Monthly Archives: September 2012

Reading #56: Elites, Apocalypses, and Tentacle Noir

Book Review, Books

There are some damn good books in this one.

Nonfiction

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home

Twilight Of the Elites: America after Meritocracy – Christopher Hayes
Hayes  (aka “the host of that show on cable news where people don’t yell”) has one clear and central argument: the culture of meritocracy in this country is both ineffective and actively harmful. He argues this convincingly, both from theory (this is why meritocracies fail us) and recent political history (here are a bunch of meritocratic systems which failed us). The crux:

The Iron Law of Meritocracy states that eventually the inequality produced by a meritocratic system will grow large enough to subvert the mechanisms of mobility. Unequal outcomes will make equal opportunity impossible…. Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or to selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies, and kin to to scramble up. In other words: “Whoever says meritocracy says oligarchy. (p. 57)

I find it pretty convincing. I’d recommend this book to anyone frustrated with the current state of politics in this country–but also to academics, teachers, and folks who work in that most meritocratic of cultures (in theory at least), Silicon Valley. It might change your mind about some things.

Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations – Norman Davies
Vanished Kingdoms tells the story of nation-states that are no longer with us. They range from the recent and well-known (the Soviet Union) to the ancient and fairly obscure (Alt Clud). As history, it’s a mixed bag–Davies makes a strong narrative out of the history of some kingdoms, even when there’s little documentary evidence (like the aforementioned Alt Clud, or Kingdom of Strathclyde) but others, like the various Burgundies, seem more like lists of genealogies. Davies pokes some fun at himself for the last, but less defensible is his decision to promote Byzantium as the most important vanished kingdom of all–only to state that it’s too important to give us only a chapter about and move abruptly on to the next kingdom. Maybe his next book will be on Byzantium? Also, he really hates the British Royal Family. Not sure why, but man, he hates them.

If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home – Lucy Worsely
Worsley hosted the BBC television series of the same name, and my main problem with this book is the same problem I have with a lot of TV history: they tend to vaguely thematic historical trivia rather than strong narratives or coherent arguments. Worsley is trying to give us a sense of how different uses of our homes, and rooms dedicated to those uses, have changed over time. She succeeds in bits and pieces–there are some lovely descriptions–but the overall effect is factoids, and those most relating to the British aristocracy. If you want to know a bunch of details about Royal beds this is your book–only not, because you get only a tease. On the other hand, I will always be grateful to this book for introducing me to that sadly-extinct breed of dog, the turnspit dog.

Fiction

Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
There’s a movie coming out, and I’m worried about it. Tom Hanks? Close to 3 hours in length? Dressing white actors up as Asian? Could be horrific. But give the movie credit: it was a trailer for the movie that reminded me to read the book, which I’d vaguely heard about without knowing much.

Man, this is a good book. Very few novels manage to be ambitious in ways literary audiences and genre audiences will both recognize. Even fewer novels succeed. So, take 6 stories, each set in a different time period and each in a different genre. You have a 19th century story (adventures on ships!) told through letters, another epistolary novel set in the 1930s about a composer, a 1970s crime thriller, a modern day satire, a near-future dystopia, and a far-future post-apocalyptic tale. Just making each of these good would be tricky, but Mitchell breaks five of them in half and orders them so forst you travel forward in time, then back again. And then there are the recurring characters, themes, stories commenting on other stories … it all sounds horrifically complicated but the beauty of this is that it isn’t. I had a little trouble with the first half of the 19th century story (my least favorite character, though the second half is better) but after that the whole thing just flows.

Part of what makes it works–and this is in comparison to many novels where (for example) a literary author tries his or her hand at genre fiction–is that Mitchell clearly knows and respects his inspirations. The best example is the postapocalyptic novel, which is an easy one to do badly. He nods to my favorite pos-apocalyptic novel, Russel Hoban’s Riddley Walker, avoids (or toys with) the common cliches, and by setting it on Hawaii’s Big Island, gives it a novel setting.

 

Graphic novels

Fatale Volume 1: Death Chases Me

Fatale – Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips
San Francisco Noir, with additional tentacle monsters. If that’s the sort of thing you like, you’ll like this–and the cover art gives you a good idea of what to expect. It is the sort of thing I like. Brubaker’s dialogue is noir-ish without being too self-parodic, the plotting decent enough, the setting glorious. I am a sucker for old spooky San Francisco (and modern spooky San Francisco, and future spooky San Francisco …) and this gives me multiple eras happily. Or unhappily for the characters, who mostly come to tragic ends, as is only appropriate. San Phillips’s art evokes classic noir films without being cheesy, and his use of color is breathtaking.

Stamen design & why my commute used to suck

Not Design, San Francisco

Scaled2.0_final_web_trimmed

First, go look at this Stamen Design project. Here's how they describe it:

Historically, workers have lived in residential suburbs while commuting to work in the city. For Silicon Valley, however, the situation is reversed: many of the largest technology companies are based in suburbs, but look to recruit younger knowledge workers who are more likely to dwell in the city.

An alternate transportation network of private buses—fully equipped with wifi—thus threads daily through San Francisco, picking up workers at unmarked bus stops(though many coexist in digital space), carrying them southward via the commuter lanes of the 101 and 280 freeways, and eventually delivers them to their campuses. 

It's a pretty neat project. I have a few questions in response, and one big reaction.

The questions:

  1. How similar or different would this look if other industries were represented? I know that Genentech has shuttles. Beyond tech, are there other industries moving their workers around l like this? If you did an equivalent map of construction job sites and the day worker centers (formal and informal) where workers hop on trucks for a days pay, how different would the streams be?
  2. Private bus systems are interesting. The biggest factor here is public transportation not cutting it for these workers and these routes–but do the big tech companies really want their workers sitting next to workers from other companies anyway? I know from the Y! shuttle that the commute was culturally considered part of the workday in ways time on public transport usually isn't.

My main reaction, though, was more visceral. I took one of these shuttles while working at Yahoo for two years–starting at one of the 19th Avenue stops. It seemed like a good idea at the time: I'd been doing car commutes previously, some of them pretty long, so a shuttle ride seemed like a great deal. It took me two years to figure out that the problem was the commute, not the car.

 
(You know your commute is killing you, right? It causes physiological damage, increases stress, decreases happiness, and harms your relationships. Transit commutes, public or private, are probably better than driving yourself, but commutes of over one hour are going to be a bad deal no matter what.) 

I might have been fine if I'd lived in the Mission and worked at the closer of Yahoo's then-multiple campuses, but as it was I spent 15-20 hours a week in a van each week. Not good, and worse: as my first child became a toddler and started sleeping through the night, I started going two or three days in a row without seeing her awake. That was completely unacceptable. I needed to either move south or move my job north.

I did the latter–joined a startup in the city. That brought my commute down to less than an hour, and more, I could bike it in good weather (and once I got over my fears of bike commuting in the city). Of course then my startup was acquired and I ended up driving to the Peninsula again for a while. But my goal had been formed–work near my home, here in San Francisco, in the Outer Sunset, near Ocean Beach, on the Western edge of the world. Where my children go to school, and where I can get a damn good cup of coffee with toast and a coconut. And that's what I'm doing now.

Looking back at Stamen's map, I see that not only are there no stops shown for the western 1/4 of the city–the private shuttles don't even cut through here on the way to somewhere else. That may change–I know more than a few folks out here who work in the Valley, but wanted to raise their kids in the city. But for now, they're almost separate worlds. And as much as I love the Silicon Valley tech world (and as much as I intend to continue working within it), that seems appropriate.