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Daniel Wortel-London's avatar

@Jonathan Parkes Allen

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Daniel Wortel-London's avatar

Would love your thoughts @Russell Arben Fox @Celeste Marcus @Connective Tissue @Michael Shuman @Nils Gilman @Elias Crim @Pete Davis @Douglas Rushkoff @Sam Adler-Bell @Timothy Snyder @Addison Del Mastro @Matt Stoller @damonlinker

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Nils Gilman's avatar

I think the comparison is quite right on several levels. Have you read Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse? It’s dated in a variety of ways (the obsession with Peak Oil), but I think it captures well the sense of the parallel political bankruptcies of the two systems — and also the way things can come apart quickly and totally once the process of reform gets kicked off.

Also: to understand how people cope with living inside a society that is “post-totalitarian” in Havel’s sense, I warmly recommend Yurchak’s Everything was Forever Until It Was No More. Brilliant book about the language games people play to preserve small autonomies while keeping themselves out of trouble.

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Russell Arben Fox's avatar

I’ll read it later today—thanks for the heads-up!

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Millie Rooney's avatar

Helpful and interesting thank you. It’s lining up with where my thinking is going in term of what it looks like to remake the relationship between citizen and state. I’m in Australia so we’re a few steps behind (but gee we love to follow the US over the cliffs) and every bit of research I do here indicates the need to rebalance power at the citizen level.

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