Reading List

The Decline of the West

Oswald Spengler

The original civilizational decay thesis. Written in 1918. Still the most comprehensive framework for understanding how cultures rise, peak, and fall.

The Managerial Revolution

James Burnham

Predicted in 1941 that neither capitalism nor socialism would win, instead, a new class of managers and bureaucrats would capture the institutions of both. He was right. The managerial class is the gerontocracy's life work.

The Wages of Destruction

Adam Tooze

The definitive economic history of Nazi Germany. The lesson is what happens when a world-class industrial economy misdirects its resources. How a nation can have extraordinary capability and still lose because the system pointing that very capability at the wrong target is fundamentally broken.

Bullshit Jobs

David Graeber

The fake work economy. Though Graeber was a leftist and I disagree with most of his prescriptions, his diagnosis is airtight: half the white-collar economy produces nothing and everyone inside it knows it.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Neil Postman

Originally written in 1985 about television, but applies more precisely to social media than anything ever written about social media. Huxley was right, Orwell was wrong. The threat is not authoritarian control, but voluntary submission to entertainment itself. We will be distracted, not oppressed.

Zero to One

Peter Thiel

The single best book on what it means to build something new. Monopoly thinking, having a specific vision of the future and engineering toward it rather than iterating blindly, is the philosophical backbone of this manifesto.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra / Beyond Good and Evil

Friedrich Nietzsche

A civilization that loses the capacity to create its own values collapses into nihilism. The last man, comfortable, risk-averse, optimizing for safety, is the terminal state of a culture that has stopped building. Vitalism is the counter-thesis to nihilism.

Mobilize

Shyam Sankar & Madeline Hart

The argument for rebuilding the American defense industrial base. Sankar's thesis is that institutional decay is the primary threat to American security, not any foreign adversary, extends far beyond defense. The rest of the American economy is the same story in civilian clothes. Admittedly, my inspiration for this manifesto was this book.

Freedom's Forge

Arthur Herman

How American private industry produced victory in World War II. Directed national energy, channeled through private enterprise with obstacles removed, produces results at a scale and speed that no central planning apparatus can match.

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant

The clearest articulation of leverage, specific knowledge, and how individuals create asymmetric value created in the last decade. Income = Accountability + Leverage + Specific Knowledge. Human judgment is the durable and likely last form of human value in a world where information processing is automated.

Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

René Girard

People don't want things independently, they want what other people want. The algorithmic monoculture is mimetic desire industrialized. A thousand identical marketing agencies are not a market phenomenon. They are a mimetic phenomenon accelerated by recommendation algorithms.

Antifragile

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Systems that gain from disorder versus systems that break from it. The modern economy is fragile because it depends on infrastructure that hasn't been updated in decades. The goal is antifragility, businesses and systems that get stronger under stress because the infrastructure adapts.

Report on Manufactures (1791)

Alexander Hamilton

Hamilton argued that a nation that cannot manufacture is a nation that cannot sustain independence. Two hundred thirty-five years later, the argument has not changed, but the country has forgotten it.

Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations (1964)

Nikolai Kardashev

Civilizational advancement measured by energy capture and deployment.

The Republic

Plato

What does a just and functional society actually look like? What kind of people does it require?

Notes on e/acc Principles and Tenets

Beff Jezos (Guillaume Verdon) & Bayeslord

The effective accelerationism manifesto. Technological progress and economic growth as a thermodynamic process, civilization as an engine for moving more energy and information through the universe. The argument is the effectively the same one Kardashev made in physics and Hamilton made in policy, just modern day.