User Profile

finktank

[email protected]

Joined 1 year, 8 months ago

Exploring and supporting Community Informatics and Youth Power for just futures.

Loving hard sci-fi, queer & BIPOC-authored sci-fi, abolition and abolitionist futures, Afrofuturism, Solarpunk, cooperativism, pedagogy, social change.

he/him

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finktank's books

Currently Reading (View all 32)

2024 Reading Goal

37% complete! finktank has read 17 of 45 books.

Ernest Mandel, Ben Fowkes, Karl Marx: Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (Paperback, 1990, Penguin Classics) No rating

The first volume of a political treatise that changed the world

One of the most …

Wow! A 6 month project, a little bit nearly every day, reading David Harvey's a Companion to Capital at every step of the way. Finished it today and can hardly believe it.

This book hardly needs my review. But I started reading it because I felt like I'd missed a critical part of an education I should have gotten, perhaps in high school or college. I'd read bits of it in college. Would the journey be worth it for most? I'm not really sure it is. For me though, it was a project I'd long wanted to take on and I'm glad I did and made it through. The Harvey companion book is a must for getting the most out of it.

Cory Doctorow: The Lost Cause (Paperback, 2023, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom) 4 stars

It’s thirty years from now. We’re making progress, mitigating climate change, slowly but surely. But …

Meaningful and engaging exploration of near future climate activism

4 stars

While some sold it as "solarpunk," I'm not sure it fits this genre. Brooks, the "hero" character, is emotionally complex, but eternally falls on optimism. And his comrades generally seem to share an upbeat nature. Near future southern California is hot, plagued by fires, and dealing with the fallout of MAGA racists and their "plut", cryptocurrency allies, a broader swath of "decent people", and the leftist activists that are trying to create change in the face of climate catastrophe that leaves many internally displaced persons. A few characters add some political complexity, but there's an overall "us vs them" equation that lays the foundation for the book. It reads like a few others of Doctorow's books (Walkaway in mind), where there's a constant back and forth between positive, hopeful movement, and reactionary destruction. It shares with other solarpunk (1) a lot of talk about solar and carbon neutral or negative …