Join 📚 Christian Champ's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Christian's read, .
But it's hard to tell a five- to six-minute story. It means making difficult choices about what will stay and what will go. It requires careful crafting and clever construction. Words and phrases must be expertly manipulated. Your choices must be spot-on. But the results are often superior.
Storyworthy
Matthew Dicks and Dan Kennedy
Gossip, rumor, and hoax are common tools for destabilizing power, and all of the multipliers present in infrastructure space facilitate such trickery. In Domination and the Arts of Resistance, James C. Scott argues against enshrining the techniques of politics proper, looking instead at the actual tools most frequently used by the politically oppressed. Referencing figures from Balzac to Brer Rabbit, he writes, “Most of the political life of subordinate groups is to be found neither in overt collective defiance of power holders nor in complete hegemonic compliance, but in the vast territory between these two polar opposites.”
Extrastatecraft
Keller Easterling
Time-outs are particularly interesting. Mental models don’t include emotions (though they may include beliefs about emotions, like “I am angry”), but their momentum is coupled to emotions (you remember where you were during 9/11 because the emotions gave your throwaway mental model of your surroundings enough momentum for life). Waiting drains emotions from situations and associated mental models, thanks to drag from other mental models and emotionally neutral stimuli. Powerful emotions subside. Time-outs are not always reliable though. Waiting might actually give you time to reason through and discover more things that upset you, leading to a “getting angrier and angrier” effect.
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise