3 Books for Thinking About Now
Slim-ish texts that are helping me think through this moment in oligarchy.
While I was listening to Against Platforms by Mike Pepi on audiobook through Libby, an invaluable public library resource, I realized that it was in conversation with two other books I’d recently read that explained how neoliberalism had dropped us right on the doorstep of fascism here in the U.S. That’s a glib way of putting it, but each of these focus on different subject matter—the food system, universities, and digital platforms—through similar yet unique lenses of critique that illuminate each other further when read in tandem, especially because each at times reaches beyond their focal points to show these connections explicitly. In the comments or today’s Salon, I want to hear about the books that are meeting the moment for you, as well.
Here, my brief pitches for each book with suggested ancillary reading and listening so that you can make your own educated choices about whether to read and which piques your interest first. (Is she getting into teacher mode for the summer semester? Seems like it!)
The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can't Hack the Future of Food by Julie Guthman
Why: Guthman is a professor at UC-Santa Cruz who, simply put, is the best there is (well, along with Raj Patel—I had the luck of interviewing them both for this piece I wrote last year) at examining the bigger issues in the U.S. food system, getting beyond aesthetics and appeals to consumerism to interrogate the imagination, corporate power, and class. Here, she takes this sharp analysis to the ways in which venture capital and Silicon Valley have invented so-called solutions to food system problems they never bothered to deeply research or understand in the first place. I reviewed it at length for FoodPrint.
Quote: “For most of Silicon Valley’s history, it had decidedly not meant using technology for environmental betterment or social equity. Rather, ‘improvement’ had connoted a reduction of the frictions of time and space in everyday transactions, as if the most challenging aspect of living is that things take too damn long.”
Suggested further reading: Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism; “Can't Stomach It: How Michael Pollan et al. Made Me Want to Eat Cheetos” for Gastronomica
Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else) by Olúfhemi O Táíwò
Why: Táíwò is a philosophy professor at Georgetown and a rare public intellectual in the U.S. Here, he looks at the origins of identity politics among the Combahee River Collective and the ways in which it’s been corrupted through “elite capture.” He writes about “deference politics” and the ways in which conversations are often had in rooms where identity politics becomes shallow; far from its original intentions as a means of building solidarity across difference, it lets people in powerful positions feel they’re doing something while only listening to and engaging with elite perspectives.
Quote: “Even in rooms where stakes have been high—where potential researchers were discussing how to understand a social phenomenon, where activists were deciding what to target—the rules of deference have often meant that the conversation stayed in the room, while the people most affected by it stayed outside.”
Suggested further reading: “An Interview with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò” at The Believer; “Critics Say ‘Identity Politics’ Ruined Art. Here’s A Better Argument,” ArtNet (podcast)
Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia by Mike Pepi
Why: Pepi has worked in tech, doesn’t hate technology, and has a lot of respect for institutions as means of protecting and strengthening our relationships with culture and each other. He clearly breaks down the ways in which tech people believe their products are neutral, without ideology, and somehow purely apolitical. This is obviously untrue, and Pepi criticizes the ways in which a right-wing libertarian perspective has come to have extreme power through its intrusion in our lives via platform capitalism. He is, notably, an art critic, and this style of analysis pokes its head in as well.
Quote: “The belief that any tool is isolated, neutral, and not subject to the worldviews and intentions of those that deploy it is far more dangerous than the idea that said software is itself right-wing or left-wing. Tools do carry inherent biases, but the worst bias lies in the humans that deploy them. We must not accept that a tool improves our lives in the near term and then give up on the continued investigation of its long-term effects of who gets to continue to deploy, innovate, and control such technology. The venture capital fueled platform utopia sold by Silicon Valley must under all circumstance appear as if you are in control, piloting your political future. As soon as people wake up to the reality that this is simply the story being told by the owners of these platforms, the entire edifice falls apart.”
Suggested further reading: “Heavy Machinery,” Pepi’s newsletter; conversation with Joshua Citarella of “Doomscroll” (podcast)
News
This month and next, the Desk Book Club is reading Between Two Waters by Pam Brunton. We will have the Zoom discussion on Sunday, May 18, at 1 p.m. EST, with the author herself. I will send my reading notes for the first half of the book on April 18. You can buy all the 2025 Desk Book Club picks at this year’s partner bookstore, D.C.’s Bold Fork Books, for 20% off with the code in the header (or email me).
The Monday 3 p.m. EST
WEEKLY SALON
is now on Discord.
