Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design by Paul Resnick, Robert E. Kraut, and Sara Kiesler
A comprehensive book applying basic economic and psychological principals to community design. I learned there are two types of affective commitment people can have to a group – identity-based and bond-based – and that turning knobs on your site that encourage one may hurt the other.
Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America by Christian Smith and Michael O. Emerson
White Evangelicals’ tendency to individualize issues and dismiss systemic explanations is not happenstance; rather, it follows naturally and inevitably from their (our? my?) defining religious beliefs. When the only thing that matters is a personal saving relationship with Jesus, it’s difficult to view anything outside of the lens of accountable freewill individualism.
This book reshaped my understanding of the history of Protestantism in the United States, and has challenged me to explore what Protestantism outside of Evangelicalism looks like and how it might enable or encourage different kinds thinking about race issues.
Play Anything by Ian Bogost
First, pay close, foolish, even absurd attention to things. Then allow their structure, form, and nature to set the limits for the experiences you derive from them. By refusing to ask what could be different, and instead allowing what is present to guide us, we create a new space.
… creativity reveals itself to have far less to do with our own desires and vision and imaginations, and more to do with the world outside us, and how seriously we are willing to take it.
To stave off ironoia, we need not resist the crass material world nor transform it into artisanal affectation. A gentler touch is needed, a more careful physical therapy: to spend time with things, to visit with them, to give them a chance to be exactly what they are. To shut up for a minute and allow the universe to hum without recourse, without appeal to moralism or nihilism, without trying to take it as a petting zoo or a Death Star, without always caging it in Instagrams or problematizing it in think pieces or strip mining it to fuel the ovens of our own contentment.
Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek
Set in context, the lean platform economy ultimately appears as an outlet for surplus capital in an era of ultra-low interest rates and dire investment opportunities rather than the vanguard destined to revive capitalism.