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Finished reading: Weird City by Joshua Long 📚

Interesting study about how the “Keep Austin Weird” slogan has been both utilized by locals as a means of creative resistance to their threatened sense of place and co-opted by business and government in order to attract talent.

Matthew B. Crawford:

AI will be the consummation of bureaucracy as regime-type. The official, Weberian appeal of bureaucracy is that it takes discretion out of the hands of individuals, who may abuse it, and subjects decisions to procedures that will be fair and neutral. It depends on having a comprehensive representation of the field to be governed, so one can subject its various parts to a rational calculus. But the conceit that one has such a representation in hand is almost always a fiction, nicely illustrated by the effectiveness of “work to rule” strikes. […]

Bureaucracies build their legitimacy on the idea that they have rendered the field of forces perfectly legible, and can therefore exert a perfect mastery over them. It ain’t so.

Finished reading: Lost in Austin by Alex Hannaford 📚

This Texas Monthly review, while harsh, is basically correct:

Like it or not, the Austin of today is a product of choices made by the electorate, by various local and state officials, and by forces that were beyond anyone’s control. So the last thing anyone needs is more Austin Jeremiahs—who those of us living elsewhere find insufferable, anyway. What the city does need, at this point, is better planning for the future—though, to be honest, it’s not always clear what that informed thinking might look like. Is the city trying to curb growth to preserve what’s special about the place, or shape its rapid development so that most of the people moving there can afford the rent?