Boundaries
Despots, "Creators", and the Open-Source crunch
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this week's algorithmic feeds and click-bait chum. No fluff, and signal > noise⚡️
📚 Reading
👑 The Weakness of the Despot:
Russia is a remarkable civilization: in the arts, music, literature, dance, film. In every sphere, it’s a profound, remarkable place—a whole civilization, more than just a country [..] And it wants to stand out as a great power. Its problem has always been not this sense of self or identity but the fact that its capabilities have never matched its aspirations.
28-minute read by David Remnick, Stephen Kotkin in The New Yorker
👩🎨 Taking Stock:
{T]he emergence of the “creator” as a cultural archetype, much like the similar use of “creative” as a noun, signifies nothing more than the end of creativity as an autonomous aesthetic possibility (if it has ever been one). Creativity is now understood first and foremost as a business resource, a component of an employee’s skill set, an ability to sell something, anything.
12-minute read by Rob Horning in Real Life
👩🏻💻 My boundaries as an open source developer:
It is my responsibility to set the boundaries, your responsibility to learn them and try to follow them, and my responsibility to ultimately enforce them if you do not (block). Me having boundaries does not mean I don’t like you. It also doesn’t mean I would never want to talk to you. I may have linked you to this article without you having violated any boundaries.
6-minute read by Joel Denning
🎧 Listening
🧐 What is Web 3.0 All About?
Web3 is basically Web2, plus these two bookends of the blockchain plus the wallet that give you this web ability to take your informed consent with you and take your idea association with this meaning around with you, such that your freedom to move is significantly increased. That's Web3. And so, Web3 is the set of apps and behavior and stuff that emerges in this new understanding about your ability to move around. That's Web3.
67 minutes with Alex Danco on Infinite Loops
🤖 The Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles:
We should focus less on the technologies and more on who is empowered by them, and that will often be the companies that are developing and deploying, and making choices about the choices we will have and the control we will have [..] If you have a small number of automated driving companies [..], they will have incredible power over the way that we physically get around.
57 minutes with Bryant Walker Smith on Complexity
🎢 The Evolution of networks:
If I own the [mailing] list, then isn't that inherently saying there isn't a recommendation algorithm? If I own the list, then I send it to you and you get it [..] I I send you an email I know you're going to get it. Except for that GMail might put it into the Newsletters folder and hide it there, and I won't see it. And now, do I own my list? Maybe that's the question...
40 minutes with Toni Cowan-Brown, Benedict Evans on Another Podcast
📬 Suggestions?
Please send tips, comments, and ideas for the next issue by replying to this email. Or, send them directly to hello@futuring-architectures.com 🙏