Related Recs

🛒

Quitting amazon

hear me out—this one might feel impossible, but i quit purchasing items on Amazon in 2018 and cancelled my GoodReads account shortly after. i did some serious reflection and realized i’d become super reliant upon, and frankly, quite used to the instant gratification of purchasing something and knowing i’d have it within a day. that’s not normal. the labor practices, economics, and environmental impacts of getting what you want from the internet delivered quickly and right to your door are skewed. i was filling a void in myself with mindless purchases. i’m aware that they service a huge swath of the internet (Amazon Web Services), own Whole Foods and Abe Books, and will likely take over more businesses we like and rely on. weaning off and avoiding entirely is very very hard, but it can also be a measured decision. that said, i know that it is a privilege to abstain from Amazon. i am able bodied, i don’t have kids, i have access to a car, i live in an urban environment with access to a lot of stuff at my fingertips. but making the choice to break out of the Amazon loop has ultimately been better for my pocketbook and better for my relationship to these mega-tech-companies that have their fingers in everything. in contrast, i’m becoming more interested in alternate economies, like bartering and sharing. i love the idea of having commonly shared tools and items (tool libraries are very cool). we don’t need to own it all, we have each other. interested in exploring more? the zine pictured below is a great start, and summarizes a much larger book by the same author on how to resist the leviathan that is Amazon.

@salad_valet

Jan 22, 2025

18

🦥

How to do nothing by Jenny Odell

a treatise on the attention economy - checked it out on libby and got through it over the course of a work day, a lot of really interesting social and cultural explorations about how time itself is the final frontier of hypercapitalism and what decommodification of our attention and time should look like the book starts with a story about the oldest redwood tree in oakland and how the only reason it’s still standing is bc it’s unmillable, and how being uncommercializable is essential to our survival. it ends with an exploration of alt social media platforms (mostly p2p ones) and what keeping the good parts of the social internet and rejecting the bad ones should look like all in all a super valuable read; my only nitpick with the book is that odell isn’t just charting the attention economy but also attempting to “solve” it and relate it back to broader concepts about labor and social organizing, but her background is in the arts which leads to some really wonderful references to drive the points home while also missing some critical racial + socioeconomic analyses that one would expect (or at least really appreciate) from the book she promises to deliver in the introduction. but this does also make the book easier to read which is good because everyone should definitely engage with what she has to say will definitely be revisiting

@alaiyo

Mar 25, 2024

🌎

slow down - Kohei Saito

this book has galvanized me to change something about my lifestyle/outlook in a way no book has in a loooong time. if you’ve ever wondered what a solution to the climate crisis could look like that doesn’t rely on the state enforcing top-down solutions at the cost of individual liberties, doesn’t rely on capitalist corporations selling you technology to profit from crisis and that causes exploitation in the foreign countries where its raw materials are extracted from, doesn’t divert responsibility onto individuals by insisting it’s your fault for not using metal straws, and doesn’t bank on wishful thinking that AI will provide a lifestyle of luxury for all, but that instead emphasizes reprioritizing connection to community and communal self governance, meaningful labor and a sustainable work life balance, the human right to their environment, and an economic shift towards prioritizing practical use over scarcity-based profiteering, then this book is for you. we will have to stop growing our global economy though, but it’s actually going to be better that way.

@royallmonarch

May 30, 2024

1

Top Recs from @acsoul

🫂

Would That I

with. each. love. i. cut. loose. i. was. never. the. same. watching. still. living. roots. be. consumed. by. the. flame.

@acsoul

Jan 13, 2025

📖

i who have never known men - a novel by jacqueline harpman

finished this masterpiece when i was traveling in tblisi, georgia last year. beautiful and dreadful read. women are sacred and divine. true love is women and i will d1e on this hill

@acsoul

Jan 9, 2025

🎬

Past Lives (2023)

last watch from ‘24. still cannot get over how beautiful and painful it is. so waiting room by phoebe bridgers coded :c

@acsoul

Jan 8, 2025