Three Recs: May 14, 2024
A good book, TikTok's empowerment, and more.
Thank you all for your kind words in response to my piece about Maggie last week. I hope it was a blessing to you in some way, perhaps reminding you of your own children and how much they’ve grown.
Here are some recommendations for you!
1) Now is the time of sea shanties
This is a thoughtful piece about how TikTok has changed everything, especially with regard to the perceived empowerment of young people.
But watching a crowd of teenagers, 20-somethings, and bewildered boomer folk aficionados, singing whaling songs in a sold out New York venue made it very clear how thoroughly TikTok has broken the continuity of how things used to work. This is what politicians are really saying when they talk about TikTok radicalization. And this is why every week there’s some panic on boomer apps like X or Threads or LinkedIn or whatever about how Gen Z women use internet slang. The world, it turns out, operates very differently when young people don’t have to rationalize what they like, how they dress, or how they act to the people that happen to live around them. And I don’t think suddenly removing TikTok from the US market will put the genie back in the bottle here.
2) Watch Apple Trash-Compact Human Culture
When I was watching the Apple event a couple of weeks ago, I cringed when I saw the hydraulic press ad, but I didn’t realize the negative feelings about the image were so widespread. This is a good explainer about why it hit so many people the wrong way.
Here’s the ad in question if you haven’t seen it.
The fundamental flaw of Apple’s commercial is that it is a display of force that reminds us about this sleight of hand. We are not the powerful entity in this relationship. The creative potential we feel when we pick up one of their shiny devices is actually on loan. At the end of the day, it belongs to Apple, the destroyer.
3) The Red Rising series of books
I am about to finish reading the six-book Red Rising series by Pierce Brown, and it has been a great ride. I primarily read fiction on my Kindle, lying in bed, for just 45 minutes or so before I fall asleep each night, so I’m not looking for high-minded hard-to-read stuff most of the time.
I would rate the Red Rising books in this order: 3, 2, 1, 6, 5, 4. As I understand, the first three books and the second three books are each sort of their own “trilogy” and they definitely read that way to me. The first three were among my favorite fiction ever, I didn’t like 4-5 much at all, but 6 has been wonderful.1
Here’s a summary of book 1 from Amazon:
Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations. Yet he toils willingly, trusting that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children.
But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and lush wilds spread across the planet. Darrow—and Reds like him—are nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class.
Inspired by a longing for justice, and driven by the memory of lost love, Darrow sacrifices everything to infiltrate the legendary Institute, a proving ground for the dominant Gold caste, where the next generation of humanity’s overlords struggle for power. He will be forced to compete for his life and the very future of civilization against the best and most brutal of Society’s ruling class. There, he will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies . . . even if it means he has to become one of them to do so.
Please note that the final three books do get a bit more colorful in their language/themes than the first three, but not so much that I don’t feel comfortable recommending the series. It was just sort of shocking to me when some language started showing up in book 4 that definitely was not present in the first three!