👋 🎄 On time for your Twelvetide: this year’s last round-up of remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
Thoughtforms will be taking a break through the end of the year. Back on Friday, January 7th.
📚 Reading
🤓 Digital Transformation Changes How Companies Create Value:
Adding the ability to coordinate value creation and exchange — from user to user, partner to partner, and partner to user — is one way that traditional firms transform. It also provides means to scale. Transforming atoms to bits improves margins and reach. Transforming from inside to outside magnifies ideas and resources.
7-minute read by Marshall Van Alstyne and Geoffrey Parker in Harvard Business Review
🧐 The internet is changing us profoundly. We aren't sure into what:
I don’t know what to care about in an NFT [..] But here’s the thing; the pendulum swings. Good and bad from both ends of the spectrum will get pulled along into a more balanced middle. I think we’re in a moment of great equalization. We will pass through extremes to get there. We will move on and move forward. Much good will be done for culture in the process
11-minute read by Troy Young in People vs Algorithms
😎 Corner Stores Are the New Darlings of the Global Tech Industry:
Millions of mom-and-pop shops are already using some form of technology from these start-ups, but the digital transformation of the corner-store industry has only just begun. If it goes well—still a big if—independent stores in the global South may be able to forge a different future for themselves than in the West: Instead of getting destroyed by tech companies, what if they can learn to coexist with them?
8-minute read by Louise Matsakis in The Atlantic
🎧 Listening
🤷♂️ Old tech, new markets:
The things that the technology industry was building 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago turned out to be hugely disruptive and destabilizing to department stores, or apparel retailing, or the music business. But that's then a conversation for people in music, or in apparel retailing, or in TV [..] That dynamic: the tech industry zooms along, changing everything, changing all parameters for everyone else. But then it's a retail conversation or an advertising conversation, or a music conversation.
53 minutes with Benedict Evans on Danny in the Valley
🇺🇸 What Happened to the American Economy & How to Fix It:
In a way, I've come to think of production not so much as simply manufacturing but the way in which intellectual property, or ideas, or innovations actually spread throughout an economy and connect larger groups of people together. And so de-industrialization has been particularly damaging [..] Issues around income inequality, and despair, and all these issues, as well as slowing growth in productivity.
60 minutes with Julius Krein on Hidden Forces
💪 The Age of Unlimited Opportunity:
Progress is whatever allows people to have better lives: longer, happier, healthier. And lives of more opportunity and choice, that's another thing that is underappreciated. Your choice of job [..], your choice of who to marry and when to marry or whether you get married at all, your choice of whether to get children and when to have them and how many to have, your choice of where to live [..] So many of these choices were just not open to people in the past, or the choices were extremely restricted.
48 minutes with Jason Crawford on Radio Free Zion
🎁 One More Thing
🤔 What happens if we line up all of the 2021 editions of Thoughtforms? Would they tell stories of great futures, of new shapes of prosperity, and of the novel ways to get there?
👉 Only one way to find out.
📬 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 🙏