Conscious Tech
‘Disruption’, Modern Internet, and the 40 Hour work week
👋 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 relentless like-bait drum. No fluff, and signal > noise⚡️
📚 Reading
🥷 ‘Disruption’ Is a Two-Way Street:
Any attempts to build more socially conscious tech will have to acknowledge that the story of disruption is not just one of the technological artifact. Tech is never the first or last mover of change. It is but one part of a larger equilibrium of forces within a complex social world, where everything exists in relation to the other. To design better technology, then, is to decenter it.
6-minute read by Rida Qadri in Wired
👩🏻💻 Bad hosts, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the overlay network
The modern internet has rendered the figure of “an individual hosting a small internet service, all on their own” as antique as a blacksmith; this, I sorta knew. But where before I might have called it a matter of ergonomics or motivation, I now understand that it’s deeper in the network.
9-minute read by Robin Sloan
⏰ People don't work as much as you think:
The 40 hour work week is almost never actually enforced. You may be punished for not being present for 40 hours a week [..] but actually working the contracted hours is a rule observed more in breach than observance, because it’s mostly impossible and most people find it easier to quietly pretend they’re doing it while working fewer hours than to make a fuss about it.
13-minute read by David R. MacIver
🎧 Listening
🤖 Designing Digital Economies:
We're basically running out of new ideas; the economy is becoming more and more psychological. It's less about innovation and more about understanding your condition as a person and then building a product around biological and psychological reflexes, rather than a teleport machine that can move you around the world.
77 minutes with Gabe Leydon on Colossus
🤭 On wordcels and shape rotators:
A lot of [Product Managers] are from what I call the failed [investment] banking track. They come from Goldman Sachs or HSBC or whatever, and they realize Facebook and Google are paying twice as much to work half as hard. "I can write words for them as well as I can write words for Goldman.”
78 minutes with Roon on The Pull Request
🦠 The History and Future of Quarantine:
Quarantine should be a meaningful experience. You are doing something, making a personal sacrifice for the public good; it just doesn't feel like that. So, how do we redesign, re-imagine it, give it some experience design? And that sounds frivolous, but it isn't, and now [..] is the time with the insights we have from COVID-19 to ask, "what should quarantine look like in the future?”
55 minutes with Geoff Manaugh, Nicola Twilley on Long Now (Apple, Spotify)
📬 Suggestions?
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