A list of stuff I've read in the last year, along with short summaries and some commentary.
Contents
- Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)
- The Master and Margarita — Mikhail Bulgakov (written 1928–1940, published 1967)
- Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism — Yanis Varoufakis (2023)
- A Final Synthesis
Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)
This book is: a psychological descent map showing how ideology collapses when a human conscience refuses to remain abstract.
Main takeaways
- The “extraordinary man” thesis is the core pathology: the belief that certain people may transgress moral law for a higher purpose — and the novel is one long demolition of that delusion.
- Once Raskolnikov tries to live his theory, the internal contradictions eat him alive; the hypothesis cannot survive embodiment.
- Every rationalization exposes how brittle his intellectual scaffolding really is.
- Punishment starts long before the police arrive — guilt is its own sovereign power.
- Relationships become the only force capable of puncturing his self-enclosed logic.
- The novel shows what happens when a system tries to run without moral feedback — the architecture crashes under its own unhandled exceptions.
The Master and Margarita — Mikhail Bulgakov (written 1928–1940, published 1967)
This book is: a shapeshifting satire of Stalin’s Soviet Union, where magic, bureaucracy, and metaphysics collide to reveal the absurdity of a regime built on enforced falsification.
Main takeaways
- Woland’s chaos isn’t malevolent; it’s a stress test for hypocrisy in a system obsessed with suppressing truth.
- Love and imagination consistently outperform authoritarian logic — the human spirit routes around censorship.
- The dual structure (Moscow + Pilate) shows how power replicates across eras; tyranny is fractal.
- The surreal isn’t an escape from reality but the only medium capable of describing a society with corrupted reality integrity.
- Large sections of the book feel weird, uncomfortable, or overlong — deliberately so; the distorted form mirrors a society forced to pretend everything is fine, and the excess doubles as a guilty pleasure, letting you revel in watching the absurd self-importance of “people with titles” get torched by forces that ignore bureaucratic rules.
Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism — Yanis Varoufakis (2023)
This book is: a macro-theory arguing that we’ve exited capitalism and entered a regime where cloud capital — not markets — governs value, allocation, and behavior.
Main takeaways
- Platforms don’t host markets; they replace them with privatized command economies.
- Profit is secondary to control over digital fiefs (data, attention, logistics).
- Competition becomes a simulation; real power lies in algorithmic allocation.
- Old-school capitalism (firms/markets/prices) becomes a decorative interface over cloud barons.
- Infrastructure = governance — whoever owns the coordination layer owns the society.
- A bleak synthesis: unlike Raskolnikov's or the Soviets' failed systems, this new regime isn't self-destructing from internal contradictions; its stability and coherence are the problem.
A Final Synthesis
The unifying theme of all three books is sovereignty and control.
Crime and Punishment (1866) is about the failure of individual sovereignty. Raskolnikov's "extraordinary man" theory is a failed coup against the sovereign power of morality. His internal state collapses.
The Master and Margarita (1967) is about the failure of state sovereignty. The soviet regime's attempt to achieve total sovereignty over truth is revealed as an absurd, brittle simulation when stress-tested by a force that ignores its rules.
Technofeudalism (2023) is about the success of platform sovereignty. The cloud barons achieve what Raskolnikov and the Soviets couldn't: a new form of sovereignty ("privatized command economies") so stable that critique slides off it.