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I've been excited to read this for months. What a disappointment.

This is a good example of what happens when a person hones their long-form writing skills on Twitter threads. This book is a printed Twitter thread.

The first half of the book is an acceptable contemporary survey of the history of Free and Open Source Software. Many important historical details are missed, but Eghbal can be forgiven for this; she isn't a software developer or an industry expert.

The rest of the book, however, is a poorly-researched advertisement for GitHub. Until we reach the final chapter, entitled "Conclusion" despite the fact that no conclusion is reached or even approached, erroneous and misleading statements soak almost every page.

On page 129, Eghbal declares that "Facebook doesn't have a customer support line you can call because they have more than 2 billion monthly active users." Facebook does have a customer support line you can call — if you are a customer. Facebook's customers are advertisers. Facebook's users are inventory. For someone so obsessed with social media, one would expect Eghbal to understand this.

On page 142, she declares "[c]ode by itself is not, and has never been, worth anything, and consumers already know this intuitively when they refuse to directly pay for it." By that same logic, a road or a library also has zero value. The latter half of the book waxes poetic about Club Goods and Public Goods, but it would appear little thought has been given to the semantics of those terms. Worse yet, she doesn't seem to appreciate that code has no analog in the economy which preceded computation. Between mixed metaphors and grand, declarative statements no space has been given to surface original thoughts about the topic at hand.

The tells that announce this deep misunderstanding of open source and its role in the economy are scattered throughout the book. On page 155 we have our first mention of the "Free Rider Problem," which is always a good indication the author has acquired her knowledge of public goods from Wikipedia. Perhaps recently. By the time we get to a comparison of the open source ecosystem to late-90s P2P filesharing systems on page 164, the jig is up. She doesn't understand the topic of her own book.

The writing is poor throughout the book. Nearly every page has a quote on it but, for some reason, the chosen quotes are always full of misspellings, causing Eghbal to shove [sic] into every one. By the tenth instance I had to wonder why her editor didn't suggest correcting all the spelling mistakes and prefixing the book with a caveat. Surely she had an editor? The words which aren't quotes are those of a first draft — a rambling and largely incoherent stream of consciousness broken up with the occasional dull fact or term definition. It was a chore to read.

But I did read it. All the way through to the "conclusion." Eghbal is a fan of scare quotes where they don't belong, such as declaring "clone" to be whimsical GitHub parlance rather than a very specific command of the underlying distributed version control system, but "conclusion" deserves scare quotes. In a book ostensibly about open source software, the final chapter is a stoner's daydream about social media and "content producers" on Facebook. In this final chapter, which doesn't reach any conclusions or formulate a single argument, open source is mentioned once. In a footnote.

"Poor Economics", indeed. Reducing every single human behaviour, from individual charitable donations to government policy, down to a dollar figure gets exhausting by the end of this book. It's as if economists feel the need to prop up the pseudoscience of Economics by scrubbing what little compassion or humanity they might be tempted to include in a book like this. Instead, the health and well-being of families in "developing countries" is reduced to a variable in RoI calculations.

I commend the authors for attempting to step outside the artificial western left/right political spectrum but it's safe to say this is a failed attempt. Instead, the writing waffles. On one side, it appeals to socialist ideals with "facts" presented without a single mention of what variables were actually controlled for in their pseudo-experiments, if any. On the other side, the language is clearly targeted at a dying generation of right-wing ideologues the authors try to sway with a few specious graphs and a tone imbued with a horrifying objectivity. "Poverty" is never identified as a state of being entirely applicable to every human on the planet. Banerjee and Duflo never even approach the idea that this "poverty" is something which might afflict them tomorrow. The language is consistently the "us-and-them" terminology of "developing nations" and "poor communities". Even the World Bank doesn't use language like this anymore. The authors spend an inordinate amount of time making the case that "the poor" are not actually just lazy and incompetent. Believe it or not, dear reader, the poor may not actually deserve their fate! Yes. Enlightening.

At a high level, it's really hard to say what the take-aways from this book even are. "Economics: Yes, it is still complicated an counter-intuitive"? "Randomized Controlled Trials: At least they're better than 20th Century Economics Witchcraft"? The last chapter is literally entitled "In place of a sweeping conclusion" and the entire book feels this way. A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, you say? Can't say I found this radical rethinking anywhere in here. It's a peculiar collection of haphazard pseudo-scientific evidence -- a long, dry summary of whitepapers. A boring book would have been preferable, though, and I wish the authors had limited themselves to summarizing whitepapers.

It's always especially frustrating to read a book which I largely agree with only to be disgusted by the patronizing tone of the author(s). This was a frustrating read and I don't recommend it.

4.5 stars. Although not as spellbinding as “Romtha”, I feel like “Operation? Bashai Tudu” is a real window into the the complexities of the systemic oppression of modern India. Mahashweta Devi’s dry sense of humour comes through this translation and I found myself laughing out loud over my morning coffee at some of her linguistic juxtapositions. In a twenty-first century full of oversimplified political discourse, this book is as relevant as ever. In an India full of deep, systematic, and structural caste oppression it colours the ongoing discourse for those of us who will forever sit on the outside.

The novelette and accompanying short story, “Draupadi”, make heavy use of puns, layers of Bengali dialects, and plays on the Bengali/English intersection of urban Bengal in the 1970s. Kudos to the translators for making this work at all, much less making it accessible and entertaining... but I understand I’m missing 90% of the book without reading it in the original Bengali. Even so, it’s wonderful.

I really, really enjoyed this book. Levy tells the story in a way that flows from one brief era of the early computer age to the next. There is still so much of those early days which defines how we build and use computers in the 21st century. This book should be required reading for any programmer but I honestly think anyone would enjoy it.

Philosophically, there is so much bound up in the Hacker Ethic that I have never heard a hacker (of any sort) express it coherently. When RMS presents it, it's some sort of Ultra-Liberal flavour of Americana-Soaked Super Freedom. ESR is probably worse. Modern hackers miss the gossamer nature of the ideal and stomp straight into implementations. Old hackers conflate a Hands-On Imperative with DIY. Somehow, Levy captures everything I have ever wanted to express about the Hacker Ethic the way that Harari expresses the concept of Collective Imagination/Hallucination. These ideas do not subscribe the ephemeral political spectra and they don't fit cleanly into the ideas the reader holds before reading the first page. Neither author is arguing for or against these ideas -- they're just presenting them. The execution is so brilliant I can't believe friends and colleagues haven't been shoving this book down my throat for decades.

"What's India like?" they'll ask as myriad images flip through your head, searching for themes or images or adjectives that might satisfy a question which demands a please-less-than-one-short-paragraph answer despite standing as inquiry to a three thousand year old civilization spanning three million square kilometres crammed full, at present, with over one point three billion humans.

I have so repeatedly failed to describe India in any meaningful way to friends overseas that I've largely stopped trying. Until now, I couldn't even point to a book that might help them get an idea. But this is the book. This book is India.

This book is also Canada. It's nostalgic in strange ways that I'm not sure were intentional... images mirror Shel Silverstein books of my childhood and phrases like "lint-covered cinnamon hearts" simply mirror my childhood directly.

I am very curious which of these paradoxical images will strike you as you read the book. Strike with that feeling in your chest that repeatedly made me say out loud "This! I can't believe she thought to write THIS down!" Lint-covered cinnamon hearts, indeed. <3