Hey, we're going to meet in an hour; the link to join the video chat (at 12p ET) is here, and at the bottom of the email. I also want to reflect a little bit on the last chapter of the book ("The War on Black Revolutionary Minds") and the book as a whole.

quotes & reflections

Not only are the agents of this war structurally incentivized to lie and omit critical details about their scandalous methods, but their notions of reality are filtered through elitist, patriarchal, and white supremacist epistemologies. (page 185)

The theory assumes that human beings can be "scientifically controlled" and programmed like computers. ... "When I give an order to a machine, the situation is not essentially different from that which arises when I give an order to a person" wrote Norbert Wiener in The Human Use of Human Beings, a 1950 volume on a field he termed "cybernetics". (page 188)

By tracing these sinuous intellectual and institutional networks, we can see how prisons function as central nodes within global networks of counterinsurgency knowledge production. (page 203)

As Dhoruba explained in a 1973 interview, "The importance of the BLA lies, not in its size, not in its ability to muster so much firepower or whatever. The importance of it lies in the concept. The concept is basically this: that revolutionary armed struggle is a very vital aspect of any progressive movement for revolutionary change." (page 212)

I don't want to draw frivolous connections between experiments on prisoners within the carceral system and the present day, but I couldn't help but think about a litany of ways that we're experimented upon in public (in digitally mediated spaces but also "out in the streets", both literally and figuratively) and how the perpetrators of these unconsented experiments rationalize their experiments as fundamentally harmless, or as beneficent, or something else. I'm also thinking a lot about how often people get "shadowbanned" when they post and try to do solidarity-building and consciousness-raising discourses. How aggressively, and how pervasively across platforms, are our ideas suppressed by people who want us to use those systems in "anodyne" or "pro-social" ways?

It was also surreal to see Burton draw connections to cybernetics and a lot of the ideas that have risen to prominence yet again in this "age of AI" (I said, pejoratively). Wiener's reduction of human cognition to fundamentally passing instructions back and forth between agents is exactly the sort of stupid shit we see AI boosters say on social media; that we hear administrators and managers salivating about as they daydream about replacing all their workers with chatbots; that we hear tech billionaires emit out of their pointy heads right after insisting that they don't have any thoughts in their head, and actually? Having internal thoughts is some cringe new philosophical nonsense or something.

I'm still thinking a lot about the legacy and the continued project of the Attica uprising, and about what we continue to owe people currently trapped behind the concrete and the steel today in prisons. I'm still reflecting on what has changed in the past 50 years (and what hasn't), and particularly drawing connections between how Israeli prisons just as much represent a continuation of the counter-insurgency thinking and the carceral system that Dr. Burton wrote about through this book. I know there are works that we could read from formerly imprisoned Palestinians; I don't want to overwhelm people who couldn't join in this book because of their past traumas and relationships with the carceral system (and I know there are a few of you who couldn't), but at some point (maybe by myself - I don't have to read everything in reading groups...) I want to read a book by a Palestinian survivor of Israeli political prisoner detention. In a lot of ways I think the fact that prisoners are at war with their captors will emerge much more saliently, but I also wonder what analyses (if any in particular) will be more specific, more or less foregrounded, or altogether different.

video chat details

In an hour (at 12pm ET) let's get together¹ and chat about whatever we've read this week. The link to join is here (if that doesn't work, the url is below)

https://al2.in/ReadingGroupRoom

(You don't seem to be signed up; you should consider signing up to get these in your inbox.)

supporting The Sameer Project

Please buy books (like our next book, Theory of Water) from Open Books. Proceeds from the book sales at Open Books go to The Sameer Project, keeping Palestinians in Gaza alive. If you already have the book, or can't buy it from Open Books because you're not in the US or something, please consider making a direct donation to one of The Sameer Project's campaigns (linked earlier). Thank you so much.