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How else could we organize ourselves? How did we lose "the ability freely to recreate ourselves by recreating our relations with one another"?

This book gets into the weeds of anthropology and archaeology, but it's "zoom out" moments are really interesting. The Rousseau/Hobbes debate leaves out much and, they argue, makes everything much more boring than in actually is, given the actual data available about previous social arrangements.

How did we get stuck? We have forgotten that social organization have been a matter of play, tinkering, and sometimes is even dependent on things like seasonal changes. It feels like we are in the least playful and least imaginative epoch, succumbing to the ideology of Thatcher's "There is no alternative."

One interesting set of arguments in the book is about scale. Received wisdom says that structures of domination are tied to population scaling up. Larger, more dense populations means complexity, which means hierarchy, and hierarchy becomes "chains of command," and thus the origins of the state. Thus, once populations grow, certain freedoms are left to the side. But the book questions this kind of story by pointing to any number of non-linear movements between systems of social organization that do not follow this pattern. This is the trick of the book - to tell the received story and then show how that story cannot account for a mountain of evidence that contradicts it. For instance, Bureacracy did not emerge in large communities to manage massive amounts of information but insted first emerged in small communities.

I almost wish there was a "pamphlet" version of this argument, one that left much of the anthropological record deep in footnotes (or just referred to this book) and hit all the high notes and "big" arguments.

At it's best moments, this book does a really great job of being both about games and evoking the if-then logic of games and game decision points. It also has interesting stuff about game engines (how they shape and constrain creation) and collaboration (the Jobs+Woz dynamic of a salesperson and a designer). It also feels like it was written for late Gen-X or early Millenials - references to Donkey Kong, Oregon Trail, Everquest, etc.

I think I would've liked it more if it were shorter...I liked the first half much better than the second, and some of that is because the latter half ends up pulling in mass shootings and 9-11 in a way that didn't feel like it connected with the core of the novel.

I should add that I listened to this, and I do think reading it would provide even more of that if-then logic. It's hard to pay close attention to structure (the book does some interesting stuff with chapter titles and branching logics at one point that doesn't translate as well in an audiobook).

I'm including books that I read for research here, meaning that I'm including books that I skim or "read around" in. This was one of those books.

This is an interesting guide for organizing, and it's pretty specifically focused on the interpersonal dimensions of organizing. My main focus at the moment is the infrastructure of organizing, and that gets less attention in this book.

One thing that occurred to me while reading this book (a really obvious point that probably is more about my own gaps in knowledge than the book itself) was that organizing tends to begin from specific issues or campaigns and then spiders outward to question of infrastructure, sustainability, and eventually broader structural change. Organizing tends to be inductive, and I guess I'd never really thought about that prior to reading Mann's description of campaigns like the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union. What began as a specific campaign and set of demands eventually became a broader organizing space and effort.