rachel binx ⤇ blog

2025 was the year of Monk Mode, quiet environments and deep thinking.

• Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
• favorite • The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind
• The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
• disliked • Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity
• disliked • Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

• favorite • The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
• Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump
• Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)
• Irregular Army: How the US Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, and Criminals to Fight the War on Terror

• favorite • Worn: A People’s History of Clothing
• The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future
• Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door — Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy
• Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy

• American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest
• Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe
• Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization
• Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World - and How We Can Take It Back

• Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
• Memory Lane: The Perfectly Imperfect Ways We Remember
• The Design of Everyday Things
• More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave
• The Sociopath Next Door
• The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold

• Moonbound

I love putting these together becuase it reveals to me my obsessions over the past year. As a (rather upsetting) election year, you can see that I spent awhile fixating on America and contemporary culture, trying to figure out “why are we like this??”

This year also included a deeper fixation on health and longetivity — I do believe there was a larger culture shift around this, but I am probably over-weighting it because my circle and I are reaching a Certain Age. I have a backlog of several more books along these lines that friends recommended… we’ll see how much more I want to learn about seed oils ;)

• Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles
• Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves
• Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga
• Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
• Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
• Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans

• Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity
• The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self
• Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health
• How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain
• Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection
• Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

• Achieving Our Country : Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America
• Poverty, by America
• Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
• Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

• There Is No Antimemetics Division

• The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business
• The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
• The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
• The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present
• The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End
• How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

• Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

What a year, what a year! This was a pretty varied one for me, with some high highs and some lowwww lows.

I’m still on my non-fiction reading kick, but my attention has been seeping outwards in different directions. I’ve been enjoying various deep-dives, a vertiable sample platter of cultural quirks.

Let me know if you decide to read any of these books — I do love to discuss! :)

• The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket
• How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World
• Wrong Way — Joanne’s new book!

• God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
• Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock
• American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology
• Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

• Pollution Is Colonialism
• The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants
• Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping

• Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy
• Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning
• Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America’s Blood Industry

• Strange Labor
• The Every
• The Crying of Lot 49

As always — if you have reading suggestions, please send them my way :)

I’ve just finished Jenny Odell’s latest book ”Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock,” which is chock-full of mediations and ways to rethink the (western) modernized relationship to time. Highly recommend!

Part of this book reviews the rise of Scientific Management AKA Taylorism, a movement from the turn of the 19th century that sought to increase workplace efficiency. To do so, factory workers should be tasked with small, short, repetitive tasks that can be optimized down to the millisecond, to collectively ensure a faster aggregate production. The most famous early success of this was Henry Ford’s factory, able to churn out production of their Model T cars.

Labor compartmentalization does increase company profits, but the human cost of this can be pretty brutal. In a low-skilled job, this could look like the Amazon fulfillment workers who have to wear physical monitors to ensure they are packaging up boxes fast enough for 8+ hours a day. At a highly-skilled job, this can look like an aerospace company siloing its research scientists to they point that they never learn enough context to qualify for a job at a better-paid competitor. (true story, btw)

I see this compartmentalization creeping further and further into tech companies, something that has been viscerally apparent as I have been looking for work lately. Historically I have had interstitial roles between organizations, but the current hiring landscape is asking me to pick a category to slot myself into.

As we apply Taylor’s principles to job roles and responsibilities, it is unsurprising that the workers comfortably settle in to focusing on their assigned tasks, without much critical thought applied to whether or not the task should exist. I was asked in a job interview if I would want to attend planning meetings about a feature I’d be building, or if I’d rather just have tickets assigned me. It blows my mind that people would choose the latter.

Time for a bibliographic tangent — my two most formative texts in thinking about corporate labor structures are both by David Graeber, ”Utopia of Rules” and ”Bullshit Jobs” Both concern the rise of bureaucractic & administrative work, and the very real time sink these tasks take.

I could talk for hours on these two books, but the point I am trying to make is that the Project Manager role is a prime example of these “bullshit jobs.”

Much of what bureaucrats do, after all, is evaluate things. They are continually assessing, auditing, measuring, weighing the relative merits of different plans, proposals, applications, courses of action, or candidates for promotion.

Graeber, Utopia of Rules

In all fairness to PMs — in some companies, we have created a set of workers (developers, designers, etc) who no longer want to understand or contribute to the larger vision/goals of their projects. A developer who refuses to write code until they have extensive step-by-step instructions for what they need to do — well, ok, someone’s gotta write those steps out.

I would urge, instead, for tech ICs to reengage with their labor, to participate in deciding if/when/how projects are built. Fight against the alienation of labor, if we want to get all Marxist about it.

Seize the means of (code) production! Cancel those daily standup meetings! Abolish the role of PM!

Today I went digging back in my portfolio and tried to pin down when I switched over to using UI frameworks, instead of rolling my own components. Misty-eyed, I rolled around the thought “there’s always a last time a parent picks up their child” but, you know, focusing on me and how I’ve given up on coding up my own UI components.

I think it happened around 2017-2018. It’s a pretty stark demarkation in my projects — from dense, angular, monochromatic UI to large amounts of padding, rounded corners, and peeks of color. It also looks… well, sloppy. Everything’s too spaced out, and you can clearly pick out which UI framework I’m using.

Ah, but think of the time savings of using a framework! Yes of course. When I was working at Netflix, I was building internal tools where the important thing was speed & insights, with visual design polish much further down on the priorities. Antd served me well for data-dense UIs, and I didn’t give it much thought.

Templatized website builders have proliferated on the web, which is mostly a really good thing! Everyone who wants their own website should be able to make one, even if it does look, well, squarespace-y. Any tech company worth their weight these days has their own design system, a nice little component library built on top of some master framework, with small tweaks for the specific business use case.

Also, it’s BORING. It’s BORING AS HELL. Guh, bring back interesting websites, bring back the creativity that the web offers. Bring back frontend devs who aren’t afraid to get down with the mouse event handlers!!

There is so much room for creative expression on the web! Standardizing UIs makes sense for large software companies — but please, let’s hold the line with the WWW also being a space for you and me to make weird little sites.

I was thinking to do blobs, but then I realized everyone’s doing blobs. So I decided to go as garish as possible.

— Ingrid Burrington

sickos voice yes, YES!!

I read an article in Nature today about the difficulties of establishing a lunar standard time. Riveting! There are a few pieces of this that I think are interesting to consider:

The first question would be to decide whether or not to use lunar time zones. Depending on the number of lunar bases, and how far apart they are, it might make sense just to have one single lunar standard time. Similarly to how the entirety of China is one timezone — this is certainly the quickest solution for establishing ground truth.

If we do decide to go with time zones, however, then we have the challenge of determining a person’s longitude on the moon, in order to determine which zone to place them in. There have been a number of delightful books about establishing earth’s UTC (1, 2) but in our modern age this is solved by using GPS satellites. On the moon, however, we don’t have enough satellites to guarantee accurate triangulation for all locations!

To date, we don’t have a standard way of tracking “the time” on other planets, because we don’t have other humans living on planets. On Mars, for example, each rover has its own epoch time, starting from the moment the spacecraft landed on the planet. So we have highly relative calendars on a per-machine basis. It would be tempting to define lunar time by a similar metric, i.e. the first human to set up shop for a bit gets to define 00:00 on the 0th day. We’re going to have multiple countries sending missions to the moon, however, and given how well humans have got along with each other historically… it will be interesting to see how they will converge on a shared calendar system.

For the beginning, this will be the simplest solution. A lunar day lasts 24 hours and 50 minutes, which is definitely off-kilter enough to drive people crazy if they tried to stay on earth time. Martian days are 37 minutes longer than earth days — when the MSL rover was first landing on Mars, JPL operators lived on Martian time to maximize the available window of sunlight and data processing on the rover. It drove people crazyyyyy to be shifting out of sync with the rest of their loved ones, 37 minutes at a time!

The city’s too crowded, no one goes there anymore.

In the midst of our astronomical rent prices across all major cities, we have fewer and fewer creative communities. Cheap rent is a prerequisite for artists, musicians, and other creative folks to settle down. These full-time corporate jobs suck the life out of you, you ideally want a location where you can get by on a part-time job. A little bit of freelance here and there. Ample time and space to focus on your creative practice.

Enter the small art town, the utopic vision of cheap land, cheap rent, and empty buildings that are ripe for a pop-up party. A small community of people who care for each other, and collaborate on some pretty sick projects. In our modern loneliness epidemic, who isn’t seduced by the idea of living on a commune?

There’s a joke on leftist-transit twitter that Disneyland is popular because it offers Americans the opportunity to experience a walkable city in their own country. I would argue that Burning Man has turned into a similarly placating fantasy for corporate workers, yearning to experience life on a village scale.

Take one week a year to get out of your stressed urban life and slow it down, man, take a stroll around the dusty city and get to know your neighbors. Help your campmates build out infrastructure, cook some communal meals, and immerse yourself in art and music. LARP that you are a full-time creative person, and no you’d didn’t rush-order your whole outfit off of Amazon the week before.

Carnival season has historically been tolerated by the Catholic church because it acts as a pressure-release valve for the faithful. Do a little sinning, once a year in a time-boxed way, and it makes it easier to follow the rules the rest of the time. Burning Man offers that catharsis, a week of wild revelry that makes it easier to accept going back to the rest of your life. The rent keeps going up, and the workday keeps getting longer.

The last two friends I’ve brought to Bombay Beach have both said to me, “wow! this is just like Burning Man!” No, friend, Burning Man is just giving you a taste of what life could be like in a vibrant small community. I wish it wasn’t such a rare and exotic thing!

I daresay… I got more fun this year?? Or at least I didn’t spend 100% of my time reading climate books.

OTOH, I’m turning into a History Dad. Oh, you read a nice novel that you’d like to share? Sorry friend, I only do hard non-fiction on my various niche interests. And boy howdy are you gonna hear me talk about them :)

• Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
• Living in Data
• Atlas of The Invisible
• Code as a Creative Medium

• Designing Climate Solutions: A Policy Guide for Low-Carbon Energy
• Sagebrush Empire
• Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation
• The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food
• The Tainted Desert
• Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control

• Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
• Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
• Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves
• I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

• Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
• A Brief History of Timekeeping
• Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
• The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas

• Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
• Capitalist Realism
• The World For Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources
• Politics of Bitcoin

• The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny
• Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
• Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
• Cesar’s Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems
• Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows You How to Identify and Protect Yourself from Harmful People

• The Suitcase Clone
• My Year of Rest and Relaxation
• Parable of the Sower

Wow, what a year!

In terms of general reading themes, I started with a heavy climate-focus at the beginning of the year. Climate change is a hyperobject, and it’s useful to approach it from varying disciplines and rhetorical techniques. Midway through the year, though, I felt kinda saturated with this topics. Which lead to bifurcating themes for the rest of the books:

1. Appreciating the hell out of the natural world. There’s no better way to honor & respect our planet than by going deep on it! Biology, geology, chemistry, ecology, gimme all of it :)
2. Digging into the historical/political/financial reasons for why we wound up here. Sadly I see now that, in terms of climate change, we as a species know exactly what’s going on and what we would need to do to fix it. It’s the money/power systems in place that prevent us from taking swift(er) action. So basically ya girl is finally learning econ 101.

Enjoy! I hope you find a good recommendation or two.

• The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet
• Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
• Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World
• The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier
• Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
• All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis

• Certainly More Than You Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast
• Cold-Water Corals: The Biology and Geology of Deep-Sea Coral Habitats
• Coral Whisperers: Scientists on the Brink
• The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World
• Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

• The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
• The Immortality Key: Uncovering the Secret History of the Religion with No Name
• Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming
• The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
• The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy

• Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent
• Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class
• Hola Papi: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

until next year, loves :)

This year was hard for me, and also everyone else I know. Sometimes I used reading for escapism, and other times I wanted to learn more about basically… why are things so bad right now. Not the most fun, but I did learn a lot.

• This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West (my top book for my 2020)
• Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America
• Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History (Kurt Anderson double-header, oh yeahhhhh)
• Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years

• Uses of Decorating (oh no this appears to be an art book with no internet presence… shoot, it’s really good!!)
• Lurking
• Bad Blood
• Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet
• Uncanny Valley
• The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism
• Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

• The Pisces
• So Sad Today
• New Waves
• Ghost Hardware
• Dune (a re-read :) )

• The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity-and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race
• Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing
• Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

I’m on a heavy earth-sciences kick, so I’m hoping to read more books on geology and/or the geologic history of the American west. I’m kicking off the year by starting Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World ❤

🤠 yeehaw Circa January 2017 I decided to “get back into reading,” and for some reason was unable to stick with anything but dystopian sci-fi novels. 2018 was largely the same (although seriously hmu if you want sci-fi recs). In 2019, I blossomed into a person who is able to handle multiple types of books. Below are my favorites, loosely organized by theme.

My “most important” category of books this year was about the environment and climate change.

• The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions
• The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
• The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption
• Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade
• Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

^ all of these books feed into my desire to blow up my life & move to the middle of nowhere in nature. Which is impractical, but I were to do it, I would need to be able to talk intelligently about the things I was looking at (chiefly rocks and clouds) so I did buy some physical books to help out with that:

• The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen
• Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor
• Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It
• Carceral Capitalism
• Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

• Acceptance (finishing the trilogy)
• The Thing Itself (Kantian philosophy as the basis for bending time and space! What’s not to love)
• Infinite Detail
• Oval
• Borne (yes I love Jeff Vandermeer and will read anything he writes)
• The Strange Bird (yes this did make me cry)
• Children of Time

• How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
• Against Creativity
• Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
• Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now
• Burnout, The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

• Literally Show Me A Healthy Person
• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
• The Unexpected Joy of being Sober
• [How To Date Men When You Hate Men](How To Date Men When You Hate Men) (LOL)
• How to Be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals
• Feeling Great About My Butt (go buy this from Kawan :) )

For 2020, I have a few books planned/preordered that I am excited about:

• Joanne McNeil’s Lurking: How a Person Became a User
• Kyle Chayka’s The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism
• Jeff Vandermeer’s Dead Astronauts
• Melissa Broder’s The Pisces

If you’ve read this far - send me recommendations, please! I am always on the hunt for more :)