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where the tangent is the architecture
I'm an independent bookseller, so please forgive me if I chatter about books. They're almost all I have.
Chad Post on our friend at Slate.
Chad Post, whose post yesterday absolved Amazon a bit much for my tastes, (though as I tried to make clear he and I agree about 99% of the issue) has just written a much better response to Manjoo’s Slate article than my own.
The best part of his post, other than his reiterated but somewhat misleading Three Paths of Action conclusion (I’d say that the concerned actors from your first category are those same who care enough to pursue the change you point at in your third, Chad) is that he highlights something I didn’t bother to, which is that Manjoo is pursuing a self-conscious Rational Actor economics 101 branch of ethics. It is Rational that he would want to extract the most value from a circumstance. In this case that would be books or money. It should go without saying that the Rational Actor school of thought is the worst sort of Objectivist schlock, that it does not exist in the world at large unless people like Manjoo take it upon themselves to act as such, and that subscribing to it is in every case reactionary, defensive, and not generally a good thing. So go read Chad, (Again. I know. He’s worth it.) and somebody send Manjoo a copy of David Graeber’s Debt.
