Recommendations for Cypherpunks Books

[Ken Brown]

dmolnar wrote:

> > Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis, and Evolution
> > L. Margulis, D. Sagan (yes that Sagan, which should id that Margulis :)
> > ISBN 0-387-94927-5
> 
> Onto the to-skim pile - thanks.

Margulis is always worth reading. "Symbiosis and the cell evolution" was
a huge eyeopener for me when I read it about 3 years ago - not so much
for the symbiotic origin of Eukaryotes (which is pretty much orthodoxy
these days & was taught to me as the standard idea back in the 1970s) as
for all the biogeochemical implications. "Five Kingdoms" is a fun
overview of LAWKI - a good read.

> It wasn't that long ago that Sherry Turkle's _Life on the Screen_ was
> supposed to be *the* account of how "we" were going to relate in
> cyberspace. Except that who uses MUDs anymore? 

My daughter sometimes! She's 11 now - but bumped into them a year or so
ago. A few days after that I found her installing a telnet server on our
W98 machine...

 
> Can you imagine a latter-day Gandhi who exhorts people to move back to the
> cities to live with each other again? No? Why?

I can easily imagine that - somewhere between Jane Jacobs and Paolo
Soleri and Bill Mollison.
 
> Yes? Why arcologies and not Gandhi?

Why not both? See  "Life and Death of the Great American Cities",
"Arcologies" and "Permaculture" by the authors mentioned above (Of
course nearly all contributors to Cypherpunks would find Soleri &
Mollison to be evil wimpish leftites - but they ought to like Jacobs).
 
> An alternative may be that the generation gap asserts itself with a
> vengeance. Dad and Jr. can't get along - what about Dad and the 17th?
> Instead of isolating vertically, societies isolate horizontally. Lots of
> parallel institutions with mandatory minimum and mandatory retirement
> ages.

Remember, if we manage to get ourselves an indefinite lifespan (as
opposed to a mildly stretched one) then old people won't be *old* any
more.

> Kids born in years between large bumps end up caught on the edge -
> perpetually too old for the ones behind, too young to ever be accepted in
> the society born before them.

That more or less happens these days - there is a sort of lost
generation born between the late 1950s & about 1970 who  managed to be
the first age cohort in 200 years who were poorer than their parents, at
least in Britain (where else did punk rock come from?)

Ken