books – Rastin Mehr

Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis

Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis draws a direct parallel between modern cloud companies and platforms, or the Technofeudalists who own private spaces and cloud capital on the internet and collect rent from businesses and people who reside in those spaces. A good example is the sales cut Apple and Google take from apps on their app stores, and, of course, all cloud service companies that are mostly large corporations concentrated in the United States.

The Internet used to be part of the commons, according to the author, much like much of the land in Europe was part of the commons before it was sold to Barons, Dukes, and Earls by Kings in exchange for military alliances. The peasants who had lived on those lands for centuries were kicked out unless they could pay rent. Peasants with nowhere to go migrated to cities, worked as cheap labour, and that was the start of the working class and the Industrial Revolution.

I’m not sure the Internet was ever part of the commons, considering that even the most basic servers that serve HTML pages are often privately owned, once we exclude servers owned by publicly funded institutions. The metaphor fails, considering that even much of the open-source software powering internet websites, services, and apps runs on proprietary hardware and costs money for electricity and expertise to keep it humming.

But the book made me think: if we can have libraries and community centers in our neighbourhoods, why not build neighbourhood cloud infrastructure and data centers owned by people, governed by local privacy laws, run on renewable energy, and used to power the neighbourhood’s decentralized AI, social networks, apps, and websites?

How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt was published in 2018, during President Trump’s first term in the US. The book focuses largely on US history and politics. Still, what I found most interesting was the first chapter, where the authors describe the common pattern of how authoritarian governments gain power through the democratic process and elections, and then later destroy the pillars of a free and democratic society during their reign.

Whether it was Adolf Hitler in Germany, Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, Alberto Fujimori in Peru, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, or, of course, Donald Trump in the US, they all came to power through the democratic process with the help of establishment political elites and were driven by short-term partisan goals. In all these cases, established parties made a ‘fateful alliance’ with a populist outsider whose message was resonating with people’s frustration and grievance. The supporting political party thought that once they won the election, they could set guardrails and boundaries to control the demagogue they helped elevate. In all those cases, their plan backfired, allowing these leaders to dismantle democratic institutions incrementally and gradually from the inside.

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.