It's really fun when they get into the computing requirements of planning an economy using the Harmony algorithm/neural network. They keep talking about things in millions of operations per second and how a super computer could solve a large economy in about 10 minutes.
When you take these numbers now and apply them to current consumer grade chips, you could take their exact model and solve an economy with several million inputs/outputs in roughly 1 second. Compared to the 2-10 weeks it would take on a 68020.
It's really sad that the mass adoption of computing has led to things like NFTs and Crypto Currency. Just absolutely wasted operations that do nothing but waste means of production and fractional products. Those trillions of operations could be going towards simulating production goals in central planning. 1, 5, 10, and 15 year plans could be generated in seconds now and presented to all for vibrant democratic input and decision making, instead were using deterministic machines to recreate the chaos of market systems and the runaway crises that come with them.
I never noticed any of that from him, they're pretty big on the importance of the abolition of patriarchy in the book and even use she/her pronouns when referring to the general worker. I know that that's not necessarily proof of them not holding reactionary views on things (e.g. terfs), but I also haven't seen anything explicitly or even implicitly homophobic or transphobic
He was fairly active in blogging and tweeting up until a couple of years ago.
He seems to consider solidarity between marginalized groups as detrimental to getting the bulk of workers on board.
Weird, I wonder if Cottrell kept most of that out of their books because TaNS is definitely not that. I think his ideas on actually managing and running a planned economy are good and for the most part he has good ideas on how to minimize exploitation of surplus, but he probably still suffers from brit brain and some Zizek style reactionary thought.
The book definitely posits that attacking patriarchal systems is one of the more valid paths towards building a revolutionary movement as the bulk of exploitation occurs in the domestic sector (unpaid labor from women maintaining a home).
It's been a while since I last read it, but if memory serves, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but TaNS generally treats the humanity that this socialist system is meant to serve as a homogeneous, faceless mass, which makes sense as it is largely a technical exploration into raw numbers and how computer technology can be used to solve mathematical problems posed in the management of an economy. It's easy to sidestep issues of patriarchy, transphobia, and racism when the humanity your machine is serving is kept somewhat imaginary.
That's not really how it reads at all. They definitely dive pretty deep into planning systems and mathematics, but they also make sure to direct you to other authors who do more criticism of Capitalism. TaNS is meant to be a pretty dry technical exploration of the types of mechanical/information systems needed to maintain a labor voucher system. That being said there's a decent amount of exploration of how planning systems like this would be implemented and what the actual structure of the society that would use them would need to look like (they focus heavily on feminism and abolition of domestic labor/partiarchy with communal family structures).
It's definitely not like most leftist theory that spends a majority of it's time pointing out the flaws and problems with capital and minority exploring how socialist planning would actually be implemented. This is a book written specifically for the future, specifically to be unearthed after a revolution and used to help build a system of central planning that works.