daniela russ
@ueberdruss
what is unchangeable in nature can take care of itself | assistant prof & historical sociologist | private account
gripping, forgotten gem of a labor history of energy technology (long before that field even existed)
Wrote a review essay of four new-ish books on Soviet energy and resource history for @kritikajournal.bsky.social. They're different in terms of scope, archival depth, and the extent to which they take the materiality of resources into account – but I enjoyed them all! muse.jhu.edu/pub/28/artic...
very excited to find traces of an anarchist story of electricity in this piece by daniel pérez-zapico stm.cairn.info/journal-of-e...
by far my favorite episode is the one on fela's mother and the movement she helped create against colonial taxation, known as 'the vengeance of the vagina head'
apparently, Giddens predicted that it would be "an indispensable study" for social scientists, but then sociology was already too detached from philosophy to engage with it, which only proves Rose's point
🤩 "His second book project is a study of global communism as a historical narrative, life world, and political sequence."
just my sort of humour: russian wikipedia claims a soviet engineer visited nixon and convinced him that high-voltage interconnections between american power pools were necessary. so the us power system is a soviet achievement! sadly, [source missing for over 1000 days].
this looks great. make it a series: volume II be like 'les économistes et la fin de la fin des énergie fossiles, 1931-1973', volume III 'les économistes et la fin de la fin de la fin des énergies fossiles, 1973-1986'... you get the idea.
apparently, europe's electric sphere of influence reaches deep into central asia... when did european think tanks start talking this way? www.swp-berlin.org/10.18449/202...
couldn‘t help thinking that this is so much smaller than the space it occupied in my head. there’s a relief in the objectification of thought: however troubling or obsessive, every idea can take the form of a handy, well-folded paperback.
militarization cannot return because it never disappeared. h/t to @floschmidt.bsky.social who pointed me to this excellent chapter
weapons manufacturing, or the art of 'depositing an adequate amount of energy into targets'
thought it would be a good time to share my syllabus on the global history of petrostates. turned out to be more topical than I could have imagined!
nazi propaganda against 'foreign electricity' (at a time when german power companies supplied still 30 percent of the world market!). 'In empty halls – mammoth machines Up and down the country – masts and wires The triumph of the machine? No.'
reading this, but like a novel: just now Snowball Earth unleashes the Great Unconformity that forms the Great Bank ultimately leading to the second, ongoing Great Oxidation Event
AI's power use is too spiky and irregular for any power source to follow it, so data centers implement 'dummy loads' which are not needed for computing but suck energy solely to avoid sharp fluctuations in grid draw... arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11119
Deutsche Bahn ad, 1960s. ‘Everybody talks about the weather… we don’t.’