Wandering the Mountains of the Mind
The Himalayas, Rewiring Democracy, and China's Engineering State
“Samuel Johnson remains an unbeatable dinner guest. How fun would it be able to hear his commentary on the present day!”
-Dan Wang, author of Breakneck
In this week’s newsletter
3 Episodes On: Mountains and Mountaineering
Where in the World: The Himalayas
Rewiring Democracy: Nathan E. Sanders on Artificial Intelligence
Scholarly Sources: Dan Wang
3 Episodes On: Mountains and Mountaineering
Every year, around 800 people reach the summit of Mount Everest. While the peak wasn’t successfully reached until 1953 by Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary, numerous attempts were made by competent climbers. The first expeditions in 1921 and 1922 are the subject of Mick Conefrey’s Everest 1922: The Epic Story of the First Attempt on the World’s Highest Mountain. Mick tells the story of these very first attempts to climb the mountain, including the difficulties associated with funding the journey, recruiting the mountaineers and sherpas, and reaching the peak.
The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment is a sweeping account of the history of mountain climbing and its connections to modern culture, from the first attempts to scale the Alps in the 18th century to mountaineering in the current age of climate change. Peter H. Hansen focuses on two episodes in that history: the first ascent of Mont Blanc in 1786 by Michel-Gabriel Paccard and Jacques Balmat, and the 1953 climb of Mount Everest by Hillary and Norgay.
Today, the idea that the Himalayas have the world’s tallest peaks—by a large margin—is entirely uncontroversial. Just about anyone can name Mount Everest and K2 as the world’s tallest and second-tallest mountains respectively. But the idea that this mountain range had the highest summits used to be quite controversial. Lachlan Fleetwood’s Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya studies the first attempts to survey this mountain range. He examines not just the expeditions themselves, but also how surveyors procured their equipment, how they handled altitude sickness, and the fossils they found (among other details), in order to analyze the connection between knowledge, the frontier, and empire.
Where in the World: The Himalayas
In what is sure to become a classic, Radhika Govindrajan’s Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas mobilizes the thematic of “interspecies relatedness” to explore a variety of human/non-human animal encounters in contemporary India.
Holly Walters examines Shaligrams in Shaligram Pilgrimage in the Nepal Himalayas. For roughly two thousand years, the veneration of sacred fossil ammonites, called Shaligrams, has been an important part of Hindu and Buddhist ritual practice throughout South Asia and among the global Diaspora. Originating from a single remote region of Himalayan Nepal called Mustang, Shaligrams are all at once fossils, divine beings, and intimate kin with families and worshippers.
In Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas, Karine Gagné explores how relations of reciprocity between land, humans, animals, and glaciers foster an ethics of care in the Himalayan communities of Ladakh. She explores the way these relations are changing due to climate change, the growth of the wage economy at the expense of traditional agricultural and pastoral lifestyles, and increased military presence resulting from Ladakh’s status as a border area.
Rewiring Democracy: Nathan E. Sanders on Artificial Intelligence
Nathan E. Sanders is a data scientist affiliated with the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University focused on creating open technology to help vulnerable communities and all stakeholders participate in the analysis and development of public policy. He is the co-author with Bruce Schneier of the book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship.
Q: What are you reading right now?
A: I’m traveling right now, and in my bag is The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle for the North Sea Empire by the Norwegian historian Tore Skeie. It’s a history of the Anglo Saxon and Viking conflicts over North Sea territories starting in the eleventh century, a place and era I am not well read in. I picked it up because of the promise of telling the origins and effects of the conflict through the interwoven stories of the multiple peoples whose course of civilization was affected by it, reaching all the way to the Mediterranean.
Q: Which book made you want to become a scholar and why?
A: Perhaps I should be embarrassed that I can’t remember the title, but it was my high school physics textbook. I trained as an astrophysicist through my Ph.D. and I can vividly remember the experience of leafing through this book. Looking beyond the chapters we had studied in class sparked my fascination for the applications and astronomical examples of physical phenomenon and how differently the laws of nature we live under every day can manifest when they are stretched to extreme scenarios like the event horizon of a black hole. It opened my mind to the idea that learning and describing ideas to others could have far reaching impacts on the world.
Q: What’s your favorite book you’ve read this year?
A: I really enjoyed John Elledge’s A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps. I picked it up at the Glasgow airport a few months ago and couldn’t put it down. Elledge organizes a brief history of the world around boundary drawing exercises and disputes from ancient to modern times. He finds a great hook for each short chapter to grab your attention and keep you reading through to the next one. To give a sense of the range and scope of revelatory history explored in this way, I’ll quote from Elledge’s Substack post about the book: “In 1884, the great powers agreed to divide up the entire map of Africa without ever visiting. No Africans were in attendance, and one who’d asked for an invite, the Sultan of Zanzibar, was openly laughed at… There’s a straight line on the map of East Africa because some bloke got tired… There’s a town in the Netherlands in which you can emigrate to Belgium just by moving your front door.”
Q: Who should read Rewiring Democracy?
A: Anyone interested in democracy and its future. While a great deal of scholarship has gone into the book, we’ve written it to be engaging and mind-opening for a wide audience. Rewiring Democracy has fascinating and surprising examples of how AI is being applied by politicians, government agencies, courts, and lawmakers as well as, most interestingly, by citizens looking to influence those other parties. We hope that anyone who wants to see their own democracy persist and thrive—citizens and policymakers alike—will finish reading the book with a renewed faith in the potential for humankind to steer the technologies of governance through a new kind of digital revolution, made with AI, to an equitable and pluralistic destination.
Q: What are some misconceptions about how people think about AI’s impact on civic life?
A: There are two broad misconceptions we try to fight in the book:
1) That the only impacts of AI on democracy are frightful things like deepfakes spreading misinformation
2) That AI can make any process it touches better and more efficient
We try to broker some agreement between both parties—often called AI skeptics and accelerationists—by calling out the legitimate grounding behind both their points of view, but also complicate their worldviews. We look to dozens of examples from around the globe to show the real effects AI is having in democratic processes today, and make informed speculations about how those trends are likely to evolve—depending on the choices we make.
Q: What keeps you up at night when it comes to the advancements in AI?
A: That we’ll continue to enable a small group of companies and their owners to extract not just generational, but civilizational, wealth from the rest of us. That we’ll fail to learn the lessons of the recent past—our failures to appropriately shape and regulate the industries of ecommerce, online advertising, and social media. That we will not act to redistribute the wealth captured by those companies profiting from—or promising to profit from—AI, and yet allow them to shift the burdens generated by their creations to the rest of us. These may sound like largely economic arguments, but they are essential to the subject of our book because democracy is the system we use to balance and distribute power throughout our society.
Q: What do you plan on reading next?
A: It’s been out for a few months already, but I haven’t yet read and am looking forward to Karen Hao’s Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. For those of us working on and thinking about AI from outside of the Silicon Valley bubble, interacting with those from inside that enclave or reading insider reporting can seem like entering an alternate reality. But the machinations happening inside of Big Tech companies and AI startups today may have massive implications on our futures, so it’s a mindset well worth understanding.
Listen to Nathan’s great NBN interview about Rewiring Democracy
Subscribe to New Books in Science, Technology, and Society to learn about new research exploring the impact of AI!
Scholarly Sources: Dan Wang
Dan Wang is a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He was previously based in China to cover its technological growth. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Financial Times, New York Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, and more.
In his debut book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, Dan Wang presents a dichotomy of China and the US as an “engineering state” and “lawyerly society” respectively and traces how China’s “engineering state” has shaped the fast-developing nation over the last decade.
Q: What are you reading right now?
A: Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny; Nan Da’s The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear; John Boyer’s Austria.
Q: What is your favorite book or essay to assign/give to people and why?
A: Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker.
Q: Is there a book you read as a student that had a particularly profound impact on your trajectory as a scholar?
A: Susan Greenhalgh’s Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China.
Q: Which deceased writer would you most like to meet and why?
A: Samuel Johnson remains an unbeatable dinner guest. How fun would it be able to hear his commentary on the present day!
Q: What’s the best book you’ve read in the past year?
A: Stephen Kotkin’s The Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization.
Q: Have you seen any films, documentaries, or museum exhibitions that left an impression on you recently?
A: Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest
Q: What do you plan on reading next?
A: Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield
Q: Who should read your book and why?
A: Anyone interested in the competition between the U.S. and China, one of the defining stories of our century
Q: Anything else you’d like to share? Either about your academic work or creative endeavors?
A: I write an annual letter on China and the US, which will publish soon.
Stay tuned for more from Dan Wang, check out his incredible reading list, and listen to his great NBN interview below!
Subscribe to the New Books in Chinese Studies channel to hear insightful interviews with scholars of China.