Joyce Appleby — The Relentless Revolution Contraptions Book Club Thread
Wow 12x gas prices makes today seem tolerable…
“While the economic climate was losing some of its sunshine, far was perfect storm was brewing. The hostility of the Arab countries to the pa-ence of Israel in their neck of the globe led to the shock that made 1973 year for capitalist countries to remember. It started on an October afte noon, when 250 Egyptian jets took off for the eastern bank of the fue Canal to bomb Israeli positions in the Sinai Peninsula. The day war he holiest of the Jewish calendar. The Yom Kippur War might have rema a regional conflict had not other Muslim countries decided to use the al weapon." They raised the price of oil 70 percent and cut production 5 per cent for several months running. The price of gas at pumps in Eump and the United States rose twelvefold. In the next two decades the gros national product of the advanced capitalist countries fell from an weng of 4.6 to 2.6 percent. Inflation found a new partner in unemployment.”
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World trade organizations passed from Genoa to Amsterdam (1600s) to London (1700s) to New York (post WW1)
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“If the causes of the Great Depression elude experts, it's because there are too many of them interacting in hidden ways. This underlines the point that in a free market economy, though some people have much more power than others, no one is in charge.”
Reminds me of the Stevenson Test:
The Stevenson Test
I’ve had a brainworm stuck in my head for a few days, thanks to Sean Stevenson.
Great idea from Sean Stevenson's talk at Protocol Symposium -- the test of New Nature should be that there is nobody to appeal to.
Which sends me back to Paul Ford's cult classic "Why wasn't I consulted" -- the argument that the web is fundamentally a customer service medium, and that WWIC is the fundamental question of the internet, the thing every comment section and pull request and reply-guy is really asking. The two ideas are the same idea from opposite ends: the web was built to make everyone feel consultable, and New Nature is what's left when there's no longer anyone on the other end of the complaint.
This feels like a Turing test type condition for New Nature. Call it the Stevenson test.
We’re familiar with ranting about kafkaesque bureaucracies and hard-coded protocols you can’t argue with. These are appeals to nobody with nowhere to direct them. You could complain online or do standup comedy jokes and hope for some commiseration and laughs.
AI is a new layer of new nature that has created entire new genres of appeals to nowhere/nobody. I don’t know how it’s manifesting irl but online the main genre seems to be poetic copes, often quoting some bit of poignant human artistry with a sentiment like “AI could never do this.”
The interesting thing about such copes is not whether they’re true or false, classy or cringe, or whether others agree. It’s that they’re poetic appeals to nobody, nowhere. And unlike the older layers of new nature marked by hard inflexibility, the AI layer is particularly frustrating because it is so protean and responsive in every other way.
The absent authority you feel you could appeal to feels human shaped. If only an authoritative scientist or even an authoritative AI itself could reassure you that yes, AI cannot do that, it’s mathematically proven.
But there’s nobody listening at the other end. You could complain to a real LLM, and it might even offer reassurance if trained to be kind, but that’s like being handled by the little boy in Waiting for Godot who reassures Vladimir and Estragon that of course Godot will come tomorrow.
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Appleby's portrayal of France's forced attempts at capitalism and comparison to England's trial and error makes it clear that you need to let evolutionary forces loose on to a system.
When pushed top-down the substrate, in this case the people, does not change and carries no marks of learning. Whereas if you simply put units of thought in tough positions but with freedom you get as close to the basics of life as you can be and then the natural laws take over.
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Reading about the history of European farming and I realize that the show Clarkson’s Farm is less slice of life and more slice of history. Especially since the last few episodes featured the newest farming innovations to increase yield—such as land scanning and targeted manure spreading.
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Half-baked thought: When Europe explored the seas and found new Spaces it’s because life and people had already made Places available there.
When we explore the abstract world of knowledge we need to build, create an engine that produces something (if only data), to be able to report back with what we have found.
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With global warming, capitalism turns from a force of culture into a force of nature.
Hypothesis: Although nature is slow to enforce the feedback loop through deleterious effects, capitalism can respond fast enough to stymie the worst, as long as culture still has receptors to hear nature.
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Appleby almost instantly dunks on Jared Diamond, love it.
“Jared Diamond wrote a best-selling study that emphasized the geographic and biological advantages the West enjoyed. Two central problems vexed this interpretation: The advantages of the West are enjoyed by all of Europe, but only England experience the breakthroughs that others had to imitate to become capitalistic”
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Joyce Appleby — The Relentless Revolution audio/video links
1. New Books Network — The Relentless Revolution
A 57-minute interview with Joyce Appleby, hosted by Marshall Poe, devoted directly to The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism. This is the best place to start because Appleby explains her central argument that capitalism was a historically specific development rather than the inevitable expression of a timeless human instinct to trade.
2. New Books in Economic and Business History — Apple Podcasts
This is the Apple Podcasts channel for the New Books Network's economic and business-history interviews. The Apple catalogue doesn't currently expose a stable direct link to the old Appleby episode, so search “Joyce Appleby” within the show; the open-web link above is easier for this particular episode.
3. ALOUD / Los Angeles Public Library — What's the Matter with Capitalism?
This 1-hour 13-minute conversation pairs Appleby with entrepreneur and writer Peter Barnes to discuss whether capitalism can reconcile private interests with the public good. It isn't simply a summary of Relentless Revolution; it takes the historical framework of the book and pushes it toward questions about what capitalism might look like in the twenty-first century.
4. C-SPAN Q&A — Joyce Appleby
C-SPAN — Q&A with Joyce Appleby
Brian Lamb's May 16, 2010 Q&A with Appleby features an extended discussion of The Relentless Revolution. It's technically a television interview rather than a podcast, but it's long-form and works very well as an audio listen if you want Appleby to elaborate on the intellectual background and arguments of the book.
5. Reason TV — The Relentless Revolution: Joyce Appleby on the History of Capitalism
This is a much shorter ~8-minute interview with Appleby focused on capitalism's historical role in generating wealth and how it compares with competing economic systems. It's useful as a compact distillation of a few of the book's big claims, but substantially less nuanced than the New Books or ALOUD conversations.
6. Crash Course — Capitalism and Socialism: World History #33
John Green gives an 18-minute overview of the emergence of industrial capitalism and socialism, and the episode explicitly lists Appleby's The Relentless Revolution among its sources. It's not an interview with Appleby and doesn't engage her thesis in depth, but it's a useful quick historical scaffold before or alongside the book.
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