Bubble Machines
The Metaverse is not a Place, Crypto's Reckoning, and the Digital Media Food Chain
👋 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 Metaverse Is Not a Place:
What if, instead of thinking of the metaverse as a set of interconnected virtual places, we think of it as a communications medium? [..] The interactions are not place based but happening in the ether between two or more connected people. The occasion is more the point than the place [..] This is the true internet—the network of networks, with dynamic interconnections. If the metaverse is to inherit that mantle, it has to have that same quality. Connection.
16-minute read by Tim O’Reilly
🫧 Return of the Great American Bubble Machine:
Much like the mid-90s, when the arrival of genuinely revolutionary Internet technology was delayed by a parade of overhyped pretenders [..] the crypto boom is being stalled by a fine-print reckoning. In an extraordinary irony, this market’s recent success seems to have only replicated on a grand scale the exact problems Blockchain technology was designed to cure, only in a different guise, and in language even more inaccessible to ordinary people.
18-minute read by Matt Taibbi
🤖 The Digital Media ‘Attention’ Food Chain:
Next is pure-AI contetn which beats ‘Algorithmic Everyone’. Dall-e isn’t that good yet, but you get where this is going—which is fully personalized generated content will someday kill Algorithmic Everyone… but not anytime soon. We will be pumping entertainment oil vs. living with infinite free entertainment for years…
1-minute read by Sam Lessin on Twitter
🎧 Listening
🔆 Lighting and Tech Diffusion:
This isn't 'technology' anymore; it's not software, it's not Silicon Valley. It's probably coming out of Shenzen in some form, but it's no longer the tech industry; it's the lighting industry. This technology of the rechargeable battery and the USB-C socket and the LEDs spread out of tech into this other industry [..] That diffusion and the spread of the stuff out of tech into everything else is intriguing.
26 minutes with Toni Cowan-Brown, Benedict Evans on Another Podcast
👩🎤 Making of a Great Leader:
[I]n order to maximize your impact, your default thinking should be to minimize opportunity cost. And there will be certain other parts of work you do where you are also addressing ROI, and you are working on quick wins. But if you're simply working on quick wins, if you're not looking at what is the best use of your time, and instead just asking yourself what is a good use of my time, then you're not going to achieve the outsized impact and returns that you're hoping for.
83 minutes with Shreyas Doshi on Infinite Loops
🌍 The ‘Network State’:
At the peak of a rollercoaster, or the crest of a sinewave, one takes that temporary stability for permanency: you live in Flatland. And so, therefore, people are not accustomed to the change that is frequent in other periods and that we're going through and that I think is going to accelerate. They kind of think as they start coming off the sine curve, "it was flat for a long time", but the derivative is going to increase.
116 minutes with Balaji Srinivasan on The Pull Request
📬 Suggestions?
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