[irregex] Reading List (2023/08/21)
My writing
[Artificial Bureaucracy] - The Martinsburg Monster
This is my this is the first entry in my new writing project on the history of government computing, data processing, automatic decision-making, and “artificial bureaucracy.” Please check it out and subscribe.
Books
Elizabeth Popp Berman: Thinking Like An Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality In U.S. Public Policy. (2022)
I have a bad habit of putting off reading books that I am most excited about checking out, which is why I’m only now getting to this. It’s as good as everyone says. Most accounts of neoliberalism and the spread of market logic focus on elite networks of persuasion and influence on the economic right. This book offers a compelling complementary narrative, showing how this project has important roots in center-left projects of administrative and bureaucratic reform. I finished it convinced that we need to be talking about PPBS at least as much as we talk about the Mont Pelerin Society. Highly recommended.
Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington: The Big Con: How The Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, And Warps Our Economies. (2023)
This is a little thinner than I would have liked, but it’s a good primer on the impact of consultancies on state capacity.
Journal Articles
Mette Simonsen Abildgaard and Lee Humphreys: Landline Natives: Telephone Practices since the 1950s as Innovation in Technology and Culture (2020).
Focusing on the Denmark in the era before cheap telephony, this article looks the social practices and rules around telephone use and how they were inflected by social class and gender.
Selections from the Web
Jeremy Harding: Where do we touch down? Bruno Latour’s Habitat
Max Krahé: No Alternative?
Kevin Okoth: Poison is better: Africa’s Cold War