The Plaza PDF Reading Group is having some scheduling difficulties. Our October calendars look confused as a child’s tie-died t-shirt.

So: let’s punt until November. Then we’ll try and squeeze in a good two or three sessions before the new year.

Texts

What would you like to read? Here are some texts we’re thinking about; we welcome your feedback. We’re currently thinking about some subset of the following:

  1. Jenny Odell, There’s No Such Thing as a Free Watch.
  2. Scott Alexander, Considerations on Cost Disease and Matthew Skala’s Some Thoughts on Cost Disease
  3. Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. Possibly as a seminar? We have, to date, avoided technical papers in this reading group. This paper is (given the standards of the form) admirably intelligible, but it does make certain assumptions of the reader. It expects a degree of background. Is this still interesting to people? We could also try and come up with some more general text. We could also try and do this session as more of a seminar, and try to walk through the paper in a more general way. Are you interested in this?
  4. Kenneth J. Arrow, A Cautious Case for Socialism.
  5. Wendy Brown, Undoing Democracy: Neoliberalism’s Remaking of State and Subject or, “what do all these thinkpieces mean when they say ‘neoliberalism’”?

Please let us know if any of these are particularly interesting (or un-), or if you have interesting ideas along this vein!

Details

Everyone is welcome. Signup for emails is available here. We’ll announce session dates and details later in the month.

We’re finally getting around to updating the website. Mostly, this will provide a nice archive of previous sessions/texts/announcements. Gaze backwards with a sense of accomplishment! But not for too long. The meat of things remains up ahead, and the distance closes fast.