Currently Reading

I am a great practitioner of the art of tsundoku, both in the classical sense with physical books, as well as in the digital sense with the RSS feeds I subscribe to, which in turn contribute to the list of saved articles that I’m going to “read later”. As far as vices go, I could be much worse off, so I’m not going to complain about it too much.

Having said that, I do usually get around to reading most of the articles I save (eventually!), and sometimes even jot down some thoughts about them; for example, here's what I had to say about Why Is the Internet So Exhausting? Blame Your Crowdsourced Bosses:

Articles about how shitty the practices of companies built on advertising-based business models are no longer surprise me, but they still piss me off and this one is no different. I do, however, love how Katherine Cross weaves together pretty much all of the internet shittiness that’s going right now and how it’s making us all miserable.

But it’s her description of cryptocurrencies and NFTs that really resonated with me:

At bottom, cryptocurrency, and the NFTs created to give people something to buy with crypto, are simply capitalism creating nonsense goods to financialize. They bear no relationship to anything real or tangible, and instead exist purely for the sake of being collected and traded. There is no better way of understanding an NFT except as an ostentatiously empty non-thing that is imbued with titanically inflated value by sheer will and shitposting; indeed, it might be considered the pure apotheosis of this phase of capitalism.

The whole NFT space is pure capitalism writ large, with the incredibly shitty behavior that gives capitalism such a bad name on display for everyone to see.

Cam Pegg
More of my hot takes

On My Nightstand

As well as the digital reads, I regularly have a couple (or three, or four) books on the go at once… I’ve been like that since I was a kid. On the positive side, it keeps a certain variety in my reading, on the negative, it often means that it takes me forever to finish some books.

More of my reading list