Spellbook

Moontower Munchies #61

Kris Abdelmessih

Apr 24, 2024

Friends,

Today’s recommended read:

Why Everything is Becoming a Game (22 min read)

Gurwinder

It opens:

For years, some of the world’s sharpest minds have been quietly turning your life into a series of games. Not merely to amuse you, but because they realized that the easiest way to make you do what they want is to make it fun. To escape their control, you must understand the creeping phenomenon of gamification, and how it makes you act against your own interests.
This is a story that encompasses a couple who replaced their real baby with a fake one, a statistician whose obsessions cost the US the Vietnam War, the apparent absence of extraterrestrial life, and the biggest FBI investigation of the 20th century.

The post offers both trivia and insight.

I’ve read about the Unabomber Manifesto before but never learned this level of detail about his personal life. That’s in here too.

Overall this article is timely for me since I’m just starting Nir Eyal’s Hooked and on the homestretch of Eugene Schwartz’s Breakthrough Advertising. In sequence, these are spellbooks to the dark arts of persuasion. Given the differences in the world since they were each written, there’s an Old Testament/New Testament feel to this reading arc. I didn’t plan it that way but here I am. (Schwartz's book fits the metaphor — it’s god-tier writing. I should probably expect that from a copywriting mage. It also explains the going price for it.)

Gurwinder does a marvelous job of closing out the post with useful recommendations to insulate yourself from Moloch’s relentless advance.

Related from archive:

The next post is like a spellbook for conjuring dorks.

The Nerd Urban Dictionary (10 minute read)
Chris Anderson

You, discerning reader of internet newsletters such as moontower, have an outsize stochastic weight of being a member of the standing desk cohort, more colloquially referred to as tech and finance bros/gals.

This article will make you laugh.

If you’re me, it also makes you cringe.

I literally keep a file of terms I come across. And yes, it’s sorted by category.

There’s some that are moontower originals as far as I’m aware (I’ve used
”Terminator HUD” and football’s “arbitrary spot” as metaphors in a few places).

[I fed the list to ChatGPT & Claude to populate the “explanations” column.]

I also keep a “swipe file” of sentences or paragraphs I like from other writers, but I’m not as diligent as I’d like about collecting or re-reading them. Now I keep a printout of it next to my bed so I actually review them.

Even that is too optimistic.

I just sleep next to the sentences to make me smarter.

I’m a pretty lucky person. If I re-simulate my life 100x, I’m pretty sure I sort recyclables for a paycheck in 99 of them.

I mean it when I say it:

Stay Groovy

☮️

Refer a friend

Need help analyzing a business, investment or career decision?

Book a call with me.

It's $500 for 60 minutes. Let's work through your problem together. If you're not satisfied, you get a refund.

Let me know what you want to discuss and I’ll give you a straight answer on whether I can be helpful before we chat.

I started doing these in early 2022 by accident via inbound inquiries from readers. So I hung out a shingle through the Substack Meetings beta. You can see how I’ve helped others:

📲Book A Meeting