My Resistance Syllabus

Here’s three books I’m reading this week that I’ve found awfully helpful in understanding how we got here and what the work ahead could be. Reading has also helped tamp down my instincts to spiral into news and rumors that aren’t helpful or to jump to action in a way that may end up being counter-productive. Especially as a straight white guy, listening, learning, and amplifying feel like the most important things.

Three (mostly) Free Books:

Beyond Molotovs — A Visual Handbook of Anti-Authoritarian Strategies

Each chapter of this book highlights a different movement or method that has been used by a resistance group somewhere in the world. As someone who worries about who is running the big social media sites and what kinds of control they could exert, this book is a goldmine of ways to speak out, disrupt, and expose in ways that we can control. It’s also just furiously inspiring and beautiful.

You can read the PDF for free here: https://www.transcript-publishing.com/978-3-8376-7055-4/beyond-molotovs-a-visual-handbook-of-anti-authoritarian-strategies/, or pay to download/print it. I ordered a physical copy through Columbia University Press.

Emergent Strategy — adrienne maree brown

I read this book every few years, and every time it’s like it’s brand new and written exactly for the moment that I am in. This book is a gift and a map and a call to action and joy. I truly believe it is required reading for anyone working within any kind of movement. brown is my favorite kind of scholar, one who does not, to grab a quote from Beyond Molotovs, “maintain the paralyzing and illusory boundaries between academic theory, art, and activism.”

AK Press, the publisher of Emergent Strategy, is offering the e-book for free right now: https://www.akpress.org/emergentstrategy.html

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI — Yuval Noah Harari

I read about half of Harari’s book Sapiens on a recommendation from a friend and never got really into it. Nexus, however, has me completely hooked. I’m not even done with it yet, but the prologue and first few chapters have laid out so much of how information and communication work from perspectives I’ve never considered, in positive and negative ways. It paints a pretty terrifying picture of where we are and could go, but also in how to resist and create a better path.

You can read the prologue here: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Nexus/PYvsEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover, which is very good (and, like Emergent Strategy, feels like it was written this week). If you have a Spotify Premium account, it’s also included as an audiobook.