Blood and Oil, by Bradley Hope

A profile of Saudi Arabia's de facto leader, Mohamed bin Salman.

[scroll down for actual thoughts on the book, first I did a lot of ranting about systems-of-thought]

This is another book that I read forever ago at this point, and really should have book-thoughted at the time, and didn't. I do not understand why I keep doing this: I put so many hours into reading a book, it seems obviously-better to start noting about it while it's still fresh in my mind, I know I plan to write about it eventually but.... instead I leave it for ages and do it when my memory is way less fresh, to absolutely no advantage. I started writing book-thoughts because my friend Spencer wrote a piece [by the time you read this either there will be a link here or I got lazy] saying how irrational it is to spend 10 hours reading a book and forget most of it, where if you spent just 1 more hour jotting notes about it you'd recall it much better (or internalise its lessons, or whatever else you're hoping to do).

It... is... wild to me how inefficient and (more importantly) non-deliberate I am about so many of the things that take up the majority of my waking life? I remember first going to college and asking someone if I should learn to touch-type, and being told I didn't need to, and when I think about that now it just seems insane, that everyone in college should take touch-typing in their first semester, and some kind of course about spaced repetition and memory formation and all that jazz. We are professional information-processors putting absolutely 0 deliberate effort into improving our information-processing, it's like gentlemen amateur athletes in the 1900s or whatever, ready to get absolutely crushed by people who started putting deliberate effort into the process of improving at athletics.

And yet.... it is hard to suppress the feeling that all the people who focus on Processing Their Thoughts Better have absolutely nothing interesting to say? That many get sucked into a self-referential loop, that their zettelkasten are ouroboros of bidirectional links all coming back to thoughts about how to process thoughts, and that even the ones who don't do that seem to output the most inane and uninteresting drivel out of their expansive Second Brains. Andy Matuschak -- who I think is an exception to the inanity -- has a sad comment in one of his Digital Garden cards where he says ~I have to note that most of the best thinkers I know do not use any of these techniques~ [approximate quote, if you're reading this I failed to get the real one]. And so I'm left wondering if the haphazard slack-filled system I use is actually a good one, or if we're just at a moment in time when good thinkers haven't adopted good tools, but any given person's thinking would be improved by using better tools

Ok, the actual book. The main thing I remember about it at this point is at-least-one unusually clear examples of how, via the news, we're manipulated by nation states and their PR companies.

The first example of this is how Saudi @£$@£ed Qatar by placing negative stories about Qatari working conditions ahead of the World Cup.

Now look, it is absolutely true that working conditions in Qatar are unconscionable. It is also true that working conditions in e.g. Saudi Arabia are unconscionable. Do you know where else working conditions are unconscionable? That's right, most of the places where most of the objects you own are created. Mostly this does not make the news, but this book made (if I remember rightly) a reasonable case that Saudi had paid PR firms to drum up interest in this about Qatar specifically.

The reason this got to me is that I distinctly remember a conversation some years ago with a football-loving friend who was thinking of boycotting the Qatar World Cup for this reason. I remember finding that super reasonable, and feeling emotionally outraged about the working conditions in Qatar. The realisation that -- while, again!, that outrage is probably the correct response to these conditions -- the salience of this particular topic to me, which had felt completely natural, was actually paid for by the Saudi government, is.... thought-provoking, for me.

The one other thing I remember from this book is the absolute insanity of how the Saudi government got details about its dissidents from a guy at Twitter. Um... that's basically it, they got a guy on the inside at Twitter and he gave them identifying details for anonymous Saudi dissidents.

Overall, I understand that systems are made up of people, and that once you have a big enough system then at least one terrible thing will happen because of a choice a person in the system made. But... damn, it was hard to read this bit and not feel like Twitter should face more consequences for, you know, causing Saudi dissidents to be caught, punished and possibly killed.