Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Current listening and reading

Livin' Fear of James Last - great compilation of Steve Stapleton aka Nurse With Wound's work

The culture of the new capitalism by Richard Sennett - whilst bits of it are slightly off the mark, especially in the rather nostalgic tone he adopts for paternalistic labour practices, it's another coruscating attack on the dislocating and disorientating effects of the revolution from above propagated by flexible globalised capitalism. And lots of really valuable analysis and observation about the nature of professional identities in the neoliberal workscape.

The future of ideas: the fate of the commons in a connected world by Lawrence Lessig - what may happen if the net and its technologies gets effectively privatised. Truisms that some might question about the desirability of market economics and the sanctity of private property rights aside, this is (so far) an illuminating and accessible read about why shared intellectual property matters.

and I'm re-reading Science, Order and Creativity by David Bohm and David Peat - full of useful nuggets (I may do a separate blog entry in honour of it...)