Done with 'Rise and Kill First': a lengthy (could use a trim, much history has been more then covered elsewhere), detailed and mostly well-paced tour of what could be called tactical successes on the road to strategic and moral failure.
Shifting to a fiction title in my lockdown era book-buying stack to Frankie Miren's 'The Service', looking at the criminalization of sex work in UK.
I am not doing well at my book-a-week goal, but for the record "The Service" is an absorbing read.
Frankie Miren has a great sense of character voice, and really gets into the weeds on the complications (legal, social, mental, economic, emotional) around sex work and the criminalisation/legalisation/decriminalisation debate.
There's also very plausible near-future sci-fi thrown in on how sex work criminalisation would trigger surveillance, censorship creep, and an industry of AI and sex-bots.
Mid-way in, and what's good is that Greenberg is both a real storyteller, concise writer and able to cover tough tech concepts in an accessible way, dispensing with some of the dense "you're in the command line" perspective of 'Zero Day.' it's slightly more tech than "This is How They Tell Me The World Ends." All 3 books cross over somewhat. Sandworm's shortish chapters allow for nice breaks and in chapters 6 & 7 we get an excellent, relevant summary of about 1,000 years of Ukraine history.
There's a chapter in 'Sandworm' that references Cliff Stoll's phenomenal threat hunting memoir, 'The Cuckoo's Egg' and how that incident really had the seeds of current nation-state operations.
I'm slightly obsessed with Drew Robinson's malware analyst role at iSight, looking at hacking campaigns' technical clues to discern which groups or political motives are behind them. I could see that being really interesting work.
Finished Sandworm. Short version: all critical infrastructure is a sitting duck. With the Kremlin now ramping up cyber attacks again, against NATO aspiring countries, this book is foreshadowing.
Off cybers slightly, now but still on the anti-authorisation spree... #freealaa
Alaa's visit to Gaza in around 2012, and analysis of the hyper-factionalization he found there is absorbing afternoon beer-and-book reading. Having once had a tiny supporting role of efforts led by locals in Rafah to bridge these divides, it really resonates.
Alaa's book makes you consider just how many of the world's top thinkers may be in a prison somewhere. Such a wide-ranging intellect, and absolute dedication to cause. What's happening to him and all political prisoners is what holds us all back. It's an angry regime brute forcing progress to stop.
Now onto what our relationship with animals can tell us about how we'll get on with smarter machines: "The New Breed" by Kate Darling.
Highly recommend 'The New Breed' if thinking of better ways to consider our future around an increasing amount of autonomous tech is your jam. Some more notes in the ol'e blog. https://treacherous.tech/i-cant-keep-up.html
Moving on to Catherine Belton's 'Putin's People' which has been in the stack a while and on the bookshop shelves longer. Felt I should move it up while it's still topical, but obviously doesn't include events of the last 3 years.
'Putin's People; was a bit of a slog, riveting in places, but some dead weight between. An exhaustive account, I got to points in some chapters where it bordered on repetitive.
Good I read it while there's still a Putin regime, and the recent past it covers definitely relates to present events. Things pick up in the latter third as all the principles have been introduced and we see how it plays out through the Trump years and the start of the Ukraine invasion in 2014.
Could be a Scorsese film.
My book-a-week schedule turned into something like a-book-a-quarter schedule. Stasiland became my travel companion. Fantastic stories linked together by the author's obsession of that period and place in the Cold War that I'm also a little fixated with. She got people to talk about things they'd like to forget which is a good gift.
Now, onto Meme Wars.
"Meme Wars" is more than just a review of political internet memes, it's the very recent political history of America from around Obama onward, and an explanation of why U.S. politics is now so weird and stupid. A time traveller from the '90s would not believe how dark it's gotten in so little time.
Moving on to "Assad or We Burn the Country." I may or may not be fun at parties but my Tsundoku book shelf is really just not.
Finishing "Assad or We Burn the Country" this week and it's been an educational, well written but painful few slogs with time out almost for self-care. It's a rage inducing tour of recent history. Having followed the Syrian uprising, regime attacks on its citizens and the rise of ISIS as it happened, there was little surprising, but the Assad dynasty origin story is worth the read on its own, and is like 'The Godfather' in many aspects.
A couple of extracts...
Realise the book came out a while ago, and stops mid-Trump, but "Assad or We Burn the Country" is very much about the Obama administration's failure to read the status of things in the world. Putin learned a lot from the US and Europe's failures. France's foreign minister had it right.
While a lot of people now pay attention to the horseshoe alliance between western far-right nationalists and weird-left tankies regarding Putin's invasion of Ukraine, this was really fermented amid reactions to the Syrian conflict, and was based on a mix of racism and xenophobia on one side and a limited, hypocritical notion of what qualifies as "anti-imperialism" on the other. "Assad or We Burn the Country" doesn't really focus on any of that long, but it pops up toward the end.
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