March Reads and Arts: Nests (Patreon)

In a month where I travelled a bunch, I appreciated home more than ever. As such, I drew nests, lots of nests.

The first book I read this month was Radical Markets, because I was going to be meeting with one of the authors, Glen Weyl, during my trip to Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond.

I found the book to be a very thought-provoking exposition on some problems with modern capitalism. It contains 5 different ideas for "radical" changes to the system, and I'm not sure whether to take them seriously or as theoretical exercises, but it was certainly fun to read about. I also ginormously disagree with a couple of them, but as theoretical or rhetorical exercises there's nothing wrong with that.

One of the 5 ideas is about data as labor, following Jaron's "Who Owns the Future". These ideas are what I'm currently working on with Microsoft and the reason for us traveling to Redmond and Detroit this month, so there was nothing new there for me.

Another of the ideas is about Quadratic Voting, something I find quite mathematically compelling though I have nothing to say about whether it might be a good idea in practice.

The first idea in the book is that "property is monopoly" and thus no one should be allowed to own things. All property is perpetually up for auction (including your home along with your vehicles and other items) at whatever price you decide on, with the caveat being you pay taxes on that price so you can't overprice it beyond what you can afford to be taxed on. That's an idea I react strongly against, both in theory and due to implementation problems. 

It led me to articulating a lot of thoughts about intangible value, and ways in which my home (and piano) is part of myself. Our tools and spaces increase in value as we develop our relationship and familiarity with them, and while we can try to put a price on that relationship, it cannot be sold, only destroyed. Aside from markets being unable to capture relational value (and aside from a host of other problems with the idea I won't get into here) there is something violatory about it. Stay away from my piano.

But I could see how the core mechanism might work well for certain specific use cases!

Anyway, our work in Redmond went really well, but I was so happy to get home. Back to my nest and all its un-sellable value.

On the plane, I was excited to read Helen Oyeyemi's new book: Gingerbread. It is so, so good. I've said it a million times and I'll say it again: Oyeyemi is amazing. If you like literary fiction with a fairytale vibe, go read yourself a Gingerbread.

Other fiction reads completed this month include Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett, which worked fine in its role as a listen-to-in-the-car book that could be picked up in small doses after a week or two or whatever (I think I started it last year?), but I really only bothered finishing because I have a thing about reading all the books with magic dogs in them. Discworld always almost clicks with me but then doesn't, for whatever reason.

I also listened to Sweep: The Story of a Girl and Her Monster by Jonathan Auxier, which is a perfectly-crafted YA book with a whimsical story and strong moral. I found it actually a bit too perfectly crafted, perhaps to the point of artificiality. I did enjoy it as a book-to-listen-to-while-arts, and I think if I were a YA I would've loved it. But it felt like "...and there's the Dickens reference, and there's the Big Quotable Moral Truth, and there's the Literary Metaphor, and there's the Discussion Point for 7th Grade English Class..." etc etc. I wouldn't hesitate to gift it to any avid YA reader, though!

And, it had homes and nests. I arted more nests while listening to it.

Back to nonfiction. Last year, when I was working on Spider Math, I read the first half of Animal Architects by Gould and Gould. I finally found it again in a book pile and started reading the second half... where there are chapters on nests!

Animal Architects includes some intriguing ideas about sensory maps and animal intelligence, things I shared last year through lens clips, as related to my previous work at eleVR involving embodied cognition. Now, in this month's context of nests and the value of homes as the extension of the self, these ideas were more interesting than ever. The spider's web is not just an object but a sensing apparatus, an extended part of the body. Some animals create external stomachs to pre-digest their food, or nests that function as an external womb with compost-enabled heating and temperature regulation and everything.

Anyway, the book is just fascinating. It is so dense with interesting facts that I found it a slow read, to be taken in sections. There's so much in there I can't stop thinking about. 

I couldn't help but relate it to some of the thoughts I had in response to Radical Markets, and the part of human history (including evolutionary history) I felt it was ignoring as irrational or inconvenient. Selfhood and ownership is apparently too complicated for humans to get right. But it's not as if bodies, property, and ownership only popped up with the human species, and one must always be cautious when attributing special power to "rational" human intelligence.

Historically, humans haven't exactly been good at property, and the powerful have a habit of finding rationalizations to take what they want. Particularly where bodies are concerned I quite prefer having a monopoly over my own, and you can keep your markets away from my piano and my nest, thank you very much.

Aside from those five books, I started a couple others (which we'll hear from next month) and also read another Harry-Potter-series-length's-worth of Harry Potter fanfiction. I gotta say, there's nothing like settling down back in your hotel room bed-nest with a bit of happy easy fanfiction as comfort food while away from home.

Detroit, by the way, was awesome. 

I'm not a city person, I don't like busy crowded places, I don't like traffic, and I don't like contexts where everyone basically feels forced into being rude to each other because there's too many people to acknowledge each other's humanity when we're all just trying to make left turns against traffic (metaphorically, but literally too). 

But Detroit was like a big city with not a big city amount of people. Everyone was friendly, from multiple bus drivers to random folks we asked for directions. There was no traffic, good food, lots of art, great architecture and old fancy buildings, it was like all the benefits of being in a city without the parts I don't like. When I took a taxi from the airport and they drove like a real taxi and not like an uber or west coast driver I wanted to cry of happiness. It instantly felt more like home than any of the four cities I've lived in. Also I can't stop thinking about the cajun fried turkey wings I had at The Turkey Grill in midtown.

Here's a nest I drew in M's notebook when we were in Detroit:

We were in Detroit for RadicalxChange, which Glen invited us to speak at. I didn't realize it was actually a conference directly related to Radical Markets and not just tangentially related due to Glen's community involvement, so good thing I read it! M and I gave a talk on Data Dignity which generated a lot of interest, and hopefully the video will be online soon so you can see what I've been working on. 

There were a bunch of cool folks working on data-economics-related things, which was great to see! As far as I could tell, the conference focused mostly on the more compelling ideas from the book, whereas some of the ickier-feeling (to me) ideas seemed to have been left behind by much of the community. They are planning to expand the conference rapidly, and it will be interesting to see how the ideas change as that happens.

But in the end I am back home! Home! Home!

Vi