Category Archives: Recommended Reading

Articles or books Rosaliene have read and recommend.

Thought for Today: Have we all become “cloud serfs”?

25 Sunday Jan 2026

Posted by in Economy and Finance, Recommended Reading

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Front Cover Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis (UK/USA, 2024)
Photo Credit: Melville House Publishing

The digital revolution may be turning waged workers into cloud proles, who live increasingly precarious, stressful lives under the invisible thumb of algorithmic bosses…. But that’s not the most significant fact about cloud capital…. The true revolution cloud capital has inflicted on humanity is the conversion of billions of us into willing cloud serfs volunteering to labour for nothing to reproduce cloud capital for the benefit of its owners.

[…]

Technofeudalism made things infinitely worse when it demolished the fence that used to provide the liberal individual with a refuge from the market. Cloud capital has shattered the individual into fragments of data, an identity comprised of choices as expressed by clicks, which its algorithms are able to manipulate. It has produced individuals who are not so much possessive as possessed, or rather persons incapable of being self-possessed.  

Excerpts from Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis, published by Melville House Publishing, UK & USA, 2024, pp. 88 & 182.

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The Writer’s Life: New Monthly Series on the Changing Earth

11 Sunday Jan 2026

Posted by in Nature and the Environment, Recommended Reading, The Writer's Life

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Front Cover: We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth – Edited by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth
Published by The New Press, New York, USA, 2022

During the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, Dahr Jamail – an American award-winning journalist and environmental advocate – and Stan Rushworth – an elder and retired teacher of Cherokee descent living in Northern California – interviewed several people from different North American Indigenous cultures and communities, generations, and geographic. Their featured collection of interviews offers us a wide variety of perspectives on a much more integrated relationship to Earth and all human and non-human beings.

Turtle Island is a term used by some Indigenous peoples, primarily those in North America, to refer to the continent. This name stems from various Indigenous creation stories which describe the landmass as being formed on the back of a giant turtle. The concept of Turtle Island is deeply significant in many Native American cultures as it reflects their spiritual beliefs and relationship with Mother earth.

As inhabitants of these lands for thousands of generations before the arrival of European conquistadores and colonizers, Native Americans carry in their ancestral memories the rise and fall of great civilizations before ours. They have much to teach us about surviving collapse and healing our broken relationship with Mother Earth.

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Thought for Today: Tecno-dreams of Space Colonies

16 Sunday Nov 2025

Posted by in Recommended Reading, Technology

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Front Cover More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker (USA, 2025)
Photo Credit: Hachette Book Group

[Tech billionaires] will keep looking for ways to extend their control over the world unless they are curtailed. Their dreams are dreams of endless capitalism of the most brutal sort, because they know that such a system would allow them to win still more money and power. This is another reason it’s difficult to imagine a future other than the ones they promote: as the saying goes, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism….

This is why the tech billionaires tell us their futures are inevitable: to keep us from remembering that no human vision of tomorrow is truly unstoppable. They want to establish a permanent plutocracy, a tyranny of the lucky, through their machines. They are too credulous and short-sighted to see the flaws in their own plans, but they will keep trying to use the promise of their impossible futures to expand their power here and now….

Excerpt from More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker, published by Hachette Book Group, New York, USA, 2025, pp. 288-289.

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Thought for Today: A Matter of Survival

07 Sunday Sep 2025

Posted by in Recommended Reading, Social Injustice

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Cover of A Matter of Survival: Organizing to Meet Unmet Needs and Build Power in Times of Crisis by Shailly Gupta Barnes & Jarvis – PDF Publication March 5, 2025
Photo Credit: Kairos Center

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, survival organizing has continued en masse, in response to ongoing effects of the pandemic, as well as climate crisis, hunger, housing insecurity, the denial of health care, police violence, deportation defense, increasing militarism and other systemic failures of our society. As Vilchis from Union de Vecinos remarked, “Health crisis, housing crisis, all of these crises are still there. The material conditions have not changed, we just have less money and are more disorganized. The risk of losing your life to COVID is less, but your job doesn’t pay enough to cover rent or other costs of living. For many of us, life has gotten worse, but we’re not coughing as loud.”

This is particularly true for poor, low-income and marginalized communities. Cosecha will be “depending on projects of survival even more,” said Adorno, especially as it anticipates more intense attacks on undocumented people. Sycamore Collaborative is expecting hunger to continue to grow in its community. “We will hit the ‘million meal’ mark soon,” said Rev. Tañón-Santos, “and there has to be a way that we can foresee this happening and figure out how to prepare.” In Kansas City, the Bethel Neighborhood Center does not want to be “surprised…we need to be more prepared than ever,” said Sonna. Under a second Trump administration, these and other communities are also facing dramatic cuts to social welfare programs, precipitous climate breakdown, greater repression from militarized police and law enforcement and a regressive, anti-democratic political movement.

In this context, a vast network of projects of survival can play an increasingly essential role in keeping our communities safe, while politicizing and preparing grassroots communities to take coordinated action together as part of a broader social movement. Whether through mutual aid, ministry or community organizing, meeting material needs is an act of resistance in a society that punishes the poor for their poverty and misery — and prioritizes billionaires over the rest of us. If and when these efforts can be connected, scaled up and strategically organized, projects of survival can anchor the call for a society where all of our needs are met, today, tomorrow and for generations to come.

Excerpt from the Conclusion of A Matter of Survival: Organizing to Meet Unmet Needs and Build Power in Times of Crisis by Shailly Gupta Barnes & Jarvis Benson, PDF publication by The Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, New York, USA, March 5, 2025, p. 73.

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Thought for Today: Awareness is Transformative

06 Sunday Jul 2025

Posted by in Recommended Reading, Religion & Spirituality

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Front Cover: The Engaged Spiritual Life: A Buddhist Approach to Transforming Ourselves and the World by Donald Rothberg
Photo Credit: Beacon Press (USA, 2006)

For Taigen Dan Leighton, a Zen teacher, scholar of Mahayana Buddhism, and activist, mindful awareness is the meeting point of inner and outer transformation.

Awareness is transformative. It happens on the level of working out the conflicts in our own hearts and minds, as well as in the culture. In meditation, we become aware of our own inner processes and the primal separation of self and other. We come to see the interdependence of self and other, how our identity is dependent on so many things, including what’s going on in society. Once we have some sense of any particular problem in society, then we can also look at it in terms of our own involvement. No one is pure and not part of the problem; we are in a web of connections. Even though I worked to oppose the invasion of Iraq, I am still connected to the murder of Iraqi civilians.

Excerpt from The Engaged Spiritual Life: A Buddhist Approach to Transforming Ourselves and the World by Donald Rothberg, Beacon Press, USA, 2006 (p. 52).

Dr. Donald Rothberg is a leading teacher and writer on meditation, the intersection of psychology and spirituality and socially engaged Buddhism in the United States. He has practiced Buddhist meditation for over 25 years and has been significantly influenced by other spiritual traditions, particularly Jewish, Christian, and indigenous. His teaching and training have helped to pioneer new ways of connecting inner and outer transformation. He is on the Teachers’ Council of Spirit Rock in Northern California and has been an organizer, teacher, and board member of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. Dr. Rothberg has also served as director of the interfaith Socially Engaged Spirituality program at the Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco. His book, The Engaged Spiritual Life: A Buddhist Approach to Transforming Ourselves and the World, was named one of the best spiritual books of 2006 by Spirituality and Practice. Dr. Rothberg lives and teaches in Berkeley, California.

Thought for Today: The Lifehouse for Mutual Care

04 Sunday May 2025

Posted by in Recommended Reading, Uncategorized

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Front Cover: Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire by Adam Greenfield
Photo Credit: Verso Books (UK/USA, 2024)

The fundamental idea of the Lifehouse [in a disaster zone] is that there should be a place in every three- or four-city block radius where you can charge your phone when the power’s down everywhere else, draw drinking water when the supply from the mains is for whatever reason untrustworthy, gather with your neighbors to discuss matters of common concern, organize reliable childcare, borrow tools it doesn’t make sense for any one household to own individually and so on—and that these can and should be one and the same place. As a foundation for collective resourcefulness, the Lifehouse is a practical implementation of the values we’ve spent this book exploring.

Excerpt from Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire by Adam Greenfield, Verso Books, UK/USA, 2024 (p. 167).

Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire is an urgent and practical guide to community resilience in the face of climate catastrophe and the collapse of late-stage capitalism. Greenfield recovers lessons from the Black Panther survival programs (USA), the astonishingly effective Occupy Sandy disaster-relief effort (NYC/USA), the solidarity networks of crisis-era Greece, as well as municipalist Spain and autonomous Rojava (Syria), to show how practices of mutual care and local power can help shelter us from a future that often feels like it has no place for us or the values we cherish.

Adam Greenfield is an American best-selling author, urbanist, and critical futurist, based in London since 2013. He has spent the past quarter-century thinking and working at the intersection of technology, design and politics with everyday life. Selected in 2013 as Senior Urban Fellow at the LSE Cities center of the London School of Economics, he previously taught in New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and the Urban Design program at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. His books include Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Urban Computing and Its Discontents, and the bestsellers Against the Smart City and Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1968, he graduated with a degree in cultural studies at New York University in 1989. Between 1995 and 2000, he served as a Psychological Operations Specialist in the U.S. Army Special Operations Command.

Thought for Today: The Doorway in the Ruins

09 Sunday Jun 2024

Posted by in Human Behavior, Recommended Reading

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Front Cover: A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit
Photo Credit: Penguin Books (USA, 2009)

Who are you? Who are we? The history of disaster demonstrates that most of us are social animals, hungry for connection, as well as for purpose and meaning. It also suggests that if this is who we are, then everyday life in most places is a disaster that disruptions sometimes give us a chance to change. They are a crack in the walls that ordinarily hem us in, and what floods in can be enormously destructive—or creative. Hierarchies and institutions are inadequate to these circumstances; they are often what fails in such crises. Civil society is what succeeds, not only in an emotional demonstration of altruism and mutual aid but also in a practical mustering of creativity and resources to meet the challenges.

Excerpt from “Epilogue: The Doorway in the Ruins,” A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit, Penguin Books, New York, USA, 2009 (p. 305).

The disasters covered in this book include: Earthquake San Francisco/California/USA (1906), Explosion Halifax/Nova Scotia/Canada (1917), The Blitz/London/UK (1940), Earthquake Mexico City/Mexico (1985), Bombing World Trade Center/New York/USA (2001), and Hurricane Katrina New Orleans/USA (2005).

REBECCA SOLNIT, writer, historian, and activist, is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and urban history, popular power, social change and insurrection, hope and catastrophe. Her books include Orwell’s Roses; Recollections of My Nonexistence; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she writes regularly for the Guardian, serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and recently launched the climate project Not Too Late (nottoolateclimate.com).

Thought for Today: Unintended Deaths

07 Sunday Apr 2024

Posted by in Human Behavior, Recommended Reading, United States

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Front Cover: War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine by Norman Solomon

Frequent killing of civilians is inherent in the types of wars that the United States has waged in this century. Despite all the hype about precision weaponry, even its top-rated technologies are fallible. What’s more, they operate in flawed—and sometimes highly dysfunctional—contexts. Whether launching attacks from distant positions or directly deployed, American forces are far removed from the societies they seek to affect. Key dynamics include scant knowledge of language, ignorance of cultures, and unawareness of such matters as manipulation due to local rivalries.

When U.S. officials say that civilian deaths are merely accidental outcomes of the war effort, they don’t mention that such deaths are not only predictable—they’re also virtually inevitable as results of policy priorities. Presumptions of acceptability are hot-wired into the war machine. The lives taken, injuries inflicted, traumas caused, environmental devastation wrought, social decimation imposed—all scarcely rank as even secondary importance to the power centers in Washington.

Norman Solomon, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, The New Press, New York, USA, 2023, pp. 53-54.

NORMAN SOLOMON is an American journalist, media critic, author, and activist. He is the co-founder of the online organization RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, a consortium of policy researchers and analysts. His books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (2006) and Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State (2008). He lives in the San Francisco area in California.

Thought for Today: Climate Change Displacement in America

04 Sunday Jun 2023

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, Recommended Reading

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Front Cover: The Great Displacement: Climate Change and The Next American Migration by Jake Bittle
Photo Credit: Simon & Schuster (USA, 2023)

At the most fundamental level, displacement begins when climate change makes it either too risky or too expensive for people to stay somewhere. The disasters discussed in this book bear little resemblance to each other on the surface, but they all exert pressure on governments and private markets, whether through the financial costs of rebuilding or the strain of allocating scarce resources. As this pressure builds, it starts to push people around, changing where they can live or where they want to live. Sometimes this looks like the government paying residents of flood-prone areas to leave their homes; sometimes it looks like fire victims getting priced out of an unaffordable state; other times it looks like fishermen going broke as the wetlands around them erode. It may seem reductive to think about a planetary crisis in terms of financial risk rather than human lives, but that is how most people in this country will experience it—through the loss of their most valuable assets, or the elimination of their job, or a shift in where they can afford to live.

Excerpt from The Great Displacement: Climate Change and The Next American Migration by Jake Bittle, Simon & Schuster, New York, USA, 2023 (Introduction, p. xvii).

Note: The title of the book is an oblique reference to the Great Migration in American history (1920s to 1970s) when more than six million Black people left the South and moved to northern cities like New York and Chicago, fleeing an economic and humanitarian crisis.

JAKE BITTLE, a journalist based in Brooklyn, New York, is a staff writer at Grist, where he covers climate impacts and adaptation. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, and a number of other publications.

Thought for Today: Communicating With Each Other

30 Sunday Apr 2023

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, Human Behavior, Recommended Reading

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Front Cover: Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet by Thich Nhat Hanh
Photo Credit: HarperCollins Publishers (USA, 2021)

If you want to save the planet and transform society, you need brotherhood and sisterhood; you need togetherness. Whenever we speak about the environment, or peace and social justice, we usually speak of non-violent actions or technological solutions, and we forget that the element of collaboration is crucial. Without it, we cannot do anything; we cannot save our planet. Technical solutions have to be supported by togetherness, understanding, and compassion.

In order to collaborate, we need to know how to listen deeply and how to speak skillfully, how to restore communication, and how to make communication easier so we can communicate with ourselves and with each other…. Restoring communication is an urgent practice. With good communication, harmony, understanding, and compassion become possible between individuals, different groups, and even nations.

Excerpt from Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet by Thich Nhat Hanh, Edited and With Commentary by Sister True Dedication, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, USA, 2021 (pp. 187-188).

THICH NHAT HANH (1926-2022) was a world-renowned Buddhist Zen master, poet, author, scholar, and activist for social change. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967 by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He remains a preeminent figure in contemporary Buddhism, offering teachings that are both deeply rooted in ancient wisdom and accessible to all.

SISTER TRUE DEDICATION is a former journalist and monastic Dharma Teacher ordained by Thich Nhat Hanh.