“It’s worth thinking about language for a moment, because one thing it reveals, probably better than any other example, is that there is a basic paradox in our very idea of freedom. On the one hand, rules are by their nature constraining. Speech codes, rules of etiquette, and grammatical rules, all have the effect of limiting what we can and cannot say. It is not for nothing that we all have the picture of the schoolmarm rapping a child across the knuckles for some grammatical error as one of our primordial images of oppression. But at the same time, if there were no shared conventions of any kind—no semantics, syntax, phonemics—we’d all just be babbling incoherently and wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other at all. Obviously in such circumstances none of us would be free to do much of anything. So at some point along the way, rules-as-constraining pass over into rules-as-enabling, even if it’s impossible to say exactly where. Freedom, then, really is the tension of the free play of human creativity against the rules it is constantly generating. And this is what linguists always observe. There is no language without grammar. But there is also no language in which everything, including grammar, is not constantly changing all the time.”
― The Utopia of Rules
― The Utopia of Rules
“Young people in Europe and North America in particular, but increasingly throughout the world, are being psychologically prepared for useless jobs, trained in how to pretend to work, and then by various means shepherded into jobs that almost nobody really believes serve any meaningful purpose.”
― Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
― Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
“Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free”
― One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
― One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
“Bureaucracies, I've suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity--of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence.”
― The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
― The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
“Technology serves to institute new, more effective, and more pleasant forms of social control and social cohesion. The totalitarian tendency of these controls seems to assert itself in still another sense—by spreading to the less developed and even to the pre-industrial areas of the world, and by creating similarities in the development of capitalism and communism.”
― One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
― One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
Arnold Kapinova’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Arnold Kapinova’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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