This issue of recently consumed was a long time in the making, so some
of the links might be a bit outdated. Actually, this list has been
waiting for so long in draft status, that I had to go back and re-read
everything here (except for the book).
- Most
recommended: Shock
Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is this week's top,
not only because it's such an awesome book, but also because I
spent so much time reading it, and neglected stuff on the internet
in the meantime. Naomi Klein's book is extremely well-researched
and enraging with the history it tells. There are two fundamental
lessons the books tries to hammer home: Shocks (inflicted to
either individuals or societies) have become more and more
important weapons yielded by free market fundamentalists in their
crusades, blinding people to the extreme poverty forced upon
them. These policies are not implementable without the use of
state violence, which has been hypocritically damned by western
intellectuals while the economic policies they necessitate have
been presented as good
examples. As other
critics have pointed out, the connections she makes between
the shocks inflicted on individual people (as torture or
psychiatric experiments) and shocks on society stay at a
metaphorical level, without any organic-political connection,
which does not necessarily take away the power of the stories of
torture. What has amazed, infuriated and despaired me is that many
policies and episodes of political violence have direct
counterparts for Turkey: Times of political imbalance, radical
economic reforms, deterioration of living standards, followed by
more political imbalance, followed by some kind of shock used not
only as an excuse for more and more radical economic reforms, but
also for extreme political violence carried out by the state.
- The
rise and rise of JavaScript: What I have feared since the
start of the web-based re-programming of every desktop app is
happening; JavaScript is swallowing the rest of web programming,
including backend. Many things happened in the last few years
that pushed JavaScript into more prominence: HTML5 makes it the
operating system of the web, V8 and node.js made it a good
alternative on the backend, and certain standards came out of
JavaScript to become more general (like JSON). But fear not,
there is hope, in the form of CoffeeScript. Raganwald reminds us
that CoffeeScript
is not a language worth learning, because it's not a
different language at all. CoffeeScript is a shorthand for
JavaScript, making you stick to all the good patterns, and
compiling to the kind of code which you should be writing
anyway. This is absolutely true in my experience. The JavaScript
compiled from its CoffeeScript counterpart is very close to what
I have in mind when coding, which makes things like debugging or
using external libraries not a problem at all.
- Modern
Web Applications are Here If JavaScript is so powerful and
fast now, why not make use of it to write faster, more robust
and responsive web apps? This is apparently what Battlenet did,
and Armin Ronacher dissects their application in this
article. Most of the content is rendered on the client, with
JSON being used to transport information, instead of whole HTML
pages. The status of the player and his friends are updated with
push notifications, through the use of web sockets. The web app
can also integrate with the game, if you have a plugin
installed, letting you join a server or start a game from the
app. Ronacher uses the Battlenet app to bolster a point he made
in an earlier post,
that web
apps should not be integrated on the server side, but on the
client side through the use of JavaScript and related
technologies.
- The
Social Graph is Neither reminds me of this one web page I
came upon in the early naughties, which just said something to
the tune of "Noam Chomsky could be wrong". Although his
influence was already waning, Chomsky was the most eminent
linguist at the time, and his views on especially language
acquisition were soaked by aspiring scientists as words of gods,
and what this guy was saying was, "You know, he might
be wrong". This article makes a similar claim in these high
times of social networks, saying that the social graph —which
the biggest software companies are trying to generate and then
milk— is neither a graph nor social. It's not a graph because
our social relationships change over time, in that new
relationships are created, and old ones change their
nature. Also, who has access to the information in your social
cloud is a function of the cloud itself, whereas privacy, as
this same problem is named when the relationships get digitized,
has to be somehow bolted on. It is also not social, because in
its current incarnation (Facebook and Google+) it is a giant
hall of mirrors that entices you to stay there so that some
marketing guys can gather your information, and try to sell you
stuff. What drove home the not-really-social argument for me was
a simple comparison at the end: 4chan is simply timestamped
images with a text field, and it gave us pretty much everything
we share on Facebook: lolcats, rage comics, image macros
etc. Can you name one cultural invention that came out of
Facebook? I can't.
- All
pain and no gain: A brief history of "Austerity Program"
massacres and disasters gives an overview of the austerity
programs in the 20th century, and their catastrophic results. It
is not written in a particularly academic language or style, and
does not shy away from naming names and expletives, which makes
it perfect reading if you want to get fired up about the
neoliberals and their command over mainstream political-economic
thought (also see first entry in this list). The most
interesting bit in this post for me was the role of Austrian
school economics (as per Hayek and Mises) in the meltdown of the
economy of Weimar Germany in the 1930s. According to the author,
their policies led to wide-spread unemployment and poverty, and
dramatic shrinkage of the economy, which paved the way for the
Nazis. After the war, however, the history of the inter-war
period was rewritten by the same people to blame it all on the
bloated state and the cost of unemployment insurance and
pensions. Another interesting pointer
is the
story of one Lawrence Summers. Summers was Clinton's
treasury secretary, and he pushed through the deregulation of
derivatives during his office, one of the primary reasons for
the recent economic meltdown. Another of his previous jobs was
advising Lithuania's transformation to free-market economy. He
was so successful that within five years the suicide rate in
Lithuania more than doubled, becoming the highest in the
world. Lithuanians elected the Communists back to power in the
first free elections. Summers went on to work for World Bank,
where he oversaw the rescue programme for the Russian
economy. This rescue was also extremely successful, decreasing
the Russian GDP by more than 60 percent. This guy has so much
asshole potential, that as the president of the Harvad
University, he actually claimed that women are inherently more
stupid than men when it comes to maths and physics, and this is
the main reason for their being underrepresented in science and
engineering. He is now the director of the National Economic
Council, and this under a democrat president. I'm sure that his
stint will be just as successful as his earlier appearences.
- Are
startups in the business of destroying jobs? answers the
question with a no, which is pretty much inevitable considering
where the post appears. The reasoninng is that startups
(especially disruptive ones like AirBnB) might be causing the
existing businesses, espacially the large ones, to shrink or
dissapear. However, in the process, they lead to other, smaller
ones (very often individuals as online businesses through the
likes of Ebay, Etsy, etc) to appear, and these have access to
technologies and resources which the same startup ecosystem
makes possible in the first place. The more urgent question of
what happens when the primary aim of an online techology
company, which is dominating a market, a.k.a becoming a
monopoly, actually takes place, goes totally
unanswered. Probably
because the
answer is not particularly pretty, but on the other hand,
it's rather pretty for the ones holding the power, namely
successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.