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The big post summer book cluster (partial) which turned into a “Get Away from Substack”.

January 6, 2024

This draft was written before taking action after finding out that Substack has a Nazi problem. Some scattered edits have been done below to reflect this change.

Huge stop after the holidays and counting. Time to revamp this newsletter with some sort of big book update and clusters. I’ve also discovered plenty of newsletters, some of which have a some great list of books.[1] So this “more books to read than time” issue is only getting worse.

So, before checking the notes of the books, let’s try to dig into things I remember. (It turns out I did NOT check the notes).

Software Studies

The biggest WTF moment while reading was discovering software studies. This happened while reading Sack’s book The Software Arts on (summer) holidays. That was simply a blast. I’ll add that book to the cluster of Surveillance Capitalism and The Contrarian. Even though it is a different book from the other two, which are already in a different cup of tea of its own.

The most unpleasant thing was to discover yet other shades of mindless techno-optimism that can be both disturbing and, simply, bad. The Contrarian forced me to see with a new attitude how “builders” or other tech hype-of-the-moment buzzwords are likely two steps away from the ultra far-right Thielverse. Btw, kudos to Paris Marx for this picture below.

(I could not find the picture and the description of PT. But while looking for it, I discovered Paris goes ghost. It turns out that my meditated content is less removed from time constraints than I thought.)

Sack’s book is subtler. Basically, you find yourself out in more neutral settings like college or academia (well, not so neutral if you take something like a Thiel’-likes perspective) you can get a vehicle and an ideology that may make it easier to sell something like the Thielverse. Again, I think that is not the intended reading of the book, but that made a connection for me. There is way more in software studies than that. If you are interested in the book, that Amazon-owned review on Goodreads may help you.

In general, the book touches on some things and ideas that I find interesting or that I naively may like – e.g. computation – and provides examples of how research in that sort of thing can be exploited by companies that are making millions to make even more and likely contribute to making the lives of other people more miserable. The fact that my life may be spared by this effect or maybe get slightly better under some metrics contributes to complexifying the whole thing and makes it even more discomforting.

A little bit more math and economics?

The other book was the Mandelbrot one on economics. It looks like “the standard model is rotten”. This resonated well with the book above. And, somehow, the book came in well in the reading list as I got it thereafter The Myth of the rational market and Caos.

Caos sets the stage for more Mandelbrot and more physics and complexity. I read some Feynman I had at home, decided to brush up some math, and giving it a try to an old book of math for economics [2]

The Myth, on the other hand, was unexpected. I imagined a Verso-like book, sarcastic and hypercritical. Something like “Here’s a joke about trickle-down economics, but 99% of you won’t get it.” It wasn’t.

The book “simply” follows the intellectual history of the standard model of the idea of a rational market. The idea did not work as expected and, academically, it got updated and enhanced. Somehow the financial industry was left behind or, following Mandelbrot, it preferred to use the oversimplified model for ease of calculation.

(If you read the books in pairs or one straight after the other, you’ll find a lot of Mandelbrot references there as he was the supervisor of Fama and related with other prominent economy scholars. Oh, and you’ll have a lot of Mandelbrot also in Caos, even though from a very different perspective.)

Mastodon and Games

I realized mastodon has a lot of extra value for game design and game development. There’s the Italian livellosegreto instance of Kenobit. There a are also molleindustria and Winter Wolves and more. Also, I am back playing Ascension and Card City Nights. And dreaming about making a card game.

Next?

There is quite a lot in the making. Most likely:

more books (these notes need to be checked) reflecting on people staying on Substack talking with Bard to get more Fisher … some game dev updates more …

[1] They were a couple of newsletters on gaming in Italian. It turns out after deleting Substack all my subscription have gone. I am considering adding some Feedly or similar access some Substack content while the authors figure out a way to migrate away. (Paris Marx toothed about that on Mastodon. I assume it is harder for people using a newsletter in a more focused and dedicated ways to migrate. Especially during Xmas holidays). [2] The idea to learn that is to use some extra programming to get things going.