It's very hard for me to accurately describe how I feel about this book because I loved it so much for so many reasons, many of which I don't know how to explain.

Mad Sisters of Esi is, as you might expect, about sisters. It is also about time, creation, creativity, and love. Laleh and Myung are the Keepers of the Whale of Babel. They roam its infinite chambers and tell each other stories of themselves and of their creator, Great Wisa. Myung dreams of more. More people, more stories, and so she leaves the whale...

From page one, I knew this would be something special. Mehta's writing is beautiful, like that of a fairytale. It's descriptive and lush without being flowery. We have varying narratives here: first and second person, academic extracts and diary entries, snippets of stories from strangers... It is hard to explain it in any sort of definitive way because it's not structured, but it shouldn't be. The words just flow effortlessly like water.

A large part of this book is creation. The Whale is filled with endless worlds continuously being created. A sister yearns to create a world of her own. The island of Esi itself is a miraculous land that cannot be pinned down in any one reality, so “you can’t draw Esi, even if it were real—the island won't stay still.” While the building of these worlds makes up the heart of the story, the actual worldbuilding of the novel is like a mirage, never substantial enough for you to truly understand, but you don't need to. You feel the world, rather than see it.

As the title suggests, another central theme of the book is madness. Is it such a terrible thing to be mad? The madness here is rooted in love, love for one's sister. For how can it be wrong to love someone so much that you'd do anything for them? "In our third chamber, a new word appeared to me. SISTER, two syllables. Meaning to belong to and love forever." This bond between sisters that wove through every page was the thread that tethered me tightly to this book. It showed sisterly love in all its forms: adoration, jealousy, protectiveness, need, pride... Never have I read anything before that truly plumbed the depths of such a relationship.

A book filled with madness, love, grief and stories, and one I didn't want to be over even after I turned the last page. "Must it end?" asks the djinn. "Can it not remain?" "It must," says Wisa firmly, "For I am not made for one story, and neither are you."

I was mostly attracted to this book because of the "socially awkward" part of the title. As someone for whom the idea of knocking on my neighbors' doors without sounding like the Communist version of a Jehovah's Witness, recruiting for an org, or leading protest chants is frankly terrifying, I was hoping for something more specifically aimed at tackling organizing for socially awkward people. It turned out to be more general reflections on, and motivation for, local organizing from the author's experience, which is fine but not really what I was looking for.

In general I think the author offers good advice on organizing, especially for people who are just becoming politically aware and want to jump into things but don't know where to start. I have some disagreements on some things. For example, he implies in an early chapter that if you or your org isn't creating immediately noticable change or disruption right now, or even if it's just been around for a long time, then it's ineffective or ideologically compromised, which I think is a bit of an idealistic take that doesn't consider that a lot of revolutionary work, especially in the imperial core and at the current time, consists of simply building class consciousness and organizational capacity, which may seem boring and uneventful compared to flashy direct action that has a big immediate impact. Not to say direct action doesn't have a tactical place within a diversity of tactics, but we don't get to revolution by just doing a bunch of direct actions.

I also disagree with his chapter on electoralism. He says that he doesn't want to discourage people from voting if that's what they want to do, but most of the chapter is spent telling us how voting is not only ineffective but actively harmful, so I think discouraging people is heavily implied. I definitely agree that we're not going to vote our way to liberation within a bourgeois democracy (or what passes for democracy), and that "vote blue no matter who" doesn't count as harm reduction, but there are still plenty of material reasons to engage in electoralism as a tactic: running communist and socialist candidates creates opportunities for education and agitation, and creating coalitions with non-socialists to support specific policies and reforms (rather than candidates or parties) can both provide some material relief to certain groups and create a more favorable terrain for future struggle. The author draws a strong moral equivalence between the two major parties that I don't disagree with, but I think it's a stretch to say that we're therefore justified in not engaging with either even in case where some short term gains can be made. The author does say that if nothing else, encouraging people to vote has some value in that it can expose them to the truth about how undemocratic this country is, which I agree with, but there's more to it than this that I think he's missing.

Overall, a good overview of what local organizing can look like based on the experiences of the author, especially useful for people new to organizing, but not quite specific enough to socially awkward people as I was looking for, and not quite as ideologically rigorous as I would like.

Enshittification- the trend of technology (companies) becoming worse for users intentionally so that tech companies can make even more disgustingly large amounts of money and satisfy their shareholders.

Cory Doctorow is an engaging author and audiobook narrator. While teaching you about all the insidious things that these companies do, there are bits of sarcasm throw in and little jokes followed by footnotes which clarify that yes, they are indeed jokes. The topic itself is well-researched. The first chapter introduces the concept of enshittification and gives four case studies (fb, amazon, apple, twitter) as examples. Chapters two and three discuss history of regulation and the fight back. Chapter four ends with what we can do now. There are many details of how horrible these tech companies are- and I believe that while the book was written recently, many of the lessons learned can be applied for years to come. For example, the transition into everything becoming subscription based, DRM, and "in an app" is definitely a trend I do not see going away any time soon. My one critique is that there should have been a lot more content added on how governments can then use or force these companies to give it all of the spyware and control capabilities so that it can be used on citizens-- ICE in particular has been granted data from social media companies, AI, and facial recognition technology to spy on citizens and non-citizens alike. They also have the power to kill the engines of cars of citizens that are utilizing their rights to follow and track ICE vehicles. So it's not just that these companies are bricking basic functions of devices (which we PAY money to OWN, but apparently not really), but that they can give these powers to governments to disable citizen unrest or organizing.

One of my main takeaways from this book- which blew my mind- was the idea that social media companies should be treated like phone network companies. If you don't like your carrier/network, you can switch to a different one and your phone number and your information will be carried over. Mastodon (which actually hosts Truth Social! Unwillingly and illegally) functions exactly this way. You can choose a server, let's pretend, Facebock, and then hang out there-- but if Facebock fails you in some way (doesn't protect you from bullies or spies on you too much) you can transfer to a different server, let's pretend, Twittock. All of your followers are transferred with you, and you can still see all the people you follow. Just like how if you change phone carriers, you can still call people regardless of what carrier they use. I have a Mastodon account- and I knew how it worked- but I never made the comparison to phone carriers- or emails. Both examples had companies trying to lock in their users into their own companies, but ultimately had to give-in and encode interoperability and compatibility into their products. There's this whole problem where many of us hate these companies and we want to stop using them, but the thing that keeps us there are our communities, our friends. It's just not easy to move entire communities onto a new platform. I know because there are some friends I just can't keep in contact with because they refuse to use any of the new messaging/social apps I use. Another example is that previously Microsoft Office locked its product and made it impossible to share documents with users of other programs, such as Apple's iWork. Apple put its engineers to work- every time Microsoft updated its Office to try and stop users from sharing docs, Apple would reverse-engineer it and make it compatible-- and now we have .docx files that can be opened with Office, iWord, LibreOffice, Google Docs, and even your browser. Of course, Apple didn't do so out of the goodness of their own heart and of course now Microsoft has now changed its strategy to 'subscription' and also 'you don't own the product' and also 'you have to use the cloud and then pay us extra money for it and also now you need it for work and your office is gonna pay us money for it'.

The final chapter on what we can do about it- made me a little hopeful but also not at all lol. Tech is getting more shitty for the users, and we are the product.