Hi everyone, we're starting a new book this week: The Eye of The Master by Matteo Pasquinelli.

This week we're just going to be reading the Introduction and chapter 1:

• Introduction: "AI as Division of Labour"
• Chapter 1: "The Material Tools of Algorithmic Thinking"

Next week we'll be reading the entirety of PART I, this is the best week to get the book if you haven't already; this week's reading goal is going to be less ambitious than the next few weeks, and I've intentionally tried to structure it to give people some breathing room if they're still getting their hands on the book.

(I mean, we're still reading like 50 pages this week)

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Ok, let's get back to the rest of the thing.

routine stuff

As a reminder, there are a few good ways to keep up with the reading group:

• newsletter: I send updates on Mondays and Fridays. In the Monday updates, I'll point to what to read; in the Friday updates, I'll send some reflections and an icebreaker question to think about, and a reminder of where & how to join the video chat.
• video chats: Fridays at 3p ET we'll have a video chat on jitsi where we talk about the week's readings.
• group chat: if you want to chat with friends, we have a few pretty active group chats: We're using Fluxer, which is similar to Discord or Slack. We also have a signal group chat (but keep in mind that Signal group chats can get overwhelming, especially at large scales like this).

next books

Our next book will be Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech's Data Empires by Paris Marx.

Hyperscale comes out October 20, so I'm aiming for us to start around then. It'll be kind of time-sensitive to order ASAP (like, today), to ensure you get your copy on time.

reading plans

My reading plan for The Eye of the Master looks like this:

We're moving quickly on Eye of the Master because we're going to be catching Hyperscale just as it launches. If you're ambivalent about this pace, we'll recalibrate for Hyperscale and probably take things at a more manageable pace. If you have precise feelings about the pace you'd like (e.g. you felt we were going a little too slow before, but a little fast now), please feel free to let me know.

For what it's worth, I felt like The Nerd Reich was a pretty fast reading pace, but I appreciated that it gave us a lot to think and talk about each week, so I'm inclined to lean closer to the new fast pace rather than the 1-chapter-per-week pace we used to use (but that'll depend on how The Eye of the Master goes, and also critically depends on whether people have feelings about the pace of reading. If I don't hear from anyone, I'll assume people are low-key fine with reading faster.)

last thoughts

non-routine stuff

This is a bit of a long shot, but if you happen to be in Austin, JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine are planning to do a couple of book events in Austin for their new book Against Tech Oligarchy. If you're interested, you can check out their tour plans here. I'm almost certainly going to be at the BookPeople event on Oct 5th, and might also attend The Trial of Elon Musk on October 4 since that sounds like it'll be fun.

If you're not in Austin but you are in the United States, you should check out if they're doing any other events near you (e.g. Seattle September 29, Portland September 30, San Francisco October 1, etc...).

Tan and Redwine are super insightful and have a ton of hard-earned expertise about the struggle to organize tech workers and the political conditions of the 2010s and our current hellscape, and I'm very keen to read their book as soon as I can.

okay that's the end of that

If you come across something you think we'd like to read, I'd love to hear about it; contact me.

Okay, that's it for now; see you Friday.