Three-Toed Sloth

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, October 2023

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on the histories of either socialist computing in Latin America, or of witchcraft. Also, most of my reading this month was done at odd hours and/or while chasing after a toddler, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.

(Left unfinished in 2023, because I got interrupted, and posted in 2026, because I wanted to procrastinate about half-a-dozen research projects.)

Antti Tuomainen, Palm Beach Finland

Mind candy: black comedy crime fiction / murder mystery, in rural Finland. I enjoyed both the comic darkness and the convincing happy endings all around. (At least, happy by the characters' own lights...) My first Tuomainen, but I'd read more if they crossed my path and I was in the right mood. §

Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile (doi:10.7551/mitpress/8417.001.0001)

This is the first, and to date only, proper, professional history of Project Cybersyn, It provides the clearest account I have yet found of what was aimed at, what was attempted, what was actually achieved, and the setting in which all this took place. I have tried my own hand at describing what Cybersyn did, and what lessons to take from it, elsewhere.

Two things struck me about this book, which I will mention, not as serious criticisms, but as worth remarking on:

1. Medina is in fact, professionally trained in the history of science and in science and technology studies. (Also in electrical engineering, which I daresay helped here.) One of the most common moves of those disciplines (especially STS) is to point at the scientists and/or technologists they study and say "Look! They thought they were just doing pure science / advancing technology, but really it was all shot through with values and politics!" This however falls rather flat when the scientists and technologists under study couldn't shut up about how their work was shot through with values and politics, which is very much the case for Cybersyn *. This seems to cause Medina some frustration in a couple of places in the book.
2. Quite properly, Medina presents Cybersyn as part of a broader set of efforts by Chilean designers and technologists to design progressive, socialist, specifically-Chilean products and technologies. In her presentation of these efforts, she talks about the stated intentions of the designers to benefit the masses, but not whether the masses actually appreciated the resulting products. It's not quite a case of condemning capitalist design for its results, while praising socialist design for its aspirations, but it leans in that direction. It would be very interesting to know whether those aspirations were successful! (Were Antú television sets actually good or popular, for instance, or just what was available?)

I said above that this is the first serious history of Cybersyn. Since Medina has scoured all the relevant archives; interviewed pretty much every then-surviving principal; and written a clear, convincing, thorough account, it is very unlikely that any superior history will ever appear. I strongly recommend the book to anyone with an interest in the intersection of computing and socialism, among other topics. §

*: The subjects could of course have been wrong about the values and politics animating their work, which the scholar studying them might understand better than they did. But that more complicated sort of un-masking is both harder to make convincing, and less satisfying to both author and audience. ^

Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present (doi:10.12987/9780300231243)

The aim of this engagingly-written book is to understand the origin of the early modern European figure of the witch, i.e., the quarry of the great witch hunts. This involves Hutton in comparative studies of witch-craft beliefs and practices across the world, tracing specific strands of European intellectual / mythological / theological / magical history from antiquity to c. 1700, and taking the reader down a lot of proposed paths just far enough to show, convincingly, that they are blind alleys (*) (**).

As for where he does end up, let me quote a little from the final chapter:

A worldwide perspective, indeed, makes Europe look fairly typical in its attitudes to witchcraft, with two resounding exceptions: that Europeans alone turned witches into practitioners of an evil anti-religion, and Europeans alone represent a complex of peoples who have traditionally feared and hunted witches, and subsequently and spontaneously ceased officially to believe in them. In fact, both developments came relatively late in their history and are probably best viewed as parts of a single process of modernization, driven by a spirit of scientific experimentation. The construction of the image of the satanic witch religion, and the trials which resulted, represented a new and extreme application of high medieval Christian theology, designed both to defend society against a serious new threat and to purify it religiously and morally to an extent never achieved before. Its abandonment occurred when the reality of the threat was not satisfactorily demonstrated and the drive for purification failed to produce any convincing improvements. Instead, Europeans developed another, much more radical, final solution to the threat of witchcraft, by defusing belief in it.

If --- as Hutton himself says --- the final answer is very similar to the one Norman Cohn offered in Europe's Innner Demons, well, it's good to check whether half a century of new knowledge has turned a classic into a mere classic. (It hasn't.) Hutton has the classic works in this area, and several modern literatures, at his finger's ends, and draws on this vast learning freely, but --- equally impressive --- presents everything so skillfully that one never looses sight of why the information is relevant, or feels overwhelmed by a mass of detail. Even if you think you're not interested in the history of witchcraft (and you should be), if you enjoy skillful historical writing, this is worth reading. §

*: E.g., Carlo Ginzburg's ideas about shamanism. (The book is dedicated, in part, to Ginzburg.) This is a shame because I've always liked those ideas, and they've inspired some good fiction, but Hutton is convincing in his criticisms. ^

**: One idea which Hutton dismisses relatively briskly here is that those persecuted as witches in the great witch hunts were followers of a pre-Christian old religion. This is simply a modern myth, whose origins in the 19th and 20th centuries is part of the story of Hutton's earlier Triumph of the Moon. (Which is great.) ^

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; Writing for Antiquity; Psychoceramics and Psychoceramica; Pleasures of Detection, Portraits of Crime; The Progressive Forces; Automata and Mechanical Amusements; Complexity