It was a year of Caro, and a year of change. I left California, and moved to Colorado with my future wife. I found myself more unfocused and disconnected than I expected, still working in a hybrid capacity which didn't come naturally to me, and with less of a social community than I wanted. I was also growing up, beginning the slow transition from a culture taker to a culture maker, realizing that I was becoming more of a leader than a follower. Perhaps this is why the biographies of Caro spoke to me in this moment. The raw unfettered potentiality of youth was fading.
1. Where Is My Flying Car?
Perhaps the urtext of what has come to be called the e/acc movement, this was a radicalizing book which inspired me to become more frustrated with the status quo. Something about reading it in the wake of leaving California and the COVID pandemic made me specifically angry, and this book grounded the anger in specific complaints about GDP, watts per capita, safetyism and other critiques. Presaging works like Abundance and Breakneck in 2025, this was a techno-utopian manifesto before that term became popularized by a16z and the American Dynamism movement.
I'll admit that Kuhn's work didn't click the first time I read it. But by 2021, I had settled into my natural state as a theorist, and was working through a longstanding paradigm shift within Palantir, consolidating the ontology systems across Gotham and Foundry and ushering in a new era of the Ontology. This book was very helpful, especially in the concepts of incommensurability and the way in which many paradigms were rejected. The concept of anomalies, and of the formalization which ossifies and then gives way to more plastic eras was formative for me.
Some great men seem relatable; Johnson is not, for me. Kicking off with a beautiful ode to the institution that is the US Senate, in a world where traveling to and from it was not a simple quotidian flight, this was a book which stuck with me in its unabashed, not quite admiration, but perhaps awe, at its subject. Larger than life, Johnson was at the peak of his powers, a legislator with no peers. Also relevant for thinking through how the Senate actually worked!
The worst best book - an incredible work of fact that reads like a work of fiction, perhaps one of the most destructive books in the history of the 20th century, a harsh counterposition to Storr's technological positivism. There isn't a book like it, and it was a beautiful read - a book I wished had gone just slightly differently, and a book which tells the story of the delicate intertwining of technology and humanity - the car and the man who bent the world into compliance with it.
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