we started the day driving down to waco to check out spice village. it’s on the second floor and has over 60 shops. it’s like a modern antique mall. we walked to fabled bookshop & cafe. i loved the book designs here. i found this book that was artsy and lovely. it’s from a cartoonist who featured over 50 bookstores through illustrations and quotes. i would love to do something like this one day, traveling the world and capturing places i love.
Footnotes from the World's Greatest Bookstores by Bob Eckstein
on our way to round rock outlet, i realized most antique shops would be closed, so we stopped at village mall antiques in salado. at the outlet, i went straight to starbucks. i wanted to finish reading breakneck. and that i did. i finished the last pages of breakneck with a watery sweet matcha.
what a book. this might be the best nonfiction book i’ve read so far, which probably doesn’t say much given my shameful goodreads counts and reading track record. still, it really shone a light on what china is like for me, both as a technological powerhouse and as a place full of surprises.
i learned about chongqing as a cyberpunk-like city, where a train runs through an apartment building complex. people eat hotpot in old air raid tunnels. guizhou has incredible
bridges. yunnan is beautiful and full of mushrooms. shanghai has a french town. shenzhen is a manufacturing hub.
as a chinese who grew up in malaysia, i mostly heard from my parents that china just copies from the us. the us felt like the natural place to gravitate toward. it’s the forefront of innovation, and that’s still true today in ai. i was fortunate enough to live in sf. but visiting shenzhen last year, the differences in engineering and the level of industrialization were stark.
the idea of a lawyerly society versus an engineering state will stay in my noggin from now on. another thing i really appreciated was dan’s writing style, interjecting personal experiences into a hefty book about china and the us. i love his letters as well. i want to keep improving my writing until i can write at his level.
a few quotes that captures the essense of the book
On lawerly society
“It’s not just the government. America’s problem is the lawyerly society. The United States is unusual among Western countries for having so many lawyers: four hundred lawyers per hundred thousand people, which is three times higher than the average in European countries. Since lawyers are everywhere, proceduralism has reached everywhere, including universities and corporations. Anyone working in these today has seen how procedures become an end in themselves, such that people grow obsessed with their logic and forget about the outcome.”
on the engineering state
“The fundamental tenet of the engineering state is to look at people as aggregates, not individuals. The Communist Party envisions itself as a grand master, coordinating unified actions across state and society, able to launch strategic maneuvers beyond the comprehension of its citizens. Its philosophy is to maximize the discretion of the state and minimize the rights of individuals. Engineers often treat social issues as math exercises.”
On viewing technology as people and process
“Silvia Lindtner, a professor at the University of Michigan and my wife, has spent more than a decade studying Shenzhen’s technology ecosystems. In 2015, the Austrian government asked her how to create a Shenzhen in the Alps; in 2016, the White House invited her to present on how the United States might learn from the success of Shenzhen. She has felt, as I do, that these agencies misunderstood the point of Shenzhen. They were still more interested in individual inventors rather than understanding it as a community of engineering practice. The obsession with invention has clouded Silicon Valley’s ability to appreciate China’s actual strength. Rather than seeing tools and blueprints as the ultimate ends of technological progress, I believe we should view them as milestones in the training of better scientists and manufacturers. Viewing technology as people and process knowledge isn’t only more accurate; it also empowers our sense of agency to control the technologies we are producing.”
On if Iphones were built in the US
“If the iPhone were built in the United States rather than Shenzhen, then an American city—say, Detroit, Cleveland, or Pittsburgh—might be hailed as the hardware capital of the world. The follow-on innovations in consumer drones, hoverboards, electric vehicle batteries, and virtual reality headsets could have sprung from American firms. Engineers wouldn’t have to fly from Cupertino across the Pacific to reach their giant factories. They could iterate on product improvements closer to home…The United States must regain, at a minimum, the manufacturing capacity o scale up production that emerges from its own industrial labs. If it does not, continuing to value scientific breakthroughs rather than mass manufacturing, then it might lose whole industries once more—as it did by inventing the solar photovoltaic panel but relying on China to produce them. The United States likes to celebrate the light-bulb moment of genius innovators. But there is, I submit, more glory in having big firms making a product rather than a science lab claiming its invention. Otherwise, US scientists would once again build a ladder toward technological leadership only to have Chinese firms climb it.”