2025 Book Club Hangout (Transcript)

Reflecting on a year of reading about the emergence of modernity, 1200-1600

Lightly cleaned-up and edited Granola transcript of 2025 Contraptions book club hangout on December 19. Present: Randy Lubin, Aneesh Sathe, John Neil Conkle, seanstevenson, Kyle Mathews and me. I’ve added name tags where obvious or where I remember who said what. If you were there and can bind one of the open Them(n) variables to names, please post a comment and I’ll update.

ChatGPT did some compressions/omissions even though I told it to just cleanup, so here is the raw transcript (thanks Kyle) as well. For those who did the book club but couldn’t join the hangout, I invite you to add your reflections as comments.

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Venkat: Anyway: twelve books, kind of done. Let’s go around—share how many you finished and some highlights. I finished eleven and a half of the official reads. I still have about a third left of 1493. I did at least three or four side reads, so I can claim more points than on the official list. I read an extra Venice book, an extra Steppe Nomads book, and a book about Buenos Aires for a trip that turned out to be connected to the reading theme. I’m counting that too. I read The Chivalric Turn—unexpectedly interesting, probably my most interesting side read. No particular standout among the official ones; they were all interesting triangulations. No favorites—learned something from all of them.

Okay, going left to right. John?

John: All right. I just unmuted. In terms of the books, I at least skimmed most of them that were on Kindle. I read the whole of City of Fortune—actually multiple times. Not sure it was a standout in terms of totally new content, but it was a compelling narrative and fun to listen to. I also got into something Kyle posted about in the chat: Before European Hegemony. Looking forward to that.

Venkat: And highlights through the year?

John: If I’m scoring myself, I’d give myself a B-plus. One interesting rabbit trail: City of Fortune got me thinking about the Renaissance—especially the “Northern Renaissance,” which feels under-discussed beyond what comes up on Venkat’s blog. One of your major claims, Venkat, is that modernity is not only a Western/Italian phenomenon, which got me brushing up on Northern Europe. There’s so much I’d never really seen clearly—especially “learning how to see,” which I think you’ve suggested is part of modernity. Northern Europe contributed a lot to that dynamic. So that side trail was a highlight for me.

Randy: I score a 10-and-a-half, plus a few bonus side reads. Favorites: I loved Before European Hegemony, and I really liked Inventing the Renaissance. Together they gave me a big “world system contraption-y” view: Before European Hegemony was more economically focused, and Inventing the Renaissance gave such a rich slice of what was going on in Italy and surrounding areas. It also disabused a bunch of notions of what the Renaissance included. Lots of fun contraptions I hadn’t really thought about—like the fractal patron-client system stuff I associated with ancient Rome, but didn’t realize persisted through the Italian Renaissance. I loved so many of them, and they’re all different. It’s been a pleasure.

Sean: I’d score myself around a nine, but a couple are halves. In the middle of the year—between Montaigne and Don Quixote—I finished Don Quixote and got halfway through Montaigne, but it was hard to recover. I finished Utopia about 20 minutes ago. And I still have to go back to 1493, which I’m enjoying. I like anything that shows Western culture depending on things like the potato, or malaria shaping where culture is the way it is. I live in Maryland—right south of me, malaria used to dominate concerns; north of me, not so much.

Being part of the book club also made a trip to Rome in the middle of the year very meaningful. Seeing the statuary and everything—it made it feel like, “oh, this really was a thing,” especially noticing what was earlier and then how Bernini takes over later. No single book seemed much better than the others. The book I was most surprised by was Monkey King—I didn’t see that coming, how much I enjoyed it.

Anish: I think I read all the books except one, which will take a few more months to finish. Besides that, I read five more books. No single one was amazing, but I found Kingdoms of Faith very nice—good orientation, especially how much depends on the period when Spain wasn’t Spain yet, and how 1493 feels like a reaction to the Muslim period in Spain.

Also, the books that led into the Asian side were nice for me personally. I moved to San Diego a couple years ago from Singapore, so I’d been exposed to many of those places, but I didn’t appreciate the historical depth until reading these. I haven’t read the “Hegemony” book yet, but I should order it; sounds like a really nice read.

Kyle: Last but not least: I read all the books at the beginning of the year, but we had a baby in August, so I dropped the book club for a while. I’m back now. I also got lucky because I’d already read 1493, so that was kind of a freebie. I’ll try to pick up Utopia over the Christmas holidays.

I read Before European Hegemony—however you pronounce that—and it was super interesting. My impression of the whole year: “modernity is already here, but unevenly distributed.” Growing up, I read lots of medieval fairy tales—my parents had books—so I had that charming sense of the past, but the people always seemed weird and foreign in their concerns and how they thought.

What surprised me was starting with the Venice book: the key characters and the history didn’t feel alien. They felt very similar to me. And that kept cropping up—different people in different places, but recognizably modern concerns.

The printing press book did a really good job of showing “the medium is the message”: how printing warped people’s brains. The same conditions—broad information, lots of decisions—existed in isolated places, but Venice was interesting because it had a huge archive and traded with everybody. An individual could sift diverse information and form a coherent view not trapped in a local cultural gravity well. Printing made that broadly possible for elites: suddenly you could have a library, read ancient and contemporary books, compare them. Then printing got cheap in the 1700s and 1800s and forced more people into that condition. And then TV obliterated any remaining pockets of people not seeing broadly selected information.

I also picked up A Secular Age by Charles Taylor—haven’t read much yet—but it seems related: tracing a shift from more religious-dominated thinking to broadly secular. I’ve always been interested in how ideas develop, so this year’s reading felt like a set of case studies for that.

Venkat: Okay, we have initial impressions. Floor is open—unmute and bring up anything you want.

A couple things for me. First, since I’m finishing 1493, it strikes me that even within “the West,” the story is unreasonably Anglo-laden. The shaping of the Americas seems much more driven by what the Spanish were doing in Central and South America, which percolated upward, rather than the Anglo story. That’s been a big reset for me, because it’s so at odds with how things are now, where those regions are much weaker.

Second, 1493 gives an interesting triangulation of China. We got an inside-out view through Monkey King—imaginative stories, telling a ninth-century story in the sixteenth century—and then the outside view through 1493: currency crisis, silver, and so on. The disconnect between inside and outside psyches was fascinating.

Third: Kyle’s point. My starting thesis was modernity’s clock should start 300 years earlier than we normally do—1200 instead of 1500. That thesis was roughly validated. But if you put numbers on “modernity is unevenly distributed,” how do you measure it?

One pair of data points: before this year I read Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities. Istanbul/Byzantium and Venice were power centers with a flippening. Early on, Venice looked up to Constantinople as the center of civilization. By 1200, it flipped: Venetians regarded the Byzantines as backward, and saw themselves as the frontier of reality. You see it in attitudes: same era, similar material capacities—ships, building, roads—but culturally it was worlds apart. Venetians were inventing bookkeeping and a kind of republican governance; Byzantines were stuck in Roman-era governance.

It suggests an exercise: define a metric for uneven modernity, run it globally from 1200 to 1600. India is interesting: I’d argue modernity arrived with Islam—gunpowder, modern courts, legal code, lots of modernization with Islamic rule. That’d be an interesting research project.

Kyle: Even in contemporary terms—last hundred years—post–World War II leadership in the Americas and Europe seemed very reality-focused. Maybe “modern” is basically “in touch with reality”: how closely are you hewing to reality, and how much of reality can you consume? Leaders now often seem like they’re in fairy tales, wandering around, losing touch with reality. World War II forced contact with reality—and there was an explosion of science and engineering, literature, and cultures unifying.

In the past, Venice was very reality-focused: out to make money, so lots of reality tests, close attention to success and failure. Plus they were in contact with Europe, the Middle East, and knew things about Asia—lots of diverse reality information flowing in. If you have enough diverse reality information, it turns your brain into a certain modern-ish kind of thinker. That might be a unified way of saying it.

Venkat: Footnote: the Indonesia book outlined that Majapahit was extremely non-reality-based—living in ghosts and magic. Interesting ships, powerful trade networks, but fairy-tale land.

Kyle: Yeah. They were good at ships, but it didn’t seem to affect them. They had tropical foods, tons of resources, the center of trading—everyone went through them—so it was all easy. It’s like the barbarian/civilized pattern: barbarians come over, people get fat and stupid, lose touch with reality, then get dominated again. Dumbified by success.

Them(1): The more monopoly you have on wealth, trade, resources, the less you need to be in touch with reality in the short run.

Kyle: Exactly.

Them(2): Another thought trail for me—this came from Inventing the Renaissance: one of the first intellectual dominoes for modernity was Petrarch (early 1300s). I knew almost nothing about him. His project was basically: we’re in decline from Rome; if we get our kids reading the classics, they’ll learn virtue and create a golden age. That kicked off a multi-generation program leading to the early Renaissance intellectual milieu—everyone reading classics—and that created more intellectual and philosophical diversity beyond what the Church provided.

Kyle: Yeah. I started a biography too. The manuscript hunting was intense: organizing trips to monasteries, searching moldy manuscripts, finding texts nobody had. It felt like an online club, but physical.

Them(3): And the Byzantines: “we found a guy who speaks ancient Greek”—then everybody learned ancient Greek.

Kyle: Yeah—that was in the printing book too.

Anish: A theme I noticed across Spain and the east books: if they could import good management, they could do it better. At some point they ran out of land, and the only way to improve was better ways of gathering wealth. Earlier it wasn’t an issue, but as constraints tightened they asked, “how can we do more with what we have?” The equatorial regions didn’t have those issues—food all the time. My hypothesis: for your scanline, the most “modern” might correlate with where management was best. I haven’t found books on that, but I also haven’t searched.

Venkat: You read Gunpowder Empires too, right?

Anish: Yes.

Venkat: That’s a good middle period: gunpowder, paper, stuff making its way to Europe. Another interesting one was the Ibn Khaldun book—almost an alt-history of how cultural settings matter. Around 1000, Islam and Europe were equally poised for modernity trajectories. Why did Islam falter while Europe took off? You get glimpses in Ibn Khaldun: a strong legal culture, due process, governance. But maybe scarcity constraints—deserts, North Africa—limited expression of what that operating system enabled. That might be a theory.

Kyle: The printing press book also contrasted Northern vs Southern Europe: the Church cracked down on printing, suppressing cultural diversity. Southern Europe is still poorer than Northern Europe. Italy and Spain were leading-edge, then it flipped over a few centuries.

Venkat: You can extrapolate that down to the Islamic belt. Islamic clergy were even more resistant to printing—the Qur’an wasn’t printed for centuries. Even when they had printing, they restricted printing the Qur’an. Something is going on there.

Kyle: The author put it plainly: a key difference is you can have multiple books open at the same time and compare them. That rapid comparison produces insights. Suppressing that comparison suppresses the ability to see problems with your current space—if it’s all you know, you can’t see it as contingent.

Randy: Adjacent point: pamphlets and letters circulate, creating a continent-scale intellectual network. Even if only a tiny percent in each city is engaged, it magnifies. More eyes, more experiments in parallel. Eisenstein contrasts not having to remember everything. I’d recently read Francis Yates on memory arts—Giordano Bruno and others. Reading those in sequence was fun, seeing Eisenstein responding.

Kyle: It’s funny—now with LLMs, I don’t write notes. I can recreate a thought by prompting a chat, so why take notes?

Venkat: Flip side: automatic transcripts and note generation. The assistant can give a summary that’s enough of a prompt, and then you can “vivify” the conversation by feeding it back into an LLM.

Kyle: Or critique everything we said and pick out the silly comments.

Venkat: Yeah.

Venkat: A couple of other thought trails. John asked me about a “postmodernity machine.” My hypothesis: a 400-year cycle, then it’s fully deployed. For modernity: 1200–1600, by 1600 modernity OS is in production in significant parts of the world. Then 1600–2000 is a plateau where modernity is dominant, but another OS is being built under it: postmodernity. Now we’re entering the era where postmodernity becomes default, and modernity declines fast—collapse is faster than construction.

Could we do a similar book club about postmodernity? Harder: more complex, more people, bigger machine. One tractable thread emerged at the margins this year: 1493 highlighted agency among enslaved people and Native Americans shaping history in the margins. Maybe postmodernity is less about building a machine and more about improvising and hacking a complex system from below—because the world becomes too complex to map, document, and govern in a “machine” way. That might be an early postmodern adaptation: living under a machine and hacking it from below.

Them (4): If we follow that line: cyberpunk fiction is a natural angle.

Venkat: Nonfiction: Henry Farrell’s Underground Empire, and Nils Gilman’s edited collection Deviant Globalization. Where leaders fail to govern complexity, organic adaptations emerge: criminal gangs, click farms, underground crypto, trafficking, smuggling. That might be an oblique way to study postmodernity.

Kyle: That matches the “declining state capacity” theme.

Them (5): Also: The Wire is a great fictional treatment.

Kyle: Another approach: how modernist regimes defend themselves—China is interesting with the Great Firewall, trying to contain complexity to keep it governable.

Venkat: Have any of you read the Dan Wang book? Breakneck?

Kyle: I started it.

Venkat: That’s the flip side: trying to force modernity to become postmodernity by pushing the accelerator. I suspect that fails.

Kyle: America is like plunging headlong—innovating into the postmodern world—while Europe and China try to keep things creaking along.

Anish: Another extreme: look at TikToks of people teaching each other how to use tools for free—or committing crime—like “how to get things off Amazon for free.” That’s where the new world is being built. Maybe a month just on social media as primary material.

Venkat: That raises a timeline issue. If postmodernity is real, it shouldn’t have started in 1950. If my thesis holds, it started 400 years ago. If slave and Native American cultures were early postmodern adaptations, what are other examples across 1600–2000?

Kyle: Spinoza comes to mind.

Venkat: Yes. Spinoza as early postmodern at the philosophical level. I read The Courtier and the Heretic (Spinoza vs Leibniz). Spinoza is postmodern; Leibniz is late modern—philosophically reactionary even if technically forward-looking. What else between 1600 and 2000?

Them (6): Maybe French Revolution visions. Romanticism too. The “wanderer above the sea of fog” type motif—announcing postmodernity.

Them (7): Quick break-in: postindustrialism is a worn term. One concrete example: positional goods. Not “can I eat,” but “is my house in the right neighborhood.” A striking case study: nightclub economies—the product is temporary status. There’s a book about the nightclub economy published by The Economist (author/title not recalled here).

Venkat: That’s a good point: democratization of positional goods. In modernity, positional goods existed but were restricted—like nobles and knights (even The Chivalric Turn has some of that). Now it’s democratized—people in slums compete over positional goods.

Also: the “economic frame” itself might be postmodern. Pre-1600, “the economy” as such didn’t exist as a conceptual lens. People understood goods and costs, vague supply/demand, but not a full “economic view.” Ibn Khaldun’s “economy” reads like alchemy—monarchical fiat framing. So early economics—maybe pre–Adam Smith or Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment—might be good on this track. The Scottish Enlightenment had postmodern characteristics.

Sean: I found an anthropology book: Beyond Nature and Culture by Philippe Descola. It argues there isn’t one nature—there are multiple notions of nature across cultures. Dense, French style, but interesting. Yuk Hui mentions it (Cosmotechnics / related).

Venkat: That’s another point: I’d take the suggestion and rewind 400 years. Hobbes and Rousseau (mid-17th century) are two different “nature” theories—Hobbesian vs noble savage. That plurality is postmodern. Pre-modern views of nature were religious myths; modernity offers a few reality-based myths; postmodernity offers a plurality.

Anish: Another angle, building on Sean: literature and gardens. There’s a pattern of the garden across the world—Islamic gardens, Japanese gardens, Victorian gardens, American parks—taking control of nature. For kings, the garden was the nightclub for a while. Then there’s a flip: from bringing a civilized nature into your boundary to building dams and administering nature outside your boundaries—terraforming instinct.

Venkat: That’s good: “garden the backyard” vs “garden the world.” Humboldt might be a symbol—going out and thinking in terms of running the world rather than running your backyard.

Venkat: Other “world processes” besides the economy and nature?

Randy: Media seems likely—French Revolution press, pamphlets, propaganda; Hearst and yellow journalism.

Kyle: Yeah: propaganda as a lens.

Sean: Noosphere and “cathexis” come up in think-tank traditions—taking theoretical concepts seriously even when not materially present. My litmus test: those feel like “resisting postmodernity” attempts—how to regain control of the machine. China might want those.

Venkat: This suggests a B-plot: some people believe you can keep building controllable machines; others think you can only adapt. That tension might guide the reading list.

I started The Unaccountability Machine (Dan Davies). It’s right on the border of whether you can build a machine you can control.

Kyle: Another lens: not just crises and disasters, but what if postmodernity succeeds—has a golden era. Modernity had golden ages. For postmodernity, Iain M. Banks’s Culture series is one of the few fictional explorations of a happy, prosperous system. He explores the edges, but you get glimpses of what “happy postmodern” might look like.

Venkat: Has anyone written a nonfiction treatment of “luxury space communism”? Banks is like “luxury space anarchy.”

Them: Star Trek is a default, but on-the-nose.

Venkat: Another theme: progress through crises vs progress through design. Modernity installation had a more planned feel—Venice administrative empire, Iberian exploration. Postmodernity feels more “agile,” fail-fast, crash-early. Colonialism itself was improvised, path-dependent, with autonomy and little oversight.

Kyle: Lots of blood and horror.

Venkat: Lots of blood—maybe like agile programming too. Move fast and break things.

Kyle: Touché.

Venkat: If modernity took 1200–1600 to install and by 1600 it was “in production,” what’s the golden age of modernity? I’d probably pick England in the late Victorian era—maybe as good as it gets. America never fully modernized—joined late, had institutional regress like slavery, leapfrogged in some ways, so it’s a weird mix: moon landings and things that look 16th century.

If our 400-year hypothesis holds, the year 2000 marks the start of postmodernity’s mature plateau. Maybe the best postmodernity can deliver is around 2150—transposing the timeline. Symbolically: Big Ben as motif for Victorian modernity; Big Ben is also a recurring motif in Mrs. Dalloway, which inaugurates modernist literature—clock entering your life.

Kyle: Mars colony gets going.

Venkat: On-the-nose symbol, but maybe. Time is another axis. Pendulum clocks are 1600 and later—Galileo principle, Huygens. Before that: water clocks, sundials, and approximate village time.

Kyle: Stories of villages ringing at different times, each with their own idiosyncratic timing.

Venkat: I have a good book on this: David Landes, Revolution in Time, on the history of the clock across the period.

Also: in the age of LLMs, I might abandon some writing projects. Next year I might do more coding and experiments with AI rather than straight writing. I’m vibe-coding a book out of my Twitter archive—impossible two years ago, now I can do it myself. It’s almost done; I’ll publish in a couple weeks.

Anyway, I don’t want to keep you too long—we’re five minutes over. This is sounding like a promising theme: emergence of the postmodernity machine through adaptation from the outside of an emergent complex beast, while retaining the 400-year develop-and-deploy hypothesis.

Kyle: It’s been really fun. I’ve tried other book clubs and never liked the books or the people or what they said. This is a good club. And it’s topical. It’s a weird time; having other people and a targeted reading list helps wrap our heads around it. Good for peace of mind—feels less chaotic than it seems.

Venkat: Yeah. Been a pleasure. This year will need more participatory development because it’s more complex—more candidate books and threads. I’ll lay out the basic thesis from this hour, then open a Google Form for recommendations: themes, books, individuals, or pointed queries we can use to find books. We might also do more months with multiple selections instead of one book.

Procedural question before we sign off: this year I did one book per month for about nine months, with a couple months of choice/pick-your-own. Did that balance feel right? Should we do more?

Kyle: The balance was good. There has to be a spine that connects everyone together so the conversation works.

Venkat: That’ll be more challenging this year, but maybe eight common reads and four with some degree of choice.

Kyle: Sounds good.

Randy: Also: the “extra credit” books worked well—didn’t make the cut, but alternate views on the same subtopic.

Kyle: For the eager beavers with weirdly large amounts of free time.

Venkat: I was questioning Anish because I think he holds the record for side reads. He said he’s been so busy, this is how he relaxes—relaxing super hard.

Anish: I didn’t read books for like seven years during startup life, and once I left I rebounded into reading. Maybe that’s part of it.

Venkat: All right. Thanks, guys. This was really fun and a good reflection on the year.