~/irregex 2023/04/23

Hannah Rose Woods: Little Monstrosities: Victorian Dogdom

Alex Pareene: I Have Seen The Future Of User-Determined AI Bias

Frédéric Lordon: The French Uprising

Gabriel Winant: J. D. Vance Changes the Subject

David W. Anthony: The Horse, The Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. (2010)

I’ve wanted to read this for a while. It’s maybe the standard account of Proto-Indo European origins. It’s honestly kind of a mess, and like a lot of archeological accounts, a little too interested sorting out who should get credit for various discoveries. But it’s free on audible.

Bertrand de Jouvenel: On Power: The Natural History of its Growth. (1945)

Bertrand de Jouvenel is one of the most successful opportunists of the postwar period. A fascist sympathizer before the war, he rebranded himself just after V-E day as a Austrian-school libertarian (he was a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society). Later still, he re-styled himself as a futurist and an advocate of forecasting and planning. This book advances his theory of state power and his “High-Low vs. Middle” theory class conflict, which is popular in some sectors of the online right. I read it for masochistic “know-your-enemy” reasons and found it to be a complete drag. Don’t bother.

Fritz Kunze, Lauren Kunze: The History of Franz and Lisp in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (2022)

Joseph Kellner: As Above, So Below: Astrology and the Fate of Soviet Scientism in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History (2019)

Samuel Lindholm: Was Thomas Hobbes the first biopolitical thinker? in History of the Human Sciences (2023)