Sat Spectac 04/12/21

Hi folks,

Did my first and hopefully only round of Christmas shopping today. We live a few minutes' walk from North Laine, home of many of Brighton's cool small businesses, and the place was absolutely heaving. I am glad that almost all my presents for friends and family are bags of homemade vegan fudge becuase I would not want to do that again!

This week I wrote about

• getting a Christmas tree
• why cancel culture is maybe like the blockchain
• why things should have websites, not just social media accounts
• trying to work out some stuff about words and identities
• LOST
• a website that I feel used to provide a useful service but now is gone

and there was a new episode of my podcast Memetic Hazard where, amongst other things, we talk about some experiences we had that helped us understand ourselves better.

This week I've been thinking about:

• NFTs—in the colloquial "art on the internet" sense, not in the sense of a unique token—play on people's acquisitiveness. The bit of people that just wants to have stuff whether or not it's of any value or makes any sense for them to want it. It's just a way to harness the desire to Have and Own in a new form. The want might be authentic but I feel as though it's not based in anything really beyond that desire to acquire, which can be triggered by any number of useless things. Not to get all Only 90s Kids Will Remember This but Pokemon cards (or the brief craze for Pokemon magnets that went through my school—not sure if that was a thing for anyone else?) are the obvious comparator.
• A while ago I spent an exhausted evening reading through beam_me_up_softboi, an instagram account dedicated to inept attempts to attract women by talking about Tame Impala and also somehow some text messages I sent to my girlfriend (don’t know how they got there). The chief thing that comes through to me reading the posts (other than the constant attempts at boundary-pushing and negotiation despite it being completely clear it's going nowhere) is the desire of the soft boys for pity, to the extent that a lot of them seem to see that as the only attention that it's possible for them to get, which, ironically, is a different sort of pitiable. They're not the best ones, though: the best ones are the ones who try to flirt by talking about cryptocurrency.

This week I've been reading:

• An article about urban dashboards, their history, potentialities and pitfalls. One for Big Dom to read, maybe.
• This extremely enjoyable post about how good Boswell's Life Of Samuel Johnson is but what a shit Boswell himself was.  
• I'm not sure how much I would recommend this history of Gavin McInnes, but it does contain the following:

In 1997, Vice took on a new editor: Robbie Dillon, a bank robber and loan shark who had just been released from Bordeaux Prison for drug trafficking. He was enrolled in journalism night classes, where he wrote an article called “How to Survive in Prison,” which got him the editor gig. Even Dillon was taken aback by Vice’s journalistic standards,

Stay safe, everyone!

Over and out.

Adam