👋 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, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
🫣 Tech Leaders Can Do More to Avoid Unintended Consequences:
The twists and turns of human behavior and technological progress can make it hard to see what lies ahead [..] “You can’t imagine impact at scale,” is common pushback. But “an inability to envision the impact at scale is actually a really good argument as to why one shouldn't be able to deploy tech at scale. If you can’t determine the impacts of the technology you're about to unleash, it’s a sign you shouldn’t do it.”
12-minute read by Rachel Botsman in Wired
🕵️♀️ The Future of Search Is Boutique:
We seem to have accepted the job of the curator as providing a product review, a list of links, or a song recommendation — all inside linear structures and chronological feeds designed to surface the ideas of the last 24 hours, not to accumulate and surface knowledge as needed [..] People should be able to find whatever content they want on their terms and not be beholden to when the curator decides to publish.
12-minute read by Sari Azout in The Future
👯♀️ Fintech hasn’t solved financial exclusion, but embedded finance will:
Embedded finance is much more transformative because it changes the business model of financial services. It breaks the value chain horizontally, not vertically , leveraging existing, typically non-financial, distribution channels to provide financial services at lower cost and with the contextual awareness to address challenges of accessibility, understandability and discoverability.
13-minute read by Ben Robinson
🎧 Listening
🫧 Crypto & "Web3":
The bubbles are wonderful things. Not so much for the investors; the investors lose their shirt. But an awful lot of experimentation and an awful lot of learning about organisations, and a lot of engineers cut their teeth during startups and during the attempt to build out stuff [..] The social returns to all this kind of "let's try this, throw it against the wall, and see if it sticks" are potentially enormous in teaching us what's possible and in building up communities of engineers.
41 minutes with Brad DeLong, Noah Smith on Hexapodia
👷🏻♀️ Reinventing Entrepreneurship:
As companies get larger, the people who create things, unfortunately, become secondary to the people who build process because corporations need process, procedures, KPIs, etc., for scale [..] And that's okay when you're a dominant player, or the market isn't changing. In fact, you can grow quite consistently until there's an inflection point or disruption in the marketplace [..] and then all of a sudden, you realize you've beaten that DNA of innovation out of your company…
33 minutes with Steve Blank on Lancefield On The Line
🤔 Do We Need Web3?
It's essentially reducing the amount of power over a system that any individual or economic actor has. [..] There are often times one or a few individuals at the top with decision-making capacity, and then there's a degree of delegation that happens to the bottom level where there is very minimal decision-making capacity [..] And decentralisation is really about trying to remove that power structure, at least in a structural way, at least in a way that makes it non-negotiable.
60 minutes with Gavin Wood on Big Technology 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 🙏