👋 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 relentless algorithmic feeds and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
The Age of Social Media Is Ending:
The terms social network and social media are used interchangeably now, but they shouldn’t be. A social network is an idle, inactive system—a Rolodex of contacts, a notebook of sales targets, a yearbook of possible soul mates. But social media is active—hyperactive, really—spewing material across those networks instead of leaving them alone until needed.
Ian Bogost—The Atlantic | 14 minutes
AI and the Age of the Individual:
AI pushes the cost of intelligence toward zero. And as this happens, domains of achievement that were previously unavailable to individuals and small teams—because they required the marshaling and coordination of a large amount of intelligence—suddenly open up [..] you should look at what people who can afford the currently high cost of intelligence do with it today. What they do with it today, will be what individuals will be able to do with AI tomorrow.
Dan Shipper—Superorganizers | 10 minutes
Legitimacy Lost:
What are changes to platform monetization policies but a form of taxation without representation? What are creators if not a new category of labor, not unlike platform gig workers or factory workers from before, seeking protectors for an emerging type of work that had previously never existed? [..] How the ecosystem responds—what alternatives are proposed, who builds them, and how—will shape the next phase of the Creator Economy.
Li Jin and Katie Parrott—Li’s Newsletter | 16 minutes
🎧 Listening
How To Create The Future:
Technology is the application of science; to make products and services that make people's lives better. You can't say the word 'technology' without understanding that it's people that technology is directed to help. [..] If you got some scientific phenomenon that's interesting but doesn't make people feel better or solve some problem, it's not technology; it's curiosity; it's scientific exploration. All good things, but they’re not technology.
Martin “Marty” Cooper—Christopher Lochhead | 84 minutes
Bad week for billionaire geniuses:
[Mark Zuckerberg] took responsibility for making the wrong call during the pandemic, and that's what he pinned these 11.000 cuts on; that basically, he saw the shifts going on and thought these were permanent and Facebook, along with its peers, got massive during the pandemic [..] I'm left wondering: why did they have these blind spots, and is this the way we just have to operate in a technologically advanced capitalist economy, these booms and busts?
Troy Young & Brian Morrissey—People vs Algorithms | 48 minutes
Tinkered Thinking:
[T]he people who are super anti-tech are still using a lot of tech and depend on it and love it; they just don't realize it's tech [..] All the things that I love are actually the reasons why all of the things that I think I hate exist today. So it's one solid up; this set of disruption curves, the S-curves, where something reaches full adoption and then it plateaus. It's a compounding of all of these S-curves.
White Mirror—Infinite Loops | 82 minutes