projectgus wants to read You Are What You Watch by Walter Hickey
Author interviewed on 99 percent invisible podcast: 99percentinvisible.org/episode/you-are-what-you-watch/
Sounds like a good accessible read
Experimenting with moving my "want to read" list here.
With luck, this might also encourage me to read more regularly, to balance the ambitious addition of books to said reading list against my recent reading habits...
I guess we'll see about that.
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Author interviewed on 99 percent invisible podcast: 99percentinvisible.org/episode/you-are-what-you-watch/
Sounds like a good accessible read
Interview with the author on the Upstream podcast: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-missing-revolution-w-vincent-bevins/id1082594532
I picked this collection up as I'm a fan of editor Zen Cho's other writing, but the premise also hooked me in. The Cyberpunk genre has borrowed superficially from East Asian imagery and stereotype, so I was keen to see what Malaysian writers would do with it.
Although all the stories are in English, they're (as you'd expect) largely written for a Malaysian readership. For the rest of us to keep up then we need to understand a little basic Malay and/or have a willingness to look up words at times. I think there were some more subtle geographical/cultural references that flew straight past me as well, as I've not spent much time in Malaysia.
There are interesting takes in these stories, but I didn't feel anything really stretched the boundaries of the genre. I did notice, but maybe shouldn't have been surprised, how many variations of techno-authoritarianism (both hard-line …
I picked this collection up as I'm a fan of editor Zen Cho's other writing, but the premise also hooked me in. The Cyberpunk genre has borrowed superficially from East Asian imagery and stereotype, so I was keen to see what Malaysian writers would do with it.
Although all the stories are in English, they're (as you'd expect) largely written for a Malaysian readership. For the rest of us to keep up then we need to understand a little basic Malay and/or have a willingness to look up words at times. I think there were some more subtle geographical/cultural references that flew straight past me as well, as I've not spent much time in Malaysia.
There are interesting takes in these stories, but I didn't feel anything really stretched the boundaries of the genre. I did notice, but maybe shouldn't have been surprised, how many variations of techno-authoritarianism (both hard-line religious and hard-line secular) crop up over and over.
My favourite story, Kakak, was quite soulful and sad: an account of a fugitive android waiting to be smuggled to relative freedom in Indonesia. That one also had some great world-building glimpses of a pan-Southeast-Asian near future. Migrant worker themes like this pop up in a few stories, with the workers in question variously imagined as artificially intelligent robots or traditionally intelligent humans.
Its tonal opposite, Attack of the Spambots by Terence Toh is a hilarious story that I reckon would make a fantastic animated short.
This collection is almost a decade old now, and I want to go and see who is writing this kind of stuff in Malaysia these days. It'd be interesting to see how the themes and tropes might be different - for example there's a lot of gadget-based direct technological control in these stories, and I wonder if those anxieties might have morphed into extrapolations of more traditional surveillance and disinformation in the intervening years.
A recommended read, if any of this sounds interesting.
This book has an emotional quality which is missing from a lot of critical tech writing. Really worthwhile collection, although the contents are quite varied I expect something here will appeal to anyone who enjoyed Close to the Machine.
The outsider-becomes-insider accounts of the tech world of 1990s San Francisco were probably the sections I enjoyed the most while reading them. The short section of essays on artificial life - including the role of the body in intelligence - are the ones that I'm still thinking about six months later.
Added after listening to Gloria Mark interviewed on the Ezra Klein show: www.nytimes.com/2024/01/05/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-gloria-mark.html
The most interesting thing here (IMO) is that it sounds like author tries to get outside the simple "attention == productivity in work" equivalence that most people writing about this topic stick to. Not sure if that'll end up exactly being the case in the book, but piqued my interest...
Some time in the 2000s I remember stumbling on a lengthy set of Reddit posts asking "what if a force of modern US Marines found themselves stranded in Ancient Rome?". Much of this book is that, but for the zombie apocalypse. If you enjoyed that Reddit series then you'll probably enjoy this in the same way.
At other points in this fictional "oral history" I found myself thinking fondly of the late Studs Terkel's engrossing (real) oral history book Hard Times. I noticed Studs was thanked in the Afterword (along with George Romero, obvs). Hard Times is a classic because it captures different overlapping experiences of the Great Depression in people's own words, recorded by the author with dignity and respect. I think Max Brooks aimed for a fictional form of this, but missed the heart and soul of it - overlapping accounts of the same experience told by real, …
Some time in the 2000s I remember stumbling on a lengthy set of Reddit posts asking "what if a force of modern US Marines found themselves stranded in Ancient Rome?". Much of this book is that, but for the zombie apocalypse. If you enjoyed that Reddit series then you'll probably enjoy this in the same way.
At other points in this fictional "oral history" I found myself thinking fondly of the late Studs Terkel's engrossing (real) oral history book Hard Times. I noticed Studs was thanked in the Afterword (along with George Romero, obvs). Hard Times is a classic because it captures different overlapping experiences of the Great Depression in people's own words, recorded by the author with dignity and respect. I think Max Brooks aimed for a fictional form of this, but missed the heart and soul of it - overlapping accounts of the same experience told by real, ordinary, people. Most of the "interviewees" in this book are generals, war heroes, profiteers, etc - the "ordinary" people are mostly still military or paramilitary.
The book tries to bring a global perspective by including accounts from around the world, but I felt Brooks strained when writing about cultures he doesn't know well. He seemed to fall back on superficial stereotypes (the Japan bits especially, eesh). He appears most at home writing American frontline troops "Gettin' the job done despite those clowns sitting behind a desk in the government", etc, etc. Definitely still cliche, but at least you get the impression he's owning it.
The other limitation of criss-crossing accounts all over the world is that there's little room for character development. A shame, because there are bits of interesting world-building throughout World War Z that you could build a great story around. For example, the refugee floating settlement in the Pacific. This shows up for a half-dozen pages, but I would have happily read a whole story set there and describing the daily lives and experiences of inhabitants. Instead, the book quickly pivots to the next section...
(Maybe I'm taking a book about a global war against zombies too seriously here, but the book takes itself seriously as well so it seems fair.)
Reading this 18 years after it was published did provide one piece of interesting perspective. In the story, the US originally denied and downplayed the outbreak leading to confusion, misinformation, and mismanagement. This account probably came over provocative and edgy in 2006, but compared against the actual events of 2020 it seems understated if anything.
World War Z is not terrible, despite all my complaints I finished reading it. And I can certainly see that there are people who would really enjoy it.
(World War Z was this month's book at my book club.)
Quoted by Mandy Brown here aworkinglibrary.com/reading/madness-rack-and-honey
As recommended by @geraldew on Fedi: fosstodon.org/@geraldew/111757834902906682
Learned about via Fedi! mograph.social/@dilmandila/111729674293525889