3 Book Critiques

1. The Art of Demotivation

Anyone in the workforce should familiarize themselves with this book. You can read it as satire, a catalog of Dilbertisms and scenes from Office Space, but without punchlines it's difficult to not feel elbowed in the gut by nearly every paragraph.

Although claiming to have managers as an audience, employees and consultants of any kind, knowledge workers included, have a lot to learn here. In our working culture where we learn to ascribe much organizational dysfunction to "Hanlon's Razor" (ie. "never assume bad intentions when assuming stupidity is enough"), this book presents justifications and patterns to enact what workers could under Hanlon's Razor consider pathologies of bureaucracy or uninformed management.

Whether or not this book is prescriptive or a dark parody of corporate culture, its recipes in practice would cultivate workers ideal for Stanley Milgram's "agentic state" wherein "the essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view themselves as the instrument for carrying out another person's wishes, and they therefore no longer see themselves as responsible for their actions. Once this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred in the person, all of the essential features of obedience follow."

2. How to Win Friends and Influence People

This book will help you do what is printed on the cover. One minor criticism is that for a technologist, artist or academic, it offers little advice for the study and development that necessarily happens in the dark, away from people.

Here's the problem. The book proposes that the best way to change someone's mind is by telling them they're right, or at least that you identify with their position. The world in which this advice can stand alone is one where the strongest and most proximal institutions are legitimate, and the consequences of climbing the social ladder are only positive and for yourself and others around you.

Realistically, this falls apart in 3 cases. First, when two unequal sides oppose one another, the obligation to align yourself with the stronger is, while possibly good for you (at least in the short term), ignores (for an indeterminably long period of time) at best only the weaker side, and at worst, it ignores all of the "externalities" not explicitly noted in the conflict. When the Lorax isn't speaking for the trees, your social standing demands that win the friends and influence of the loggers/Department of Agriculture. When the Lorax does show up a team of lawyers or government regulators, your desire to win friends and influence will instruct you to use your influence to collude with your friends to make the Lorax go away as cheaply as possible.

Second is that, like the first, your group might be destructive, but the "Lorax" or the entity you oppose might be hidden from you at the time that you're winning friends and influence from your base. "Dr. Death," the designer of various methods of execution devices, found this to be the case after his expertise in execution equipment led his new found friends (neo-nazis) to invite him to discredit the Holocaust. He stayed true to the spirit of "How to Win Friends and Influence People," by supporting his friends and taking what he looked at as the next step up the ladder. Subsequently, he lost his prison equipment contracts to those with less objectionable ideas. In this case, the book wouldn't have saved him for a few reasons. First, this was the culmination of his career. He was connecting with more important (rich) and influential (for bad reasons) people than before. Second, he had a blindspot for the people he was actually accountable to and he depended upon for further equipment contracts. Third, and most generally, his morality was indistinguishable from his careerism, which is damn close to what "How to Win Friends and Influence People" advocates. This is not to say that everyone who reads the book will end up as a nazi sympathizer, but rather that, with a strict pursuit of career and influence, one will end up stilted by the ideas of those around them. Whether you can beat the Lorax or the initially hidden Lorax gets the better of you when you are presented to a larger realm of criticism, friends or influence (or money) are not good metrics for evaluating your positive impact on the world.

The third problem is that aside from personal gain (of wealth, position, and influence), no notion of "good" is presented by the book. Surely, this could be seen as simply out of scope, but for something so "timeless" as this is considered to be, it is striking and concerning that an amoral pursuit of self-importance is considered such a foundational book on self development.

3. What Technology Wants

To summarize, Kevin Kelly makes a case that technology has a path, and that the path is basically good.

Expounding on the first theme, technology is moving forward on a path, and because it is doing so, that path must be good for technology, because what is good sticks around and evolves (he draws on some biological analogies for this). Additionally, nothing really disappears from life and experience because increasingly well-cataloged by technology.

The second main idea, is that the progress of the technology develops with development of humans, so it must be good for us as well (we co-evolve with it). Ultimately this rests on his perspective that because he personally prefers the enjoyment of technology in the manner that his wealth allows (he can drive to nature, visit museums, take planes to visit other cultures), technology allows the world at large somehow to have more access to a broader base of cultures and experiences.

Inequality, environmental disasters, and extinction of species are all swept under the rug for now. Technology is, with little oversight (not directed by concentrations of capital) clearly just making an omelet, and will itself uncrack those eggs later, when it decides to.

In the mean time, thousands of apps pampering the wealthy and disrupting working class jobs, compete to capture venture capital while our bridges fall apart, holy wars rage, and a very tiny group of people in Texas determine what knowledge deserves to be in American text books.