reading for 2/5/18

chapter one of prison memoirs of an anarchist, by Berkman.
the person i asked for suggestions about what to read loves the whole book, and so was less helpful than one might think. here are some of his comments “First, congratulations on making good reading choices. The reading group
should clap for each other for good choices, maybe eat cake.
As to the good bits, it is a long book, and there is a lot that can be left out if you aren’t trying to read the whole thing.
I would suggest that part 1 which focuses on the attentat is good context if there is none, but not necessary in entirety, chapters 4, 5 & 6 are pretty crucial to the narrative though.”
he emphasizes that there is a lot going on in this book, and no excerpt is going to get at the book in full, so… we shouldn’t think that we know what the book is about without reading the whole thing. so cute!

reading for 1/16/18

the stanford experiment is a notorious example of how prone people are to losing their shit when put in positions of power/lack-of-power.

Jack’s choice for the reading is here.
It’s Philip Zimbardo’s account of the experiment, who was the lead in the experiment. He’s caught a lot of criticism for both the experiment and his presentation of it… so it should be a good starting point for discussion.

Jack proposes the following questions:
What’s more surprising, how guards abused their power or how prisoners complied?
Is your life more like that of a prisoner, or a guard?
Do liberals, conservatives, socialists, etc. see themselves as prisoners or guards?

ps: the piece i mentioned about artificial intelligence and corporations is here.

reading for 1.9.18

an essay by timothy morton from the book object-oriented feminism.

Timothy Morton, philosopher of Object Oriented Ontology, claims it is relevant to anarchists. He is the author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence; Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics; Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People; Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World; The Ecological Thought; Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality, etc. He contributed to Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism.