- Nicola Papale's reading list

Reading notes on "The Futurological Congress"

2025-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

In all honesty, I have the upmost trouble writing about books. It doesn’t align with my usual tone, style. It feels so wrong to just describe what’s in the book. And I don’t see how to discuss the deeper elements of the book without introducing them in the context of the narrative.

The Futurological Congress is a weird book. It’s short, it’s dense, it’s full of weird ideas, some deeply explored, other just approached at a surface level, but desserving pages of discussions.

The Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem is a science fiction novelette about Ijon Tichy, a futurologue, and his insane adventures during the Futurological Congress in a Hilton Hotel in Costa Rica. It was published in 1971 in Soviet Poland.

The book is insane, it’s a wild ride. It sips into a sense of irreality that make us doubt everything. It’s not just an unreliable narrator but an halucinating narrator. It will remind scifi fans of Philip K. Dick. I thought about Ubik a few times while reading the book. The style is close to Peace on Earth, another Lem book that I absolutely loved. And the plot reminded me in an abstract way Et On Tuera Tous Les Affreux (To Hell With The Ugly) by Boris Vian.

The Futurological Congress</h2>
The book starts at the Hilton Hotel at Nounas in Costa Rica. A massive structure of 164 stories, where the Futurological Congress runs.
The conference happens while a literal civil war is brewing up in the country. Whatever the locals do is not material to the attendents, The Hilton is part of this non-space of international administration that lives in another plane of existance.
The Futurological Congress is the Davos WEF: it’s a gathering of completely incapable people ostensibly pretending to want to solve all the world problems. Those problems might be familiar to a 2025 reader:

The first item of business was the world urban crisis, the second – the ecology crisis, the third – the air pollution crisis, the fourth – the energy crisis, the fifth – the food crisis. Then adjournment. The technology, military and political crisis were to be dealt with on the following day, after which the chair would entertain motions from the floor. </blockquote>
The futurologues are more of a practical joke. With a reasoning cruelly similar to today’s AI boosters, one futurolgue predicts that exponential population growth will cause, in 400 years, humanity to form a living sphere of bodies with a radius expanding at approximately the speed of light.
Eventually the This-is-fine dog will burn, and that’s what happens in Nounas. Reality catches up with the Hilton.
Reality in the form of irreality: psychem. It’s a new way of managing protests. Psychoactive substances that induce a desired state of mind or hallucinations.
The Costa Rican police added “benignimizer” to the water. Benignimizer makes you happy and benevolent. Ideal to quell revolutionary protests. But wise to the police scheme, the protesters didn’t drink the water, they drank guaro instead.
With more than one trick up their sleeve, the police drop Love-Thy-Neighbour (LTN) gas over the protests. But turns out LTN also works on police. And ensued an orgy of brotherly love and friendship. Police, protesters, hookers: friendship besets everyone. As to the higher ranking officials, they just committed suicide on the spot, suddenly wise to their horrible act of cruelty.
Thankfully, the army was far from the war (love?) scenes, and, still untouched by compassion, could still exert cruelty:

[The army] had come to stifle the brotherly love rampant among the police. This they did, with considerable bloodshed. </blockquote>
Fleeing the complete chaos of a psychoactive civil war, Tichy and a few other futurolgue go down into the sewers. But the sewers turned out to be filled with hallucinogenic gas. That’s where we enter a completely demanted world barely strung together.
After a couple of false escapes that could put to shame the most hyperactive modern action movie, Tichy gets blown up, but his brain is preserved and gets transplated into the body of an attractive young balck woman.
Yes.
Tichy doesn’t seem that shocked by the change (I might be projecting here^{1</a>) but the doctors basically assume he’s done for. A bit later, he reawaken in the body of a sturdy irish-looking dude, and is confronted with his worse enemy wearing his own body. Turns out the irish dude was a revolutionary leader, and in no circumstances what-so-ever could Tichy leave the clinic, as he would be identified with him. Lem plays on the grammar of identity: when Tichy describes his own body, doing things while he’s not inhabiting it. In any case, the clinic gets raided and Tichy dies again, but he is back to the Hilton sewers, as it appears all of that was an illusion too.}
^{1
I really want to write a fanfic that explore the scenario where Tichy stays a young attractive black woman and explore the theme of sexism, which is present in the book (but barely).
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After that, Tichy dies again. No need to dig into the weirdness of a 150 pages book where the main character dies half a dozen times. In any case, he gets frozen.}
2039</h2>
Tichy wakes up in 2039. 2039 appears to be an utopia of abundance and democracy: the weather is selected by popular vote, the bank lends you money with no conditions associated, people seem to be able to change bodily appearance as easily as outfit.
Things are different though. Everything is done through pills. Encyclopedias don’t exist anymore. You eat a pill that gives you the encyclopedic knowledge, literally eating through it.

Books are no longer read but eaten, not made of paper but of some informational substance, fully digestible, sugar-coated. </blockquote>

All knowledge is acquired now by way of the stomach. Eagerly seizing this opportunity, I began to satisfy my hunger for information, but the first two volumes of the encyclopedia gave me the most terrible cramps </blockquote>
The vocabulary changed, Tichy can barely understand anything.

Some other unfamiliar expressions I’ve come across: threever, pingle, hemale, to widge off, palacize, cobnoddling, synthy. The newspapers advertise such products as tishets, vanailliums, nurches, autofrotts (manual). The title of a column in the city edition of the Hearld: “I Was a Demimother.” Something about an eggman who was yoked on the way to the eggplant. The big Webster isn’t too helpful: “Demimother – like demigran, demijohn. One of two women jointly bringing a child into the world. See Polyanna, Polyandreew.” “Eggman – from mailman (Archaic). A euplanner who delivers licensed human gametes (fe-male) to the home.” I don’t pretend to understand that. This crazy dictionary also gives synonyms that are equally incomprehensible. “Threever – trimorph.” “Palacize, bepalacize, empalacize – to castellate, as on a quiz show.” “Paladyne – a chivalric assuagement.” “Vanillium – extract emphorium, portable.” </blockquote>
Yikes fam, don’t be a creep, join my polycule. Or maybe you are plural? Ask your other tuplas.
This is a major theme of the book. The alienness comes from the language moreso than the narrative. But it seems we are exploring queer identity here? It’s weirdly familiar, despite being a future from the 1970.
More on the psychem. To learn stuff, you just eat a pill. To change appearance, you eat a pill. In fact, no need for cloth anymore, you eat a pill and the outfit grows out of you. You get in a dispute? You take recriminol to enhance your critic. You don’t go to church, you take a sacrosanctimonium pill. No need for prisons, you get a procrustic pill, it cancels pleasure pills.
Chosing between breakup and marriage is now a choice between the black pill and the white pill.
Want to fix racism? Prescribe caucasium to all the balck people.
*There is some technology involved. For example, there is a sort of wireless 3D printer-TV. But beware! If there is interferance, the printed characters might just thrash you**2</a>.*
^{2
It could be made completely safe with a glass screen, but manifacturers refuse to do anything about it.
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Also the TV set has an integrated camera, Tichy notes the similarities with 1984, and immediately discards them, as it is strictly illegal to snoop on people without their explicit consent 3</a>.
^{3
2025 reader: ahahah 😭
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The robots are here and appear to do all the industrial work. But robots get outdated:

A strayaway is a robot who doesn’t belong to anyone. It was one of those duddlies – a factory deject, a model taken off the market but not recalled by the manufacturer. Out of work, in other words, and unemployable. Many of them become juggermuggers. My bathroom immediately realized what was happening and dismissed the intruder.
</blockquote>
With intelligence, comes shirking. It’s Chapulier’s Rule:

If the machine is not too bright and incapable of reflection, it does whatever you tell it to do. But a smart machine will first consider which is more worth its while: to perform the given task or, instead to figure some way out of it. Whichever is easier. And why indeed should it behave otherwise, being truly intelligent? For true intelligence demands choice, internal freedom. And therefore we have the malingerants, fudgerators and drudge-dodgers, not to mention the special phenomenon of simulimbecility or mimicretinism. A mimicretin is a computer that plays stupid in order, once and for all, to be left in peace. And I found out what dissimulators are: they simply pretend that they’re not pretending to be defective. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.
</blockquote>
Advertisement is freakishly similar to 2025:

Manufacturers these days have peculiar problems: a package may recommend the virtues of its product by voice only, for it is not allowed to grab the customer by the sleeve or collar. […] Security doors open only at the sound of their owner’s voice. Also, the ads in magazines animate when you look at them.
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The illusion</h2>
But Tichy feels alienated, it’s not right to order society according to psychem. That’s where he meets Trottelreiner. Trottelreiner was part of the Futurological Congress of the beginning of the novelette, and he too was resurected. He tells Tichy that the world is a lie, the prosperity is as artificial as the love and fidelty induced by pills.
He gives Tichy a choice: keep the bliss of illusion, or experience the world as it is: smell the vigilanimide.
And the mask starts to drop. The magnificient gilded 5 star restaurant they are in turns into a bunker, the poultry in front of him turn out to be a grayish paste.
Is this a metaphore for our modern society? Focused on the shiny and “potential future” at the expense of what is really going on? Bonus for including “climate collapse” in the mix. You may answer this question at your own leisure.
But that’s only the start of it. Indeed, all those robots I talked about earlier? They are humans driven into the illusion that they are robots. Reminds you of anything?
Actually, there is no functional lifts, people jump on the lift cables and climb down/up, as the lift cabines are long gone, but their psychem gives them the illusion of a lift.
Neither is there any car. Car production has since long been halted. People walk down the street with the illusion of driving a Mercedes.
Now, Lem lived in Soviet Poland, a first order analysis would make the parallel with the long waiting list for cars and other shit impossible to put your hand own in Soviet times. But a more self-indulging smarmy dude who thinks hismels supreoir (like me) would tell you that it’s about the distinction between what is being sold to you and what you actually get.
Do you really buy a Mercedes (today I’ve something against Mercedes, sorry) because it can move you from point A to point B? Of course not. Someone who isn’t self-aware will tell you that it’s because of the superior build and high quality components. Bollocks, utter bollocks. It’s about showing you’ve money. Bonus if it makes a lot of noise so that you can advertise your wealth around like the creepy exhibisionist every single freaking rich dude apparently is.
Ok where was I at? Ah yes, nothing to do with the material reality, purely to do with status, things that do not exist and are not encoded in any shape or form in the object you are purchasing. So why not take a pill that gives you the feeling of being wealthy instead? It’s what you are after, and it’s a purely social construct, so might as well make it a pill instead of pilfering and destroying the planet to make toy cars for adults.
People don’t sleep at home, they sleep in the street. Also the climate colapsed and it’s snowing every week.
Eventually Ijon Tichy wakes up from this nightmare and find himself in the present day, all of this appearing to be yet again another figment of his imagination.
What’s amazing about Lem’s terrifying scifi is that he not only gives those extremely unique, excentric visions of the future, completely appart from the garbage unimaginative pulp produced en masse by American authors of the same era. Asimov, Clarke, Herbert: The slope they produce serve more to obscure the mind than open it to new horizons. The key to a scifi book is it’s bridge to the present. It makes explicit what the fuck the whole book is about. Scifi isn’t about the future, it’s about the present.
There is much more to the book I didn’t mention. If I keep up, this post would be a full reprint of the book with commentary on top. That would both be illegal and highly impractical.}

Reading notes on "Governance of the Commons"

2025-07-03T00:00:00+00:00

Elinor Ostrom was the Sveriges Riskbank price 1</a> recipient in 2009. She worked on and developped the concept of Commons and wrote “Governance of the Commons” (GoC).
^{1
Phonily known as “Nobel price of economy”
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I got familiar with the idea of Commons at Ag!ssons. It’s promoted as a third way, outside of capitalism or centralized state control. A society of the Commons is a society were you have a say in the matters that concern you, you have control over the rules that restrain you. It’s not an utopian dream. We already are surrounded by examples of the Commons. I like it, to put it middly.
In a way, Ostrom’s mission was more than just theorizing Commons as an alternative to free markets, but as a more general framework that includes markets.
Ostrom is frustrated with the myopia of economic modelling with regard to actual practical existing arrangements. Things that work in practice but not in the model, are considered as irrelevant.
Ostrom likes to focus on overlooked parameters of economic models: The cost of creating and sharing knowledge, whether people follow rules. Not specifically because she likes to “gotcha” the rest of the field, but because she find in those parameters the explanations for the failures of standard models.
GoC speaks in two tongues. The first and last parts are heavy on economic theory, while the rest of the book is a very delightful list of examples of resource arrangements that work outside of markets, failed to take root, or disintegrated.
As a neophyte whose knowledge of economy is limited to Piketty, Parrique, and Nitzan, the economy part felt dense, but I enjoyed the practical examples. They are deeply inspiring.}
Institutional analysis</h3>
Ostrom was close to New Institutional Economics. From what I gather from the book, it’s a theory of how people comply to rules, seen through a more general version of game theory.
An institution is a set of rules. Rules are prescriptions that either forbid, allow, or mandate an action or result 2</a>.
^2
In software circles, you might already be familiar with RFC 2119</a>. Turns out Alexander Esening-Volpin</a> had a constitutional theory based on the same premises. </div>
But rules are not magic spells. Writting them down do not affect reality by itself. What affects reality is people doing things. The propensity of rules to affect people’s actual behavior depends on what Ostrom calls “levels of analysis”3</a>4</a>:

Operational rules</li>
Collective choices rules</li>
Constitutional rules</li> </ol>
^{3
I suspect the wording is different in English. I’m back-translating from the French translation of the book. Some of the vocabulary is probably off.
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^{4
Also to link with control theory, which itself has strong ties to institutional economics, and cybernetics: you have the objective, strategy, tactics, and operations.
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Furthermore, Ostrom names “self-organizing” the ability for all individuals to influence each level of rules.}
What’s the difference between those levels of analysis? Constitutional rules are the most abstract and agreed uppon. You can’t use them as a basis for action, as they could be intepreted in many ways. They are the most often written down. Then you have collective choices, which set the means by which to attein the constitutional objectives. Collective choices can be formalized through text5</a>, but not necessarily. Finally, you have operational rules. Which is how people behave within the confine of both the rules and how they are applied.
^{5
In state institutions, you have a constitution that set general goals for the society, and a body of text called law, a mean to organize society so that those goals are atteined (if the legislator is acting in good faith), and finally, you have what people do which is never fully legal or fully illegal.
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So concretely what distinguishes collective choice rules and operational rules? An example here in Geneva. As in many cities, parking space is limited, and you get fined if you stay too long in one parking spot. That’s the collective choice rules: you can’t use a public parking spot as if you owned it, you need to leave room for others. Comes this car dealer. It’s in a city-center corner where space is sparse. He sits the cars for sale in about 8 parking spots surrouding his dealership, with price and specs displayed on them. He pays fines, but the fines are so low compared to what he earns6</a>, that it’s as if the law didn’t exist for him. Concretely: The opperational rules aren’t what the collective choice rules are: since the sanctions for breaking the collective rules are ineffective, the operational rules do not follow the collective rules.
^{6
Earning is rich here, since he makes the money from breaking the rules. If that is earning, then bank robbers are entrepreneurs. To top it all off, the car dealer franchise owner finances Switzerland’s “law and order” party. I guess the law only applies to others?
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Other examples involve software pirating, limited-time software free trials, etc.
Why does Ostrom care so much about institutional analysis? It’s because that’s where the Commons is a whole different thing from markets. The value creation and storage do not lie in economic exchange and capital, but rather, in the institutions themselves, the relationship between human beings, and how they shaped their physical surrounding to amplify and make sustainable the institutions, which conversely, amplify and make sustainable their environment and economic model of subsistance. This last sentence is long, but it’s very important, you may re-read it a few times.
She doesn’t say it explicitly, but Ostrom seems to think that Commons are valuable in themselves. They take a lot of time to form and they are ideally adapted to their environment.}
The Farce of The Tragedy of the Commons</h3>
Ostrom’s law is as follow:

A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory. </blockquote>
Ostrom’s first act in GoC is to deconstruct the concept of Tragedy of the Commons. It’s a thought exercise formulated by Garrett Harding, a eugenist maltusian A-grade hole:

Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. </blockquote>
The idea is that absent an outside entity enforcing rules on resource usages, the natural tendency of people is to mismanage every resource to the point of destruction.
However, even the metaphor of sheeps grazing in a Commons land by itself undermine the conclusion. This is a well known historical example where herders managed to agree to rules of usage, follow them, and preserve the land, without the help of a central authority.
But Ostrom goes beyond the cheap shot, and identified many setups where this so-called unnavoidable tragedy was avoided for centuries on end. And in fact, Ostrom also identifies setups where bringing in the concept of Tragedy of the Commons was the trigger for the ruins of the Commons.
On a personal level, I’m revolted by the framing of The Tragedy of The Commons. It reflects a mindset still existing today, that absent an enlightened savant with a Political Science degree or MBA, people are helpless and incapable of understanding their environment and finding solutions to shared problem. The lesson I learned from the few decades I spent in this society is the exact opposite: it’s overconfident assholes, using their credential as a shield from any form of objections, that are incapable of understanding their environment and finding solutions7</a>. And the truly best way (If, admitedly, not the only) of finding solutions to environmental problems is to integrate every actors’ understanding of the world through discursive debate and collective decision making.
^{7
Of course, I still have no idea on which category I fall.
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Törbel in Viège</h3>
The first example in the book is the Alanya fishing community in Turkie. But I didn’t take any notes on it, so I’m going to skip it. It was a very good demonstration of an ecologically embedded Common.
So I’ll go directly to the second example: Törbel in the valley of Viège (Visp), in Valais, Switzerland. I’m Swiss, my mom is from Valais, so it’s close to my heart.
Törbel is a tiny village of 600 people who sustained a system of Commons since 1224 to manage high altitude pasture, forest, and irrigation. The first written record of the Commons dates from 1483, it’s a rule for participations of the Commons, and especially exclusion of outsiders (even if they married and settled in the village) from the Commons.
All over Switzerland, and other alpine regions, you find a rule called “The Cow Right” or “Wintering rule”. It’s a rule that say you can’t send to pasture more cows than you can feed during winter. It’s very easy to check (and therefore make opperative the collective rules): you just count the cows. And it rationalizes Commons pasture usage. Other rules exist to limit the number of cows: the size of land owned by the farmer in the valley (as opposed to the high pastures); a fungible rights share; etc.
This type of Commons isn’t a kind of extraordinary isolated phenomenon. It was and still is the rule in the alpine regions of Switzerland. 80% of Alpine land is managed through a system of Commons. Ostrom only names explicity Törbel, but I know also of the Fluss in lake Ägeri and the Bis in other Valais valleys. If the Commons lands aren’t the most productive, land quality surveys show that they are the healthiest and better managed than private property. Traditions meant to preserve Commons and make opperative the community choice rules are still in play today. You’ll find every Swiss have some sort of drive to go hike and survey their surroundings. It’s the kind of things you do to make sure people do not sneakily exfiltrate resources from the Commons in your back! So, if you want to go back to the traditional Switzerland of the lost Golden age, adopt communism I guess?
Ostrom identifies five factors for which Commons management improve over private proprety:

Production value per unit of land is low</li>
There is strong variability in productivity (due to unstable climate or other)</li>
There is little to no way of improving productivity (this means that innovation in technology isn’t an environmental factor that can change the economic relationship between participants)</li>
Productive usage requires coordinating over a vaste chunk of land </li>
Large group of people require to create and sustain infrastructure.</li> </ol>
The Tokugawa Kumi</h3>
Kumis are communal lands in Japan managed as a Common. They started during the Tokugawa period (1600 - 1867), and still persist to this day.
Their management was explicitly delegated from imperial power to municipalities. The rules are set in assemblies where each “household leader”8</a> had a say. A commissary was elected 9</a> to watch the Commons land to prevent missapropriation.
^{8
“household leader” here is loadbearing. It means that large families, even with lots of able-bodied young men, have the same say as smaller families. One house, one vote. This smoothed out temporary power imbalance related to demographics.
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^{9
Different regions had different ways of chosing the commissary.
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The communal land was an exclusionary zone where no one was allowed until a specific date when everybody would gather and participate in the harvest. The harvest lasted one day: a lot of people working together gets thing done quickly. Once the harvest completed, it would be shared equally between each household.}
Outside of the harvest date, the commissary – or the sake sherif as I like to call it – had a duty to stop anyone who trespassed. He could expel people from the communal land (of course) and fine the trespassers. The fine was paid in sake bottles, half going to the commissary. A minor infraction would call for a small fine, while repeat offenses or grave infractions would incure larger fines or punitions10</a>.
^{10
Of note is that “small fine at first, larger on repeat” is a driving principle of the Swiss judiciary system.
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Works great! But there are limitations: In some seasons, the crops would be ripe way too early. Resulting in the harvest – if held to the pre-approved date – failing. One time, it was so bad that the whole village decided to just go and do the harvest early, breaking the commonly agreed rules. What happened then? I actually forgot! But it either was overlooked, or the fine was so small as to be negligeable.
Another example I’ve more details on is the Yamanaka 1930 defection. People would readily pilfer the Commons land, but it was in 1930, during one of the worse financial crisis that Japan experienced, and the infractions were overlooked with a nod. The crisis was seen as exceptional, and the community was ready to accept lower yields if it meant that the poorest (which were the defectors in this case) would not die of starvation.
But this indulgence was only possible because the commissary was local, and knew that the defectors (the one harvesting before the commonly-agreed time) were in need. This local and deep understanding of the situation is primordial for rule-bending to work.
The fines are not here to punish, but rather to show participants that their commonly agreed rules are applied: If someone breaks the rule they will be punished. And as the contravenent, when you get caught, you not only are dissuaded from breaking the rules, but the fact that you got caught shows that the system is effective at catching rule breakers, and it’s unlikely that there are others doing the same. This is why a small fee makes sense: the point is not to dissuade, but to show that defection is detected.}
The Huertas</h3>
Huertas (means “garden” in Spanish) are irrigated valleys in Span and Portugal. Ostrom focuses on the Valencia, Benacher and Faitanar ones.
Huertas exist since at least 1435 and continue to this day. They started in the al-Andalus period, and survived the Reconquista. They are self-organized.
The region surrounding Valencia has very variable anual rainfall. One wet year can be followed by several dry years. This means that water needs to be rationed and equitably distributed, otherwise individual farmers may just lose all their crop. In this context, when water is scarse, it may be tempting for upstream farmers to withdraw more water than their alloted share, in order to irrigate their whole field, at the expense of downstream users, who then would have no water at all to irrigate theirs. 
The irrigation system is setup so that everyone gets a given share of water on a schedule. When it’s time to toggle the sluice gates to drive water to another plot, both the currently active user and the next meet at the gate to toggle it. If we take for granted that people would favor their own individual gain over the common good11</a>, they both have inverse preferences. So they do what humans do best: defer to pre-approved rules when in a situation of conflict, and generally the sluice gate is switched at the exact approved time.
^{11
In general I don’t, but in this specific instance it makes sense: the farmer must give up a large part of his harvest to respect the rules.
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It’s also possible to visually check when a farmer is ready or not to take in water. Someone who is readying their plot in an unexpected timeframe would give themselves out immediately.
The huerta has a few agents out to monitor the sluice gates, but they are far from enough to monitor everyone. Yet the huertas only have a 1/12500 infraction rate. Basically no one breaks the rule, despite the huge insentive and the little formal monitoring. That’s thanks to mutual monitoring.
To go back to Valencia climate: the huertas work as a risk mutualization system to damped the cost of droughts. Instead of having one person get all the water and everybody else left dry, the rotation system equally distribute the water accross the whole valley. That means that instead of every but one farmer starving, we have a little diet, but everyone live to see another day. This is an alternative to insurances, which imposes the accumulation of capital and means of importing food from other regions.}The Zanjeras</h3>
Zanjeras in Philippines are my favorite Common.
As a lot of Ostrom’s examples, it’s a cooperatively managed irrigation system. 45% of irrigated land in Philippines are managed through Zanjeras, for about 5700 different Zanjeras.
How to create a new canal when there is no assets in the country? You create a zanjera and emit “atar” which are like stocks, but with duties attached.
As an atar holder, you must:

Provide the material for the initial build and maintenance of the irrigation infrastructure</li>
Provide your physical labor as well.</li> </ol>
Of note is that the “material” is mostly wood, mud, and banana tree leaves.
Unlike your everyday stock, the atar has not just rights attached, but also obligations.
Your right is of course the access to the water from the irrigation system. This allows starting up new infrastructure with 0 finances.
Zanjeras elect a “maestro” who’s job is to motivate the atar holders to participate in the work to maintain the infra. Philippines’ weather will damage irrigation infra, and it takes a lot of work to keep it running. They also elect a cook, because it’s always easier to motivate folk with free food (true even in the richest country on earth)
Zanjera takes in average 39 days of work per member per year to maintain.
“In nature” contributions have advantages:

You don’t need financial infra (banks, money, safe, saving, etc.) and all associated costs.</li>
You know exactly where your contribution go (can’t be misappropriated by the maestro, you know exactly what you are working on, corruption is impossible)</li> </ol>
The Biang-ti-daga zanjera configuration allocate land around the irrigation canal 12</a> equally to each member, except the most downstream plot. That goes to the maestro.
Why that? So that they are motivated to get the water to the very end of the canal, and therefor feed all the plots of land!
^{12
The plot is a long thin parsel, perpendicular to the canal, so that everyone has the same total “distance from canal” integral value. This way, in case of drought all farmers can only irrigate a part of their parsel, rather than just the farmers with a plot not contiguous with the canal.
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Zanjeras form federations, so that downstream coops can help upstream coops they depend on.
Upstreams tend to leave more water than necessary to downstreams. 
In federated setups, the amount of water a zanjera gets is fairly close to the amount of work their member put in. With a slight skew, explained by the reluctance to renegotiate contracts.}
The California aquifers</h3>
The California aquifers is the OG Ostrom doctoral thesis. It particularly interests here since it’s an example of a Commons system built live before her eyes. The time travelling machine was requisitionned by the history department, so Ostrom couldn’t see why or how Kumis were formed, nor how the alpine Commons came to be.
The context: The aquifers (undergroud water reserves) pumped in California for industrial and agricultural uses were getting lower and lower. That meant both more expensive pumping, and a risk of total collapse 13</a> or salt contamination on the costal regions.
^{13
If the water reserve goes low enough, the porus terrain that hold the water colapses and cannot hold any water at all anymore.
</div>
If you were to replace the water capacity of the aquifers by water towers, it would have had an insane cost (I didn’t note the exact values, but that was like hundreds of millions of not billions, dude)
It was actually difficult to get to a working Commons system. Initially, the pumping rules were based on three different standards. Which standard applied depended on the “renewal rate” of the water, and no one knew about this renewal rate, it required a long survey and expertise. So the users didn’t know on which side of the pumping rule they fell, and depending on this “renewal rate” they either lost it big time, or gained it big time, so no one had any interest to sue to prevent others from overexploiting.
Another aspect is that the aquifer users were diverse: various industries, such as oil, but also agriculture, and municipal water distribution for human consumption.
One day though, the largest user, the city of Pasadena started a lawsuit, judging that others aquifer users were overexploiting. But no one knew how the lawsuit would end, they could be compelled to stop using water as much as gaining massive new pumping rights. So, in the end, everyone was compelled to sit at the table and find a compromise rather than rely on the outcome of the lawsuit, since that was a clear lose-lose-lose situation.
In the end, all but 2 parties in the lawsuit landed on a settlement. In this settlement, everyone would reduce proportionally their extraction so that the total water extraction was under renewable levels. They created a “regeneration district” to manage that, and setup rules: everyone had to declare their water usage, and they would mutualize the cost of geologic studies. The two dissenting parties settled a few years later.
Ostrom characterizes this as a happy ending: users predicted that keeping as usual would lead to a disaster, and managed to avert it thanks to the creation of a new resource management structure. But was the negotiation fair? How much did the interestts of the oil industry weight against human needs?
Ostrom then cites other aquifers in California where similar institutions were created. She says that the simple fact of creating a model of institution allows others to replicate them. If it works for them, it should work for us, right? She links this with the concept of “path dependency”.
In the context of new institutional economics, Ostrom says that the creation of new institutions can be modelled similarly to changes in institutions. An “append” operation on an empty set of rules, vs the same “append” on a non-empty set.}
The failures of the Commons</h3>
All isn’t roses in GoC. Ostrom talks about a few places where people tried to self-organize resource management systems, but failed. And places where existing resource management organizations collapsed. She cites the San Bernardino aquifer, where the setup of a regeneration district failed. Because in this case, the regeneration district was a top-down project people felt imposed on, rather than bottom-up organization which carry much more legitimacy and trust in users.
She also cites the Izmir and Bodrum cases: Fishing communities in Turkie where, unlike in Alanya, no one managed to impose rules on fishing to prevent fish population collapse. Ostrom cites the heterogeneity in the technologies used, and the background of the fishers (mix of amateurs and pro, from different regions, various frequency and level of dependence on fishing)
In fact, trust is the keystone of Commons Management. You are willingly sacrificing your own personal gains while leaving open the ability for others to take advantage of the resource. You need to be damn sure that the other participants comply, otherwise you’ll just be the turkey at christmas. Ostrom doesn’t go into how to build trust. But generally speaking: explicitly and deliberately exposing vulnerability is the first step, the second step is to not exploit that vulnerability; while reciprocating. Bottom-up allows for much more opportunities to build trust.
The Mawella beach</h4>
This gets a whole section because it’s a fascinating case.
Mawella is a small costal village in Sri Lanka, living off fishing. One particular fishing method was based on very large nets that several people would drag accross the beach to catch fish.
Those nets are called “madella”, they are 800m long, they are costly to produce, and maintenance requires about 8 people.
In fact, madella ownership is divided in 8 “shares” usually held by the maintainers of the madella. Those shares are technically transferable, and technically have monetary value. But it is traditionally transimitted to family or as endowment in wedding. And it requires the approval of the 7 other shareholders, it’s just good sense to be in good terms with your future coworkers.
To highlight the similarity with the Zanjeras atars. Here as well, we have a form of capital that combines rights with obligations. It’s not enough to own a share of the madella to profit from it; you have to contribute personally to it through your own labor by taking part of the madella upkeep, otherwise, you won’t catch much with your net full of holes.
Finally, owning a madella share is more than just owning the material. I’ll explain. The fishing village setup a schedule for fishing. Since you actually have to go through the whole beach with the net for fishing, and the best time is at morning, the villager coordinated to avoid overlaps or conflict when going to fish with the madella. Having a madella, by itself, allows you to hop on the schedule.
The schedule is also a way to regulate access to the resource to avoid overfishing: a Commons.
All of this was going well, until 1933. This is when a new law regulating the madella share trade came in. This law formalized the madella registration system and forbade any form of discrimination in selling shares, it also limited the number of madella allowed.
Ok, I lied. It was fine in 1933, the change itself wasn’t an issue. The real change came with the modernization of Sri Lanka: between 1938 and 1941, an ice factory and new roads were built. This greatly increased the buyer pool for fishers. And the price of fish increased by a factor of four (4).
So a lot of people suddenly had an eye for madella: fishing = fish = $$$. And the share prices went up. People built more madellas (remember how this is illegal? Well, the law wasn’t applied), but the scheduling system was kept up. As a result, the number of fishing slots per year per share fell. To the point that if you only had one madella share, you’d have to wait several years to be allowed to use it. Subsistance on fishing became impossible. You would need at least 6.5 shares to live from fishing, but 58% of fishers had less than 6.
In 1930, there were 20 madellas, and in 1945 there were 71.
People bought shares not to fish, but with the perspective to resell them at a higher price. What is commonly known as speculation. Share ownership concentrated in the hands of owners from outside the village. They would hire people rather than work themselves the madella.
The village attempted to petition the local constabulary to apply the law13</a>. This in 1940, 1942 and 1945. But they were ignored. It’s only in 1946, when the petition was not only supported by the small owners, but also the larger village owner (as opposed to the remote ones), that the constabulary did deign apply the law. But there were already 71 registered madellas, way too much, and they didn’t revoke any madella license.
^{13
Remember Alexander Esening-Volpin from note 3? Well, he started a dissidance movement in Soviet Russia focused not on regim change, but simply asking the state to follow Soviet law and provide free and just trials.
</div>}
Middling ending? No, it doesn’t end here. In 1964, a daring disruptive innovative entrepreneur named David Mahattea managed to get his madellas added to the registry, in exchange for political favors. And the example inspired others, and quickly, 24 new madellas were added14</a>.
^{14
The local fishers did some metal civil disobedience to prevent Mahattea from actually using his madella. A pretty cool hack: the one-to-last fisher would skip his turn and directly let the first fisher use the beach, so that it would skip Mahattea’s net in the schedule sequence. But it only worked one year, the next year he came with other large owners and the police: the tools of enforced injustice.
</div>}
The result is that there is just too much madellas. The final count is around 100 nets, while only 20 is really necessary to cover the fishing year. Thankfully, this didn’t lead to a fish population collapse, as the schedule stayed in place. But in practice, there are 80 madellas that sits iddly. To an economist15</a> like Ostrom, this is capital sitting at 20% capacity that hasn’t much purpose, she calls it “overcapitalization”. To me, it’s transparent that it works as a market gateway, so that no new fisher can enter the market without overinvestment, preventing competition. As Warren Buffet would put it, a moat.
^{15
The dictionary definition of “economy” is “effective management of resources”. Remember that!
</div>
It’s also a good lesson on what Ostrom considers to be a Common. It’s not just about a resource management system that prevents depletion, but also about all the culture around it to make it sustainable, not just in ecological terms, but also economical terms for the people depending on it.}
The Mahaweli development programme</h4>
As an aside, Sri Lanka is a large insular country of 19 millions people. Of a size similar to that of Ireland, or West Virginia. Since its independence in 1972, the country politics is split between two sections with very similar policies, but relient on ethnic resentment as a polarizing method: Tamil vs Sinhalese. From what I read about it, I understand that Sri Lankan politic is mostly based on personal favors and massive amount of corruption.
Geographically, there is a very wet south-western region, and a central high land, with several rivers radiating from it down to the sea. The east and north are aride in comparison. The massive amount of water carried by the rivers are an opportunity for irrigation in the drier regions.
That said, let’s go back to Ostrom. The Mahaweli (named after the largest river in the country) programme is an industrialization project started in 1961 with giant dams, new water channels, and irrigation facilities, with the goal of settling people in the newly irrigated area.
In fact there are archeological remains of irrigation infrastructure dating from the 12th century around the Mahaweli river.
While the physical infrastructure was indeed built, less can be said of the agricultural system.
The goal was to grow paddy rice. There was enough water to get two harvests, sustaining families on a much smaller plot of land. But only a fraction of the production was realized 16</a>.
^{16
Sorry for the lack of numbers here. But I didn’t write them down and I don’t have the book at hand anymore.
</div>
The upstream farmers used too much water, not leaving enough water for the double harvest to the downstream farmers. Why use too much water? Because it was effectively free, and it had one advantage: Flooding the field would kill weed, while the rice didn’t care much. This spared the farmers the tedious work of weeding. This meant less water downstream, and no double harvest.
But that’s not an issue, the al-andalu, the primitive Swiss and the Japanese managed to organize to improve collective outcomes. If medieval people can do it, why not Sri Lankans in the XXth century? For Ostrom, the reason is to be found in the institutions around the Mahaweli project. It was a state-driven centralized institution, with static rules that harldy could be changed. The government hired a few people to monitor water usage, but it was far from enough to monitor everyone, the irrigation bassin is freaking huge. And they had no means of sanctioning frauders. Also, the law pretty much made it illegal for the farmers to self-manage. And in the end, the farmers failed to build relations and couldn’t create any organization to regulate water distribution and improve collective outcomes.
Now, Ostrom characterizes this as an incidental outcome. But is it? Developmental projects are always more than just “developping”, it’s also about what kind of infrastructure we are building. The goal in this specific case was to increase centralized power, and it is incompatible with the kind of distributed institution Ostrom recommends for developping Commons. 
Ostrom gives five reasons the Mahaweli project didn’t develop effective Commons:}

A large number of farmers.</li>
Little long-term tie to the land (as it was a colonization project)</li>
Ethnic and cultural diversity.</li>
An opportunity for the wealthier to control the water by bribing the monitors.</li>
Missing physical collective control over the infrastructure.</li> </ol>
I contest points (2) and (3). What maters isn’t uniformity, but the existance of shared understanding (shared culture helps for it, but it is only a factor). The tie to the land doesn’t mater as long as the actors are capable of having long term plans.
The Left bank of the Gal Oya</h3>
After the middling results of the Mahaweli project, another irrigation developmental project happened in Sri Lanka, on the left bank of the Gal Oya. The Gal Oya is a river (“Oya” means river in Sinhala) at the south east of the island. There was a similar “state engineers vs farmers” dynamic, with a kind of elitist disregard for the farmers (which was readily reciprocated). Here is what Ostrom has to say on the functionaries:

The hiring was based on qualifications and grades at school. Promotion was based on seniority, and there weren’t any connection between the professional and non-professional sectors. The functionaries identified themselves strongly with the profession of civil engineer, their prestige came from building new infrastructure, rather than valorizing and preserving them. [emphasis mine] </blockquote>
Ostrom is summarizing a report, and I’m summarizing that summary, translated to French and back to English again, the report is available at the Internet Archive at:
Web archive link to usaid report</a>
It’s accessible and fun to read. I’ll make it much less accessible and fun to read, but shorter. So read on! :)
The farmers in the region were ethnically diverse: Tamil downstream, and Sinhalese upstream. But the real split was between the authorities and the farmers, and building an effective irrigation system requires to build trust between the authorities and the farmers. Creating not only water channels, but channels of communication and decision making.
The development project was codesigned with the Agrarian Research and Training Institute (ARTI) and Cornell University between 1980 and 1985. The Gal Oya bassin already had a period of development in the 1950s, and it was fully irrigated, but, at the time, the infrastructure was in complete dissaray, and most of the water would leak before reaching the fields. The farmers were constantly fighting over water access, in fact, murder was a frequent occurance in the region.
ARTI started by organizing the farmers. They used “catalysers”, or Institutional Organizers (IO). The IOs were Sri Lankan fresh out of university, who followed a six week formation on organizing. Most of them were of agriarian origin. The university background allowed them to effectively work with the engineers, and the agrarian background with the farmers.
Once formed, they were posted in the region and built rapport with the farmers by asking what problems they encountered. They then led the farmers to create small neighbourhood councils of about 15 people. The farmers would identify problems with the irrigation infrastructure and organize sorties to fix them. The problems they couldn’t fix by themselves, they could summarize and delegate to the state engineers.
They then developped regional councils to which the neighbourhood councils would send delegates. They would identify the larger works necessary to improve irrigation and bring them to meetings with the engineers. Before, the engineers couldn’t care less about the requests from the farmers. But now, they readily listened: the requests were the result of contradictory deliberation, it came with a solid list of arguments and mass backing from all the farmers 17</a>.
^{17
As an example: The farmers argued that now that they did manual labor on the infrastructure, they should have a say in their design.
</div>
The result was staggering: In a region plagued by murder and distrust, a large cooperative organization was born, people from diverse ethnic groups started working together and even defend each other from outside troublemakers, within six months, the harvest for 300 famillies doubled!
For my own personal benefit, I’ll list down the organizational structure of the project:}

Field channel organizations: 12-15 farmers, no schedule, self-organized</li>
Distribution channel organization: 100-300 farmers. General Assembly (GA) with all members, and comitees of delegates from the field channels</li>
Zone Councils: Spans the few thousands farmers, which are free to attend.</li>
Project Councils: Includes the engineers and debates strategic decisions.</li> </ul>
The Nova Scotia fishing zones</h3>
Nova Scotia is a Canadian province located on a peninsula in the Atlantic.
The Nova Scotia fishers had setup extralegal rules for themselves. Certain technologies were limited to certain zones depending on the marine life. And the sea was divised in zones reserved to specific fishers. They would enforce this through mutual monitoring. When outsiders were breaking the rules, they could back each others on communication channels. To quote Ostrom:

Territories were split between fishers based on their specific fishing technologies, to reduce externalities that technologies can impose uppon others. [emphasis mine] </blockquote>
This was effective and prevented population collapse in fisheries.
In the 1980, the Canadian central government, eager to foster more efficient fishing technologies, but, especially, convinced that the Tragedy of the Commons compelled them to intervene, completely undid this. They financed large thrawlers and imposed central fishing registrations. This completely undid the pre-existing system, disempowered the local fishers, who knew best the ecosystem and how to manage it, and led to population collapse (of course) and also ruined a lot of fishers to the benefit of large corporations.
Commons as an aspirational model for society</h3>
The book doesn’t end there, but I just don’t understand the rest of my notes. So here is my horribly uninformed take.
The Commons presented in the book show both their power and weakness.
Commons can replace financial systems. They work as insurance by mutualizing risk without capital, as in the huertas. They work as bank without debt, by associating rights to resource access with obligation of upkeep, as for Zanjeras.
Commons are not uniform, quite the opposite. They are grown organically, and they both reinforce and are reinforced by natural systems and changes humans make to the world.
Commons demonstrate that local knowledge have power in itself, and that existing organizations, even when not formally recognized have immense value. I link it to the Chesterton fence</a>. Institutions have more value the longer they have been in existance. Because they evolved to incorporate a complex set of rules that allows their survival, and themselves allow their modification to further their survival.
Ostrom notes that Commons can reinforce and foster other Commons: Maybe one system established successfully can be re-used fully or in part somewhere else? Or multiple rules mixed according to the situation?
This leads us to Doughnut economics</a>. A framework to evaluate an economic system and a set of policy options to put together an economic model that evolves within the limit of prosperity and sustainability, tailored for the local environment.
It shows how Commons are built as bottom-up organzations. How they can grow to fairly large sizes and federate. Demonstrating that it is indeed possible for large organizations to exist without debilitating corruption.
It also shows how vulnerable Commons are. External forces can just step in and declare the Commons a nuisance or illegal. Sometimes through force – as for the Mawella example – sometimes ideologically – as for Nova Scotia fisheries. But if people recognize the existing institutions as valuable, they will fight for it, and it might repel the external actors.
Commons build trust and collaboration. It can diffuse ethnic tensions as in the Gal Oya left bank.
Why don’t we see more Commons popping up? The choice in technological evolutions are delegated to centralized entities whose priority is to increase their power. As a result, the environment is less welcoming to decentralized organizations.
But this is a purely political choice, not a technological fatality. Our current day technological landscape follows decades of policy designed to concentrate technical power, delegate social organization choices to giants. No shit they have outsize power. But that’s only because the state enforces that power. Finding a better life, refounding the Commons, is as simple as reducing this enforcement. We are propping up a doomed model to no gain to ourselves.
The basis of decentralized power, and a dignified life for everyone are already here. The technology for a sustainable management of resource is here and usable. What is stopping us is a system that prioritizes destroying any possible alternative.
You don’t need a wild imagination or long studies to see that a better system is possible. It is already here in some parts of our economy, and some parts of the world. The future is here, it’s just not equally distributed.

Comments on "Life and Fate"

2024-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

Warning If for some reasons you want to read Life and Fate, this contains spoilers. </blockquote>
Certain books are more powerful than others. I know a book is great, not when I read it, but when I keep thinking about it months after finishing it.
Life and Fate is such a book.
Life and Fate (жизнь и судьба). Author: Vasily Grossman (1905 - 1964), former reporter for the Red army’s newspaper during WWII, official soviet author. Written: 1950, Moscow, USSR. Published: 1980, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Weird: written 1950, published 1980, after the author’s death! What’s going on? That’s because – as Grossman said – the book was arrested. When he submitted the manuscript, the KGB raided his and his friends’ houses to find and destroy all its copies. He was told the book couldn’t be published “in two hundred years”. Grossman died 3 years later, from old age (maybe from weariness).
For such a reaction, Grossman must have scared the shit out of the Soviets. Indeed, the book is not an eulogy to Stalin.
Why submit such a blasphemous pamphlet to the state? Knowing full well it won’t be published and might very well throw him in jail. He knew he was too well respected for that. Throwing him in jail would be reckless. Listen, Navalny came back to Russia after being poisoned by its government. People in Russia are brave (or reckless) and will risk their life for what they believe in.
Or maybe Navalny read Life and Fate and it inspired him to keep up with his ideals.
Ok, enough context for now. Let’s talk about the book.
The book itself is a complete bore, it’s structured as a series of self-contained vignettes, like a collection of short stories. There is little action, although the characters’s life change, and drastically. You mostly find descriptions of the characters thoughts and opinions. It’s similar to a Chekhov short story.
A not-so-subtile difference with Chekhov: Chekhov is a magician, his stories are pure beauty, he extracts from the most mundane situation the purest form of wonder and beauty. Now, yes, this is a shining recommendation, please go read some Chekhov short stories</a>, but this post is about Life and Fate. And Life and Fate is about WWII, grind it as much as you want, you won’t find any beauty, not even a grain of dust, and by far.
But life is made of more than just beauty, and Life and Fate has plenty of what is not beauty.
There is an awful lot of very interesting ideas in that book, I won’t talk about all of them, not because I respect your time or care about your attention. But I care about my time and going over all of them would pretty much constitute a doctorial thesis spanning two years of work. And that’s from someone who doesn’t know how to read (like a doctoral student).
Socialism in One Country</h2>
This requires more context, oh God. This post is going to be long.
“Socialism in One Country” is the euphemism Stalin used to define “National Socialism, but with Soviet wording”. I.e.: galvanizing the folk with ideas about how great the “Russian man” is, how it is the destiny of Russia to show the world that communism is the right system of government. How it is the role of the pure Soviet Russian to show how communism is done to its still impure neighbours (and discipline them if necessary). Now that we established that the Soviet is fuelled by the purity of the Russian blood, anything that isn’t Russian is suspect by nature.

The Stalingrad victory, on the other hand, served mainly to change people’s attitude towards themselves, to develop a new form of self-consciousness in the army and in the population as a whole. Soviet Russians began to think of themselves differently, to adopt a different manner towards other nationalities. The history of Russia was no longer the history of the sufferings and humiliations undergone by the workers and peasantry; it was the history of Russian national glory. </blockquote>
The Soviet didn’t shy from reminding everyone this. Every year, you had to fill a survey. You had to answer questions such as “Nationality”, “Social Origin”, “Social Position”, “Do any of your relatives live abroad”.

A friend of mine once joked: “I’ve got an aunt in New York. I always knew that hunger’s no friendly aunt; now I know that aunts mean hunger.” </blockquote>
Enough context, how is this relevant to the book? One of the main characters, Viktor Shtrum, is Jew.
It may surprise you (or not) to learn that the Soviet regime, especially under Stalin, was freaking antisemit.

On the tenth anniversary of this victory Stalin was to raise over their heads the very sword of annihiliation he had wrested from the hands of Hitler. </blockquote>
In chapter 53, Shtrum fills this survey. I said the book is a complete bore, but not really. It picks up at the 2/3 mark. That chapter is amazing. Yes, it’s something like 20 pages of a dude filling a form, and it’s one of the highlights of Russian literature…1</a>
^{1
In this sense, Life and Fate is indeed very Chekhov-like.
</div>}
In it, Shtrum discovers how, by nature he is anti-revolutionary. He’s born in Ukraine (he was born in Bakhmut, but registered in a Kharkov hospital), his nationality is Jew2</a>, that his social origin 3</a> is “petit bourgeois”, his social position is “white-collar worker”. That, yes, he has relatives living outside of Russia, and a lot.
^{2
I’m puzzled by this answer, but it seems “nationality” in Russian means much more than “nation of origin”, and implies ethnic, cultural, linguistic sense of belonging.
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^{3
class appears to be a genetic trait for the Soviets
</div>}

He remembered a meeting at which a Party member, confessing his faults, had said: “Comrades, I’m not one of us.” </blockquote>
Shtrum understands that he’s now the enemy. That whatever he said – if before, it was acceptable – would be examinated for signs of dissent, that he couldn’t get promotions, or better living conditions. He was suspect, and the suspect can’t be given power.

He remembered looking at his assistant’s face after making a thoughtless joke aobut Stalin having formulated the laws of gravity long before Newton.
“You didn’t say anything, and I didn’t hear anything,” this young assistant had said gaily.
Why, why, why all these jokes? It was mad to make such jokes – like banging a flask of nitroglycerine with a hammer. </blockquote>
This, of itself, isn’t antisemitism. It’s just repression, and a Jew happening to be caught in it. Not counting that the 1918 revolution abolished all the odious discriminations of the Tsarist empire against the Jews.4</a>
^4
Quoting Lenin in 1919: “Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism.” (it is true that the sentence just following</a> is not exactly a praise) </div>
Yet, yet, there is a few tells. After the start of the Russian counter-offensive, the evacuated Moscovites are to return to the capital. But Shtrum discovers that none of the assistants with a Jewish name are called back. This is not all, as a physicist, Shtrum discovers the puzzling idea according to which “relativity is a capitalist construct”, that Einstein, by dint of being Jew, somehow spews corrupting ideas. Shtrum’s work is criticized not on scientific merit, but as being too abstract, too “Talmudic”. He learns of the Doctor’s plot</a>, an absurd accusation thrown at high society Moscovites, who strangely all happen to hold Jewish names. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee</a> is disolved. The propaganda denounces the “rootless</a> cosmopolitan</a>” Jew.

Viktor had told him of his failure to secure his nomination. “Just as I expected!” Landesman had said angrily and reproachfully. “Is there something awkward in your background?” Viktor had asked. Landesman had snorted and said, “There’s something awkward in my surname.” </blockquote>
The Jew is yet again a corrupting poison rotting society.

Tell me what you accuse the Jews of – I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of. </blockquote>
The book focuses on antisemitism, because that’s what the author experienced himself. But, Grossman admits that Jews were not the only target. Also Kalmyks, Balkars, Chechens, Crimean Tartars.
How the Soviet state grinds and tames dissent</h2>
Shtrum refuses to incriminate himself, confess to thought crimes. He doesn’t go to this Science Council where he was to enumerate his anti-patriotic deeds and recuse them (this includes Einstein’s theory of relativity).
He refused, and he felt the full weight of the state fall over him. His very presence became the plague. Everyone avoided him. Ostracization. People avoided talking to him, even talking about him. By fear of being contaminated with the (not even pronounced) accusation of dissent. He won’t have his lodging permit renewed, he won’t get his salary, he won’t be able to renew his passport.

I’d be happy if even a dog phoned me </blockquote>
All of that, until…

“Goodbye, comrade Shtrum, I wish you success in your work.”
“Goodbye, comrade Stalin.”
He put down the phone. </blockquote>
Shtrum gets a phone call from Stalin. Not a dog, but Stalin himself.
And now, months of ostracization, fear and isolation. Not reversed, but erased, as if it never happens. The people who avoided him forgot their prejudices, the weariests are now his best friends. Not as if nothing happened, but as if the continuty of history got interrupted, as if Shtrum’s reality got stitched into another one where he always has been recognized as a great genius of major importance to the state.5</a>
^{5
An 1984 reader will recognize some similarities with doublethink.
</div>}

He looked Viktor straight in the eye, Viktor knew this open, frank look; it was characteristic of people who were doing something dishonest. </blockquote>
Shtrum’s thoughts themselves seem to be mangled in that transformation. His defiance has been erased as well. What is there to defy now? He gets all the privileges, because Stalin spoke to him.
Privilege kills a man’s resolve more so than any oppression.
Remember that “Doctor’s plot”? It told Shtrum that he may be a trator by quality of his name alone? This comes back. Now in his position of privilege and comfort. To condemn the incriminations of the doctors, a committee of Western scientists wrote a letter of support. The Soviets devise a letter to turn the accusation to the West and call the USSR the only wall against depravity:

Your defence of Pletnyov and Levin – degenerates who are a disgrace not only to medicine, but to the human race as a whole – is grist to the mill of the anti-human ideology of Fascism… The Soviet nation stands alone in its struggle against Fascism, the ideology that has brought back medieval witch trials, pogroms, tortue chambers and the bonfires of the Inquisition.
[…]
Nowhere in the world do scientitsts enjoy the affection of the people and the protective care of the State to the same degree as in the Soviet Union… </blockquote>
And Shtrum signs that. Out of weakness? Out of subordination? Well yes. But can we blame the man when everything is done to destroy his will? The totalitarian state is in a constant fight against all resistance. The state destroyed him, by sheer strength. Where it failed with fear alone, it won with enticement.

Only people who have never felt such a force themselves can be surprised that others submit to it. Those who have felt it, on the other hand, feel astonished that a man can rebel against it even for a moment. </blockquote>
Was Shtrum a bad man for this? We just know of his regrets. He questioned his own resistance, sometimes regreting it, until his fears got discipated. But now, his regrets for having signed that letter will never fade.

Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed – while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end. </blockquote>
The Gulag society</h2>
Shtrum is but one of many characters in Life and Fate. While here I just described “The Life and Woes of Viktor Shtrum”, the book is far from that.
One of those characters is Krymov. Who, once in Lubyanka</a>6</a>, meets Katsenelenbogen. Katsenelenbogen (fictional character) helped design the Gulag, and found himself in Lubyanka – being high-graded and having a Jewish name was a quick way to get yourself arrested at the time.
^{6
KGB headquarter and a prison reserved for politicals. Now the headquarters of the FSB.
</div>}

The surgeon came in. The two doctors looked at the X-rays. No doubt they could see all the poisonous dissidence that had collected inside his rib cage over the years. </blockquote>
Katsenelenbogen, despite finding himself in the hellish system he helped build, is still fascinated by his work. He iterates on it in his own head.
He notices – very much like the Nazi concentration camps – that in the Gulag, the mere regular criminals (e.g.: Rapists, murderers) were giving orders to the political criminals. But this is an obvious waste. Politicals come from high society, they are skilled knowledge workers. The Gulags lower them to mere skilless physical laborers, but the Soviets could instead exploit their skill.
What about society? Here as well, clueless politically appointed managers cattle skilled workers (cue Viktor’s superiors denouncing the theory of relativity). Their decision completely disconnected from reality.
Why not just make the whole of society a sort of Gulag? The Gulag is the epitom of reason winning over the filthy idea of personal freedom. If we can make the Gulag as efficient as society, then, at this point, the proof is made that freedom is useless, and repression becomes unnecessary.
Way more I don’t care to expand on</h2>
Again, I just described “The Life and Woes of Viktor Shtrum”, and maybe a tinny bit more, and that’s not what Life and Fate is.
I did find the first 2/3 of the book a “total bore”. Nontheless, it’s an amazing book that makes transparent and comprehensible to us mere Westerner what the Russian spirit is. And the last 1/3 is seriously amazing.
The novel goes deep into the war, much like War and Peace, but unlike Tolstoy, Grossman experienced himself the war, and unlike Tolstoy, Grossman wrote his book after reading Chekhov. I said earlier that no beauty could be found in WWII. But I lied, there are some nuggets of beauty in there:

For some reason she didn’t feel any fear at all; instead, she thought of the wonderful, fairy-tale life she had enjoyed before the war. </blockquote>

It turned out to be the starlings imitating bullets… The lieutenant had even put us on alert – they did it perfectly </blockquote>

“Once, when we were in the steppe,” he told her, “something suddenly hit me. I thought it must be a shell at the end of its trajectory. But guess what? It was a hare. He stayed with me till evening. Then things quietened down a bit and he left.” </blockquote>
Krymov is an odious character, despite the fact he ended in prison. He was a Chekist</a> and eagerly denounced people as Kulaks</a>.
What’s a Kulak you ask?

There had been a fine harvest in 1930 […] the little children kept up a constant, barely audible whine as they crawled about like living skeletons. The men wandered aimlessly around the yards, exhausted by hunger […] Meanwhile the young men from the city went from house to house […] digging holes in the barns, prodding the ground with iron bars… They were searching for the grain hidden away by the kulaks.
[…] Just then the young men from the city had come back to the hut. One of them, a man with blue eyes and an accent just like Semyonov’s, had walked up to the corpse and said: “They’re an obstiante lot, these kulaks. They’d rather die than give in.” </blockquote>
Maybe Krymov came to recognize his heinous crimes once in prison, but not the ones he was accused of, not the ones the KGB wanted him to admit, those made-up crimes. Maybe Krymov was a good man? Became one?

Were these old women braver and more honourable than Old Bolsheviks like Mostovskoy and Krymov? </blockquote>
That’s not all. I also learned about “10 years without the right of correspondence”</a>; How clueless buraucrats with simply lie to get rid of relatives trying to find the whereabouts of their close ones; How considerate of human life the Russian army was.

Not once had he known a superior officer show real anger because an operation had been wasteful in terms of human lives. He had even known officers send their men under fire simply to avoid the anger of their superiors, to be able to throw up their hands and say: “What could I do? I lost half my men, but I was unable to reach objectives” </blockquote>
About Russian folklore.

If you kiss with your eyes open, you are not in love </blockquote>
About honesty.

“He was honest as a boy and he remained honest all his life. And then suddenly – ‘espionage, plotting to murder Kaganovich and Voroshilov’ … A wild, terrible lie. What’s the point of it? Why should anyone want to destroy people who are sincere and honourable?” Once Lyudmila had told her: “You can’t vouch for Mitya entirely. Innocent people don’t get arrested.” She could still remember the look her mother had given her. </blockquote>
Is it history?</h2>

The Russians have seen everything during the last thousand years – grandeur and super-grandeur; but what they have never seen is democracy </blockquote>
Have the Russians ever seen democracy? I would say between 1999 and 2005 maybe? Even then, it’s a bit of a stretch.

Can you imagine what it’s like to have freedom of the press? One quiet morning after the war you open your newspaper, and instead of exultant editorials, instead of a letter addressed by some workers to the great Stalin, […] instead of stories about workers in the United States who are beginning the New Year in a state of despondency, poverty and growing unemployment, guess what you find… Information! Can you imagine a newspaper like that? A newspaper that provides information! </blockquote>
I used the past tense to describe Russian society during the 1940s and 1950s. But it feels weirdly contemporary.
Grossman calls Stalingrad the turning point in Russian society, the first step toward totalitarianism. After Stalin’s death, his image of hero of the nation eroded. Outside of Russia, he’s considered as a monster. In Russia as well, just a bit.
Memorial (of which Oleg Orlov</a> was chairman) fought for the discovery and rememberance of crimes committed during Soviet times. Memorial is now dissolved, Orlov is now an exile, Memorial dissolved as a terrorist organization.
The name of Volgograd may change again</a> to Stalingrad.
New statues of Stalin</a> pop a bit everywhere in Russia.
The shameful parts of Stalin’s reign are excised from history books.
But most importantly, history is still “the history of Russian national glory”. Arguably, this vision of history, as seen by Germany and Italy, is exactly what started WWII.

Review of "Baudolino"

2024-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

Baudolino is a book by the celebrated Italian author Umberto Eco, published in 2000.
It is at the same time high fantasy as removed from reality as it can be, and an extremely accurate, realist, depiction of 12th century Europe.
I mean, yeah, confusing description isn’t it? Well, but that’s what makes the book amazing, why I love it so much.
It taught me a lot about European history. It’s teaching through example. Reading Baudolino is living life like in the 12th century. I was absolutely unaware of Frederick I. The French (and visibly French-speaking Switzerland) do not like the idea of Frederick I, it rattles the fundational national myth of France. Charlemagne, is of course Freench, for French people. While for German people, he’s German. It underlies, in fact, the eternal rivalry between France and Germany, which only ended recently with the creation of the European Steel and Coal community.
Frederick I calls himself the “Emperor of the Holly German Roman Empire”, and his “legitimacy” flows from his ancestry, that includes Charlemagne.
Indeed, he’s a great conqueror, the Empire encompasses all of northern central Europe, a large part of what is nowdays France, the north of Italy, and what will later become Austria. But his legitimacy is questioned outside of his homeland. Especially in northern Italy, where most of the plot occurs. Northern Italy isn’t a unit, but a set of rival cities, with already powerful bourgeoisies. They can easily fend off assaults from the Empire, unless other cities decide to join force with the Empire. Which they often do. Frederick is an astute diplomat, capable of making compromises and distribute privileges to build alliances.
But those alliances, in the eyes of the cities, are only transactional. As soon as the power balance changes, (ie: when the troups of the Empire move out of sight) the even small set of obligations they signed up in the alliance are forgotten.
Almost each battle led by Frederick in Italy find on both side a seemingly random new set of city states of Italy. People who fought together, two months later fight against each other, and reversly.
This is why Frederick desperates for some sort of historical legitimacy. Being crowned by the pope, as Charlemagne did, would be ideal. Frederick wants the benediction of the pope, but at the same time, in competition with the pope for the control of the Italian peninsula, does not want to recognize him any authority.
That’s the historical context.
The story itself follows Baudolino, son of an Italian peasant, who became advisor to Frederick. As he gets an education in latin, Baudolino hears from his mentor of Prester John.
Prester John is a legendary monk at the head of a cornucopial christian kingdom south of Judea. A reality for his mentor, Baudolino himself doubt of the factual existance of Prester John.
In actuallity, there is indeed christianity going on in Africa at the time. Both the coptic orthodox church and the Tewahedo in Ethiopia and Eritrea do exist, but are a far cry from the Prester John kingdom, covered in gold and precious stones.
Reality doesn’t mater anyway. Prester John is just a nice story, and Baudolino build up on it. He keeps him in the back of his mind for his whole life, as a tribute to his mentor.
Baudolino does love stories, and making up stories. As the book unfolds, Baudolino invents new myths through his deeds and tellings.
During the “deconstruction” of the city of Milan – a punishion inflicted on the city after its defeat against the siege led by Frederick, consisting of the unbuilding of every building in the city (this did actually happen) – Baudolino wonders into one of the 8 churches the deconstructors leaves intact. He gets told by a monk the location of remains of three persons, the presumed relics of the Three Wise Men. The monks admits that he is relatively convinced that they are fake, and hid them by fear of fuelling devotion to fake relics.
But this is of no concern to Baudolino. He sends them to Hannover as authentic relics.
We learn also of the fundation of the city of Alexandria (northern Italy, I’ll call it Alessandria now). Which happens to be Eco’s birth place.
Indeed, the city was founded in 1168, by locals and Genovan bourgeois, to protect trade routes through the Tanaro river against Frederick’s empire.
But soon, Genova allies itself with Frederick, while Alessandria (named after the pope Alexander III) keeps is alegence to the pope. According to empire rule, the founding of Alessandria is illegal, it must be demolished. Hence, starts a very long siege on the city. Through this, Eco retells of the funding myth of the city. Which I won’t relate here.
This is but a tinny fraction of the events of the first half of the book. In this, we discover that the past is a mix of facts and legends, sometimes so interwinded that it’s impossible to separate fantasy from history.
In fact, one of the most amazing twist of the book, occuring at the exact middle underlies specifically this lack of boundary between fantasy and reality. I don’t want to spoil it, but it really blew my mind.
Eco tells us that information is indeed separate from its intent. Be the information malevolent, fantastic, satirical or factual. In the end, what matters is how people understand it.
Take this for example. Baudolino and his friends search the Graal. They try to make up a relic that could be the Graal.
But how should the Graal look like? It is at the same time a precious cup that gives innimaginable powers and the cup used to gather the blood of the christ, by logic, it should be humble and weak.
But Baudolino, unlike the knights of the round table, finds the Graal. Where? At the table of his dying father. It is the simple wooden cup by which he feeds his loved and widowed father in the last weeks of his life. By virtue of its usage, the cup reveals itself as the Graal. And at this, the Graal is not fake, it’s as true as the one the knights of the round table search. And like a knight, Baudolino didn’t find the Graal by searching it, but by stumbling on it, living through a challenge that tested his virtue.
The book is powerful, it is a tool of learning. I now know so much more on history and mythology (talmuldic, islamic, gothic). But, especially, I now know much more about the nature of myth and history. Lies become reality, reality becomes myth, people convince themselves of fantasies they themselves made up.
The last chapter of the book gave me chills, if I close my eyes, I still have a vivid picture of Baudolino leaving on the back of a horse, toward the east, in the quest for the mythical kingdom of John.

Review of "The Long way to a Small Angry Planet"

2024-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (named “LWaSAP” afterward) came out about ten years ago. I read it under a Terence Eden recommendation</a>. And I didn’t like it!
It’s filled with tropes. It’s as “Opera” as “Space Opera” can be. Filled with much more drama than the plot can handle, distracting completely from the main point.
By that I mean the narrative line is so sparse, with so many aparté that barely have any impact on the general plot line that it feels incoherent. This could have been fine! After all, that’s the narative archtecture of Don Quixot and The Idiot, which are monuments of literature. Yet LWaSAP doesn’t assume this, it tries to be a linear story despite not being linear.
LWaSAP is rife wtih deus ex machinas. Oh, it just so happen that the crew lands on a planet when this event that occurs every two to three years happen. It just so happen that the spaceship of the girlfriend is in distress right next to that of the main characters. How likely is this in a whole galaxy? Suddenly we discover that X is actually Y and is thrown to jail by Z which consider Y to be illegal. etc. etc.
Almost everything that occurs in the book is the result of a completely random occurence that comes out of the blue with no foreshadowing what-so-ever, and generally has very little impact on the rest of the narrative. Remember that forecefield that got bought in “desert planet nº2”? Well, it doesn’t ever get mentioned afterward.
The “aliens” are just humans with an outfit. People lode LWaSAP for the creativity of its creatures, yet it does feel very unimaginative.
The different races can learn and use the language of other species with a completely different physiology. I would imagine the difference between creatures that evolved on different planets would be such that it wouldn’t be as easy to learn an alien tongue as learning Italian, nonetheless being able to speak it.
All species smile when they are happy. It felt out of place to put smiles on alien creatures.
Maybe LWaSAP is victim of the Seinfeld effect. Current Hugo award finalist for the best science ficition series “The Final Architecture” by Adrian Tchaikovsky is eerily similar to LWaSAP. But outdoes it by all metrics.
The “science” (ie scientific mumbo jumbo/magic system) is much more credible; the story line is much more cohesive, going together toward the same direction; the alien spieces are much more interesting and alien, both in appearance and behavior (it falls close to the Lem line of nearly impossible to understand).
I suspect Tchaikovsky was inspired by LWaSAP (there is no way it isn’t, the main characters are so similar, and the concepts behind FTL navigation are so similar) But managed to make a true drama out of it.

A deep dive into Tchaikovsky's Shadow of the Apt

2022-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

Tchaikovsky, who is better known for his Sci-fi classic “Children of Light” started his writing career with the fantasy saga “Shadow of the Apt.” (ShotA) The first two books definitively show that it was indeed the start of his careers, having yet to adopt the whimsical flowing and descriptive style that fits so well his subject matters.
Furthermore, the e-book edition available on the Kobo store is filled with editing mishaps. I counted about 70 errors ranging from missing spaces, uncapitalized names, spelling mistakes/repeated worlds and uncut sentences across all the 7 tomes.
However, ShotA captures the interest by presenting a very well thought-out world inspired by our own history in which creditably interesting characters evolve.
The sheer breadth and depth of the world and its mysteries invariably invite curiosity and make for thrilling discoveries. Tchaikovsky is careful to never reveal too much of his world and leave to speculation and wonder a lot of the phenomenons both reported and hinted at.
Pratchett</h2>
Tchaikovsky’s love for Pratchett transpire throughout the whole series. ShotA isn’t at all satirical. However, the themes dear to Pratchett seem to also be dear to Tchaikovsky. The relationship of magic with storytelling definitively hint at Pratchettian meta-narrative. The focus on characters rather than the world (even for such a well imagined and detailed world as Discworld and ShotA) is also a common trait. As with Pratchett, those characters often fall by accident into a fantasy trope archetype and find themselves at a loss as to what they are supposed to do. Tchaikovsky also loves the “spill words” trope so often found in Discworld, there isn’t one book where Tchaikovsky doesn’t use this at least three times.
ShotA’s characters are hit-or-miss. Some are extremely interesting, capable of introspection, constantly evolving and questioning everything. Tchaikovsky definitively re-used some them in other series. Some are extremely archetypal and feel unrealistic or very dumb.
Tchaikovsky is extremely good at setting interesting situations and interactions, and sometimes, interesting means funny. Tchaikovsky sense of pacing and original characters leaves a lot of room for humor. Tchaikovsky’s characters are aware of their situations and often a fantasy trope is challenged by characters that are more than tokens in a narrative flow.
Magic</h2>
Magic in ShotA is weak, as technology and mechanics gain in force. The story happens about 500 years after the “revolution” which sees the magician races overthrown by their “Apt” slave races, makers of crossbows. The magician races are “Inapt,” and while they are capable of listening to the fabric of the world, have glamors bind people to geas, their magic are receding and they cannot wield or use any mechanical device.
While magic is not held as a fundamental secret by the author, in breakage of the Tolkenian golden rule, it is held as a fundamental secret by the characters and their culture, and generally said indescribable by the characters themselves. Making the narrator not a conspirator against the reader, but a resigned unhelpful comrade.
The World</h2>
The world of ShotA starts set in the Lowlands. The Lowlands is a region containing many independent city-states. It is under invasion of the Wasp Empire coming from the East. One of the driving characters, Stenwold Maker, is set to unite the Lowland against the invader, and his met with utter contempt.
The Lowlands are clearly inspired by the polis of antic Greece, as the Wasps empire reminds mostly of the Romans.
In later tomes, the Wasp Empire has become extremely acute at diplomacy. Their approach to undermine their future conquest by sowing division and sugarcoat their conquest as “self defense” is eerily familiar in 2022.
Each book hints to larger horizons, and those horizons are progressively explored in latter books. Sometimes delivering surprises barely hinted-at. Tchaikovsky is great a tickling the want to explore and delivering on his baits.
The world building is what makes Shadow of the Apt exceptional, but it’s also the reason the books are so dang long-winded bordering on the “too long.” Yet, the world is not fully described, leaving a lot of room for imagination and speculation.
The Narrative</h2>
In ShotA, the narrative is harrowing, most of the time, everything feel absolutely hopeless. And the narrative supports this hopelessness by delivering on it a lot during the beginning of the saga, killing relentlessly main characters and destroying important places. So that when something bad is announced, it can very well happen, making it all the more harrowing. Although to be perfectly honest, the second half of the saga reveals that Tchaikovsky cannot stand a non-happy ending (which is fine! I love his endings)
The Characters</h2>
Tchaikovsky is good at characters! Children of Light is not at all character centric, and ShotA was my first opportunity to know what his characters look like. As said earlier, the characters of ShotA are very Pratchettian, but they definitively have a Tchaikovsky twist.
Recurring characters in ShotA change a lot through the saga. Not only the invariable fantasy trope of “lvl 1 char levels up to lvl 20 and becomes as god.” We also see changes in allegiance, betrayal, rethinking of fundamental assumption, new knowledge or skills and others. This makes ShotA characters rich and diverse not only as individuals, but inside themselves. Evolutions are smooth and often believable.
My favorite characters include Thalric (which I won’t expand on, because spoilers!) and Stenwold Maker.
Recommended</h2>
Overall, even if it’s not the best series Tchaikovsky wrote, it’s still really good. And unlike his more recent sci-fi, it’s strongly inspired by history and might teach readers one thing or two, while sucking them in a well crafter world of fantasy.

The Dawn of Everything

2022-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve read Graeber’s “Bullshit jobs” before, so I was expecting something politically charged. Bullshit Jobs was eye opening for me. Graeber has a talent for reinterpreting the world and put words on things that define them in a new perspective. The lame thing about Bullshit Jobs I found was that it was very much unsubstantiated and amounted to a lot of straw man arguments.
This is the mindset with which I’ve read The Dawn of Everything. I knew Graeber was an anthropologist, but I was not expecting a book on archeology and… anthropology. The Dawn of Everything is still filled to the brim with revolutionary ideas and interpretations.
The influence of native Americans on the French Revolution</h2>
The book starts (that’s literally just the first point of many) with the reinterpretation of the French revolution. Graeber and Wengrow say that the ideals of personal freedom and mutual aid came in France during the Enlightenment (or Siècle des Lumières) by the exposure of French intellectuals to the rejection of European values by the native Americans. The common idea of foolish savages overwhelmed by the intellectual and technological superiority of Europeans cannot be further from the truth. Graeber and Wengrow focus on the interaction between the French missionaries and colonists with the Algonquians and Iroquois.
Specifically Kondiaronk, the Huron-Wyandot chief was a notorious diplomat that interacted not only with the then-warring Iroquois people, but also a lot with the French occupants. He was extremely appreciated in the colonial society as a talented orator and rational philosopher.
In fact, it is likely that Kondiaronk not only interacted with the colonists, but also went to France and met such people as Montesquieu and various architects of the new way of thinking society in Europe.
The stories and retelling of interactions with native Americans, especially their logic for rejecting European society were extremely popular publications at the time. Most notably Lahontan’s “New Voyages to North America”. Today, those books are interpreted as devices of rhetoric where Western authors attribute to foreigner ideas that they themselves have. This was indeed a popular device, most notable (at least from personal experience) is Voltaire, which even invents a giant ~~robot</del> from space</a> landing on earth and trying to tease out the working of French society, completely baffled by how silly all of it is.~~
However, Lahontan having lived and interacted with Kondiaronk for a large part of his life, is likely to simply be retelling what Kondiaronk said. Especially given Lahontan was a military man, not a literate or philosopher. Graeber and Wengrow say that — indeed — the seeds of criticism of European society were sown by the Jesuit missionaries and other colonists who interacted with the American natives and imported their reasoning to Europe.
Graeber and Wengrow even go on to say that at the time, it would have been silly to assume that personal freedom was a western value. In fact, quite the opposite is true: Thinkers of the time thought that democracy or any form of power short of totalitarian monarchy would inevitably lead to complete anarchy and chaos. At the image of Hobbes’ savage in the Leviathan.
The first cities</h2>
Graeber and Wengrow paint a new landscape of early European and Mesoamerican cities. They list important excavation sites that came to light recently that would gain from being better known by the general public (if not for their impossible-to-remember names). Such as:

Göbleki Tepe</li>
Çatalhöyük</li>
The Indus Valley Civilisation</li>
the Cucuteni-Trypilian culture</li>
Teotihuacán</li> </ul>
Graeber and Wengrow describe the archaeological records of those sites, take notice of the specific lack (or ominous presence) of typical markers of wealth disparity and imagine what a society leaving those records could look like, taking inspiration from known social structures (such as native American or Basque societies). This results in a surprising but realistic (if maybe imaginary and potentially far from the truth) depiction of the past that is in complete discordance with our commonplace naive and boring pictures of our ancestors.
The three forms of domination</h2>
This might be the part of The Dawn of Everything that changes most my perspective of the world. Surely Graeber and Wengrow take this theory of domination from some other authors, but regardless, it was new to me and not only very helpful to understand our world today, but also understand forms of powers in the past. Graeber and Wengrow identify three fundamental ways you can force someone to do something (willingly or not):

Sovereignty: the ability to physically threaten someone (and follow on)</li>
Mystery: Exclusive access to information, such as ritual protocols, myths or technology</li>
Charisma: the ability to persuade through words and attractiveness</li> </ul>
This is a surprisingly useful framework. Try applying it to anything. You’ll soon see how it underlies a lot of our social interactions or even the working of multiplayer games.
In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow forego the usual anthropology description of tribes, chiefdoms, complex chiefdoms and kingships and build an understanding of ancient societies based on the three dominations. Societies where power is based on none of them, one of them (first order), two of them (second order) or three of them (third order). It has a much more broad level of application.
Graeber and Wengrow dismiss the classical anthropology classification as being too weak to describe the rich diversity of cultures and form of dominations found across the world today and most likely in the past too. They also argue that the classical model is ideologically loaded, inherited from a mistaken past where the belief in linear evolution was firmly held.
The fallacy of linear social evolution</h2>
Linear social evolution is the idea that the western social system of an hyper-hierarchic top-down decision system is the inevitable outcome of agglomerations. The idea goes that first people lived in a pure natural state of small independent egalitarian groups, and with the adoption of agriculture and the potential for wealth accumulation (eg: granaries), hierarchies and small chiefs spawned, either by appropriating the resources or in response to attempts to violently overtake them. Those chiefs confiscating parts of those resources to employ armed men to keep their power. And as societies grew and population centers densified, inequalities grew more and more, creating kings and other chief types we are familiar with today.
If there is only a single thing Graeber and Wengrow want us to remember from the book, it is that the linear social evolution that inevitably leads to the creation of a small powerful elite is a busted idea, a fallacy invented by Victorian English philosophers to defend the most atrocious and inapt form of power (absolute divine monarchy). The second part of the argument (for me personally) is questionable, but the first seems self evident. To the point that I sometime feel like Graeber and Wengrow are beating a dead horse. The diversity of social arrangements at the dawn of humanity was extraordinary. It is easy, but also very dumb, to say after the fact that the only surviving mode of society was the necessary and inevitable one. 
Archaeological records show many large cities with very little social inequalities, as well as small settlements or tribes with large inequalities and holding slaves. On all continents. In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow describe a rich variety of societies, both existing and extinct with a staggering large palette of social systems and inter-relational behaviors. Graeber and Wengrow speculate that humans, for at least the last 20 thousand years, were consciously engineering their society. Learning from the mistakes of their forebears or consciously rejecting the models of their neighbours, and making a society explicitly in opposition to the ones they knew.
A palaeontological aside</h3>
This argument reflects in fact a debate that already happened in a completely different domain of science: paleontology. In “Wonderful World”, Gould defends a reinterpretation of biological evolution. Wonderful World tells the story of how the discovery of the Burgess shale, a fossil deposit dating from the earliest known time of multicellular life, went misinterpreted for 60 years.
The deposit was discovered by palaeontologist Charles Walcott. He excavated a lot of fossils, but did only superficial analysis of them. He failed to see the beautiful diversity of creatures and body plans captured by the fossils. It’s only 60 years later, when the fossil collection was re-examined by Whittington, Conway Morris and Briggs that completely new and surprising species were properly described.
Gould says that Walcott’s understanding of evolution, inspired by Victorian ideals, (in addition to his ridiculously busy schedule) was what prevented him from appreciating the diversity of fossils he had under the eyes. Indeed, at the time, evolution was understood as a progression from the most basic unicellular creature to an inevitable intelligent human (a view called orthogenesis). Coming from simple beginning to increasingly complex and adapted organisms. Gould counter this with what he calls “the contingency of history,” that really what survives is random. All great extinction events are trimmings. The diversity of life narrows with each extinction and species filling the newly opened ecological niche are only but small iteration on the surviving species. The conditions of extinctions cannot be predicted, therefore, the species that survive may do so because of purely incidental features, there is no “better” species that are bound to survive and take over the world, just the random set of species that just happen to be capable of living in the new arbitrary environment, the most “lucky” ones. So the world would look completely different today if the order of the massive extinction events or their nature changed even a little bit (apart from sharks and crabs, it seems nothing can possibly kill them)
Gould exemplifies the linear mode of thinking by the popular March of Progress iconography. Representing small monkey → walking monkey → ape → bipedal → humanoid → Homo Sapiens with a spear → Modern man. The picture omits the rich arborescence of speciation or the fact that by nature evolution is directionless. Leading to the idea of an inevitable march toward the current world. This is in complete disregard of the modern understanding of evolution, even the fundamental workings of evolution.
Graeber and Wengrow really are making no different claim. Linear evolution, both social and biological are political ideas from centuries ago that cannot have any claim of scientific legitimacy today. The Dawn of Everything is just a reminder that we should apply this updated knowledge to our understanding of the world. In fact this iconography of the March of Progress includes the prejudices of social evolution by putting tribal savages as a step to attain the level of civilized westerner.
The lack of social imagination</h3>
This concept of evolution did impede scientific understanding of evolution, and is likely to have severely hurt the understanding of human social relations.
Graeber and Wengrow’s vivid descriptions of alternative human societies may veer on the side of fantasy at times, but outright discarding any interpretation of previous societies that do not involve violent domination is as fantasist if not more than accepting the potential for societies where people live with each other in mutual understanding and respect.
The Dawn of Everything is a reminder that a better society is possible, where our fundamental freedoms are not given up from birth and where there is no self-important assholes projecting and enforce their bankrupt mindset on everyone through arbitrary vertical hierarchies.

- Nicola Papale's reading list

Reading notes on "The Futurological Congress"

Reading notes on "Governance of the Commons"

Institutional analysis</h3> Ostrom was close to New Institutional Economics. From what I gather from the book, it’s a theory of how people comply to rules, seen through a more general version of game theory.</p>

The Tokugawa Kumi</h3> Kumis are communal lands in Japan managed as a Common. They started during the Tokugawa period (1600 - 1867), and still persist to this day.</p>

Comments on "Life and Fate"

The Gulag society</h2> Shtrum is but one of many</em> characters in Life and Fate</em>. While here I just described “The Life and Woes of Viktor Shtrum”</em>, the book is far</em> from that.</p>

Review of "Baudolino"

Review of "The Long way to a Small Angry Planet"

A deep dive into Tchaikovsky's Shadow of the Apt

Recommended</h2> Overall, even if it’s not the best series Tchaikovsky wrote, it’s still really good. And unlike his more recent sci-fi, it’s strongly inspired by history and might teach readers one thing or two, while sucking them in a well crafter world of fantasy.</p>

The Dawn of Everything

Recommended</h2>
Overall, even if it’s not the best series Tchaikovsky wrote, it’s still really good. And unlike his more recent sci-fi, it’s strongly inspired by history and might teach readers one thing or two, while sucking them in a well crafter world of fantasy.</p>