save Your Life by Beth Pickens

Your Art Will Save Your Life by the Queer writer Beth Pickens is a guideline and slim handbook about surviving fascism by creating art and sharing it with your community and community building as an antifascist tool and means of staying politically engaged.

The author wrote the book in 2008 during the first period of Mango Mouselini’s presidency. The book also provides additional guidelines for artists to sustain their practices of creating art, navigating the art world, residencies, and funding.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture

“From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism” is my favourite book by Fred Turner. He is a professor of communication at Stanford University. The book explores the origins of the digital utopianism that emerged in the 1990s, tracing it back to the countercultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s. You can consider this book the continuation of his other book, “The Democratic Surround.”

Internet was an innovation started and funded by DARPA and the US department of defence. Its practical applications primarily focused on building an ad-hock messaging and information exchange network. The idea of the Internet as a global utopian community to connect people who wanted to exchange ideas was inspired by a combination of hippy artists who used a lot of psychedelic drugs and hosted psychedelic parties and libertarian right investors who believed the Internet would become space where governments would have little influence over and wouldn’t be able to regulate. Stewart Brand was one of the artists and a key influencer to lead the counterculture movement.

Stewart Brand was a member of the art collective USCO, who created experimental light and sound environments and film projections in museums, dance clubs, theatres, and universities. At the time, he was distributing buttons with a profound question “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet?” That self-funded campaign led to NASA releasing the public’s first photograph of Earth. This was during the cold-war and Brand hoped that humanity would see the Earth as a whole and interconnected system and, as a result, give peace a chance.

Later, Brand founded the Whole Earth Catalog with a picture of the planet earth on the cover. At the time, many people had decided to move back to nature and restart humanity by living in communes, growing their food, building their habitats, and, you know, the whole hippie movement. WEC contained information for sourcing anything from farming, medicine, and creating habitats, to technology and cybernetics equipment. This was not a shopping catalogue but rather for knowing where to find what in this network of communes nationwide; it was a hard copy Internet, Google, or Wikipedia. We often attribute the quote “Stay hungry, stay foolish” to Steve Jobs, but this quote was from the WEC, and this catalogue was one of the resources that inspired Steve Jobs to start Apple computers.

WEC was later recreated as an online community called Whole Earth Lectronic Link or WELL, where users could communicate. Naturally, the WELL users called themselves WELLBeings! So as the hippy communes collapsed, they migrated to cyberspace. Today I learned that WELL.com is still online!

This book also covers the start of the WIRE magazine and silicon valley once the World Wide Web became available to the public.

Stewart Brand and his friends laid the groundwork for the concept of the world wide web as a global community; however, they also note that this vision of the Internet as a utopian space of freedom and society has been challenged by the commercialization of the web and the rise of surveillance capitalism.

Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek

Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek is a historical summary of the mainstream internet platforms we use daily on our devices. It also does a decent job of describing different types of internet platforms and their business models.

This book is a quick read; it took me only a few days to finish. Despite the word “Capitalism” in the title, in my opinion, the author keeps a somewhat politically neutral position on the topic and focuses primarily on the platforms’ taxonomy and evolution rather than how they impact the communities and their culture.

Suppose you are an internet consultant or developer who develops and maintains any multi-user infrastructure on the Internet. In that case, the Platform Capitalism helps you better connect the dots between what you already know and what happens behind the closed doors of your organization and leadership team.

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

I’m a big Naomi Kelin fan, and it took me a while to finish this book. The Shock Doctrine is a good summary of the history of Free Market Capitalism favoured by center-right and conservative political parties.

This book explains how a Noble Prize-winning American economist named Milton Freedman became an advocate of a free-market economic system and minimal government interventions. Freedman became an advisor to politicians such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Their policies often boiled down to tax cuts, defunding of social programs, privatization, and deregulations.

The impact of these policies was relatively minimal in more democratic countries yet devastating in South America and the Middle East. Free market policies are often introduced after an intentionally induced shock, such as a war or natural disaster.

The Shock Doctrine is ample with historical details from countries that adopted the free-market economic principles and those who chose to move away from it.