Love what you're doing here, and hope to write soon on your excellent and well-timed The Irrational Decision, but....
one of my pet peeves is how much attention Graeber's work (and Foucault's, but that's a different matter) gets compared to writers doing more rigorous writing about bureaucracy. I appreciate that Graeber wrote the right "big idea" book at the right moment, but I think Nguyen does his readers a service by talking about Daston and Porter instead, so I am glad you mentioned them.
Both are highly regarded scholars, but unlike James Scott, not well known to general readers. I hope you'll forgive posting a few titles in case your readers are curious:
Lorraine Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By
Theodore (not Thomas) Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life
Porter co-edited a book Objectification and Standardization: On the Limits and Effects of Ritually Fixing and Measuring Life (Carolina Academic Press).
If people want left radicalism written by non-academics, (and I hope they do!), Cory Doctorow is a more thoughtful and better polemicist than Graeber.
Again, my peevishness about Graeber isn't that he's wrong or stupid. It is that there are so many other writers doing better work on the topics he is known for.
>> Still, we love our board games and video games, and we hate going to the DMV. Why is that?
Because games are stylized, ritualized objects designed to create the kind of pleasure and meaning we get from aesthetic experiences. So for the same kinds of reasons we enjoy seeing representations, in stories and films, of events we would find horrifying and disturbing in reality. I know this is obvious, but it bears repeating because many people miss this aspect of games.
I simply must point out that your favorite YouTube video essayist's favorite YouTube video essayist, CJ the X, recently posted an in-depth interview with C. Thi Nguyen on "Games, Metrics, Values": https://youtu.be/jHrskVhWdsU?si=3G3XGbln6WexsjkS
See also top-of-the-field indie tabletop RPG designer Jay Dragon's posts "Rules Are A Cage (and I’m a Puppygirl)" and "Does Super Mario Bros. (1985) Have Rules?":
And a couple of my own poems on the matter (though speaking of material rules, what this website is doing to my poems' formatting is an affront to nature ugh):
On Tabletop RPGs
Rules like a cage?
More like ropes.
Tied up.
Tying up.
Climbing.
Restrained.
Constraints that deconstrain
to play with, together.
What will you do?
What will you let get done to you?
Pause.
Reflect.
Will you like it?
Will they?
Tension & release tells the story
if you can let it.
Hold Each Other
A lawful good anarchist
A contradiction in terms?
I don’t think so
Let’s sit down at a table together
Get some rules in play
Adjust them as needed for the experience we’re having together
Funnily enough, I have less than a foot away 'The Utopia of Rules' shelved *directly next to* 'The Irrational Decision,' so, color me unsurprised you found some common ground. It makes me realize I need to shelve Dan Davies' 'The Unaccountability Machine' next to both of them- its thrust that a non-trivial role of bureaucracy is to create armor for the bureaucrat and their masters by creating decisions that have no deciders seems to nestle right in.
Love what you're doing here, and hope to write soon on your excellent and well-timed The Irrational Decision, but....
one of my pet peeves is how much attention Graeber's work (and Foucault's, but that's a different matter) gets compared to writers doing more rigorous writing about bureaucracy. I appreciate that Graeber wrote the right "big idea" book at the right moment, but I think Nguyen does his readers a service by talking about Daston and Porter instead, so I am glad you mentioned them.
Both are highly regarded scholars, but unlike James Scott, not well known to general readers. I hope you'll forgive posting a few titles in case your readers are curious:
Lorraine Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By
Theodore (not Thomas) Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life
Porter co-edited a book Objectification and Standardization: On the Limits and Effects of Ritually Fixing and Measuring Life (Carolina Academic Press).
If people want left radicalism written by non-academics, (and I hope they do!), Cory Doctorow is a more thoughtful and better polemicist than Graeber.
Again, my peevishness about Graeber isn't that he's wrong or stupid. It is that there are so many other writers doing better work on the topics he is known for.
>> Still, we love our board games and video games, and we hate going to the DMV. Why is that?
Because games are stylized, ritualized objects designed to create the kind of pleasure and meaning we get from aesthetic experiences. So for the same kinds of reasons we enjoy seeing representations, in stories and films, of events we would find horrifying and disturbing in reality. I know this is obvious, but it bears repeating because many people miss this aspect of games.
I simply must point out that your favorite YouTube video essayist's favorite YouTube video essayist, CJ the X, recently posted an in-depth interview with C. Thi Nguyen on "Games, Metrics, Values": https://youtu.be/jHrskVhWdsU?si=3G3XGbln6WexsjkS
See also top-of-the-field indie tabletop RPG designer Jay Dragon's posts "Rules Are A Cage (and I’m a Puppygirl)" and "Does Super Mario Bros. (1985) Have Rules?":
https://possumcreek.medium.com/rules-are-a-cage-and-im-a-puppygirl-69e8d569b2b6
https://possumcreek.medium.com/does-super-mario-bros-1985-have-rules-7ba73ed22805
And a couple of my own poems on the matter (though speaking of material rules, what this website is doing to my poems' formatting is an affront to nature ugh):
On Tabletop RPGs
Rules like a cage?
More like ropes.
Tied up.
Tying up.
Climbing.
Restrained.
Constraints that deconstrain
to play with, together.
What will you do?
What will you let get done to you?
Pause.
Reflect.
Will you like it?
Will they?
Tension & release tells the story
if you can let it.
Hold Each Other
A lawful good anarchist
A contradiction in terms?
I don’t think so
Let’s sit down at a table together
Get some rules in play
Adjust them as needed for the experience we’re having together
The rules we make aren’t binding
Unless we choose to be bound, together
Funnily enough, I have less than a foot away 'The Utopia of Rules' shelved *directly next to* 'The Irrational Decision,' so, color me unsurprised you found some common ground. It makes me realize I need to shelve Dan Davies' 'The Unaccountability Machine' next to both of them- its thrust that a non-trivial role of bureaucracy is to create armor for the bureaucrat and their masters by creating decisions that have no deciders seems to nestle right in.