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UofWinds 401, Week 50 2024: Coffeehouses in the 1750s were remarkably like Twitter, Empire and On the Coming Merger of Tech and State Power, Welcome to the Martian Revolution


Good morning. It's that time of year when I have to double check to make sure that I didn't screw up the way that I assign weeks to each issue of this newsletter. But it's true: we have arrived at Week 50 of 2024. Some of us are still getting ready for the holiday season. As I write this newsletter, I am building an Xmas 2024 playlist. This is mostly for myself as my family prefers to hear the songs that I had on our Xmas playlists some 15 years ago. The way that Christmas grounds us in the past only to, some short days later, have the New Year hurl us into the future is wild. I am unclear if all the Best of 2024 lists that are already out are intended as holiday gift guides or are works of critical reflection.

My cats are unbothered by all of this. One is curled asleep on her heating pad. The other refuses to discover the warmth of her own pad, and is curled up on the sofa in the study. I am deeply settled in my reading and writing chair under a blanket.

After the newsletter, after the skating, after lunch, after the errands, after some baking, I think we are going to trim the tree and set the house up for some much needed recombobulation during the holiday break.

Coffeehouses in the 1750s were remarkably like Twitter


This past week, there have been several mainstream media outlets who have used their op-eds to scold the Internet on how it should react to the murder of a CEO. I'm not going to touch on this particular story, but I do want to highlight a dynamic that might be behind the scolding and how we may have seen this before.

Coffeehouses in the 1750s were remarkably like Twitter.
The early coffeehouses, then, formed a space of encounters where people heard the latest news and gossip, connected socially, debated politics, and transacted business. Despite varying social backgrounds, all participants were treated as equal, freely communicating with each other and openly sharing their knowledge, interests, and experience. As Richard Sennett notes:
The talk was governed by a cardinal rule: in order for information to be as full as possible, distinctions of rank were temporarily suspended; anyone sitting in the coffeehouse had a right to talk to anyone else, to enter into any conversation, whether he knew the other people or not, whether he was bidden to speak or not. It was bad form even to touch on the social origins of other persons when talking to them in the coffeehouse, because the free flow of talk might then be impeded. (Sennett 1977: 81)

I was reminded of this parallel between Twitter/Bluesky and early coffee culture from this Mastodon post from Adrian Hon:

Prescient note from a 1996 book, Internet Culture, on the demise of English coffeehouses and the fate of then-new newsgroups. Regulars don't want to hear from newbies and retreat into backrooms (aka Discords); public zones become dominated by a few celebs and loudmouths. The only way to keep a group free as a public sphere is through unruly newcomers who question established norms... [click here to read the screenshots]

From what I understand, the elites who once visited coffeehouses eventually chose to move their conversations into newly established private clubs and then salons.

It would not surprise me if, in this particular moment, as the coffee houses of the internet start to resemble a rowdy bar where a fight with knives might break out at any given moment, our current elite might make its own exit from social media to another platform so they can meet up with each other IRL when they find themselves in Bern or perhaps, Miami.

On the Coming Merger of Tech and State Power


I regret to inform you that I think its worth reading this short essay, On the Coming Merger of Tech and State Power by Taylor Owen.

First, the relationship between tech companies and Washington is transforming into something we haven't seen before. While Silicon Valley has always wielded influence in American politics, what's emerging now is different – a world where the interests of select technology companies become indistinguishable from US government policy.

Look at Elon Musk's growing empire. Tesla, Starlink, X, and Neuralink all stand to benefit substantially from this new alignment. They won't be alone. Peter Thiel's Palantir and Palmer Luckey's Anduril are perfectly positioned to collect expanded defense contracts, while major venture capital cryptocurrency investments are likely to see favorable regulatory treatment. The concentration of power in these companies' hands isn't just about market dominance, it's about shaping the very rules of our digital future...

... Second, for democratic nations outside the US, this power shift threatens their very ability to govern digital spaces.

This issue appears to have a theme: our moment – is being shaped by history and by our future as we imagine it.

... all these platforms and attendant dipshits will be replaced, eventually, and what happens next isn't guaranteed. The British East India company was a commercial atrocity factory at near-global scale; what came after it was direct colonial rule. The assumption that "Twitter but decentralized" or "Facebook but open-source and federated" will necessarily be good—rather than differently bad—is a weak one. – against the dark forest, Erin Kissane

It was only by listening to Empire, a UK podcast by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, that I learned that the East India Company first worked within India as an independent agent separate from Britain and then only after did formal colonization take place. Empire is dedicated to telling the story of how empires rise and how they fall.

I'm listening to the past to better see our future.

Welcome to the Martian Revolution


"In late Stuart London, coffee houses were seen as the breeding grounds of sedition and treason" (Sarah Richardson).

Mike Duncan is back! And his next project is future historical fiction! Chapter 11 will cover the centuries-hence revolution on Mars. When he first wrapped up the Revolutions podcast after his 103 part epic on the Russian Revolution, Mike recorded his takeaways from the podcast's run in a series of 12 appendices. Now he's using these takeaways to create a future history of Mars using a premise familiar to readers of Kim Stanley Robinson and The Expanse: People don't stop being people just because they've gone into space. [whuppy]

I didn't think I was going to like my favourite history podcast delving into speculative historical fiction, but I have been utterly charmed by Mike Duncan's Welcome to the Martian Revolution season of his podcast. You should be able to find it on your podcasting app, but if not, the first episode is on YouTube.

(Do its future protagonists become friends after regular meet ups at a coffeehouse/bar? Absolutely they do.)

I've been reading other speculative fiction in this moment. And not just for comfort and joy. I think it is essential in this moment. As does Mandy Brown as she illuminates this re-orientation in her post, Storytelling as practice.

Writing in Practicing New Worlds, Andrea Ritchie documents a pattern of crisis response that, far from interrupting the crisis, merely serves to continue it...

.. I want to posit that the endless crisis scenarios of our present political era—not only the crises themselves but the rapid, bombastic, repetitive, and constantly escalating storytelling around it—are themselves designed to increase that pressure, to trigger the fear and wariness that brings us back to the same old responses, the same dusty stories, the same roads we’ve been down before. There’s familiarity even in trauma, even and especially in fear.

But Ritchie (and Boggs) both shine a light on a different way: creating images and stories of the future that help us imagine and then create alternatives to the existing systems. This is storytelling as action and as practice; storytelling that gets us moving when we might otherwise be stuck; storytelling that invites us to lift our heads up and see further afield, so that we might know in what direction to place our next step.

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