
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


Is the arrow of history one of progress, where things just keep getting more bureaucratic and more complex, or is there another story that we could tell about the past? This week we’re cracking open David Graeber and David Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything, which argues that the arrow of progress is flat out WRONG. Instead of there being a single story of history that requires us to live these enfeebled, isolated, matrixy lives, there is a whole world of possibility out there for what a society *could* look like, but they’ve been keeping it from you! Or have they? We enter into this exploration with some skepticism (at least Nastia does), because it’s possible that there are other competing systems that litter history, but surely there’s something meaningful about the fact that they’ve all been subsumed into the monetized beast that is the modern capitalist technotopia (or dystopia, the designation of which is inversely dependent on how much paid vacation leave you get and directly dependent to how much time you spend deboning chickens on the Perdue production line). Whatever the case may be, we are listening, Davids - because any change starts with an idea, and this book is full of ‘em.
By DemystifySci4.6
5656 ratings
Is the arrow of history one of progress, where things just keep getting more bureaucratic and more complex, or is there another story that we could tell about the past? This week we’re cracking open David Graeber and David Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything, which argues that the arrow of progress is flat out WRONG. Instead of there being a single story of history that requires us to live these enfeebled, isolated, matrixy lives, there is a whole world of possibility out there for what a society *could* look like, but they’ve been keeping it from you! Or have they? We enter into this exploration with some skepticism (at least Nastia does), because it’s possible that there are other competing systems that litter history, but surely there’s something meaningful about the fact that they’ve all been subsumed into the monetized beast that is the modern capitalist technotopia (or dystopia, the designation of which is inversely dependent on how much paid vacation leave you get and directly dependent to how much time you spend deboning chickens on the Perdue production line). Whatever the case may be, we are listening, Davids - because any change starts with an idea, and this book is full of ‘em.

975 Listeners

445 Listeners

433 Listeners

3,325 Listeners

1,274 Listeners

485 Listeners

600 Listeners

328 Listeners

251 Listeners

1,179 Listeners

368 Listeners

33 Listeners

75 Listeners

160 Listeners

331 Listeners