New episode of Literally 2c is up! Alex and I talked for a long time about the work of academic and philosopher David Golumbia, whose work The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism made me deeply sad for a number of reasons.
It was a fun conversation — I find myself gravitating toward these book review discussions. After some thought, I decided that it’s probably because I love and miss school and seminar-style classrooms. I was capital B Bad at graduate school, but I had a great time. Listening to smart people talk about things is one of my favorite activities (it might actually be my favorite social activity). I’m not sure I had a lot to contribute to the experiment of graduate school, but I certainly got a lot out of it.
All of that is to say that I enjoy these book club-style discussions more than anything else. Alex is one of the smartest people I know, and I love hearing him talk about literally anything. So these episodes are fun for me.
For this episode, we talked about cyberlibertarianism, which is a concept of identity that Golumbia applied to Silicon Valley tech bros. Golumbia’s argument is basically that cyberlibertarianism is a slippery slope to conservative politics. It made me sad because I know quite a few people in this pipeline.
There is a part II of this discussion, mostly because Golumbia is a pretty prolific writer and has a lot to say about libertarianism, Bitcoin, linguistics, and more. I was especially excited to talk about his work in conversation with Noam Chomsky’s “language organ” theory. Stay tuned for that!
So, in any case, enjoy!
Liz Cultivates | L.M. Fern 
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