👋 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
Social vs. Science Experiments:
For AI, a science experiment, there’s nothing, nothing, nothing… then BOOM. A fully formed butterfly emerges from the chrysalis. For web3, a social experiment, little flints spark adoption, and adoption shapes the products. Nothing, something, more, more, “probably nothing”… then KABOOM. Something unexpected breaks, and it’s back to the drawing board.
Packy McCormick—Not Boring | 15 minutes
Undetectable, undefendable back-doors for machine learning:
[M]aintaining vigilance over a system that is almost always right except when it is catastrophically wrong is neurologically impossible [..] That's why attacks on ML models are so important. It's not just that they're fascinating (though they are! can't get enough of those robot hallucinations!) – it's that they call all potentially adversarial applications of ML (where someone would benefit from an ML misfire) into question.
Cory Doctorow—Pluralistic | 8 minutes
The more beautiful internet our hearts know is possible:
The beautiful thing about the internet is that it's still a wild frontier. The physical frontiers of our world are largely mapped and tamed. But the digital frontier is endless, and it's always open to settlers seeking better ways forward. We are all free to venture forth, follow our curiosity and aliveness, direct our attention in new ways, and find the others. We are free to trust our intuition when it says "things can be so much better than this."
Rob Hardy—Ungated | 8 minutes
🎧 Listening
WTF is a media company now?
There is a breed of internet entrepreneur that really understands how the internet works. It's about understanding how traffic flows: how people come from search, what the role of social is, how to interrupt those flows in a commercial way that is profitable [..] Really, what matters is: is there a behaviour that exists that you can get in front of and get a product out there really quickly and figure out if someone is going to embrace it?
Troy Young & Brian Morrissey—People vs Algorithms | 39 minutes
Is Remote Work Here to Stay?
Because it was a default, we didn't have very sophisticated answers to an important question: What does the office do? If the office is a technology, what is its job; what does the office accomplish? Today, workers and companies and bosses who have a choice have to actually answer this question. What is the job of an office? [..] That is the really big question that's being asked right now that we have to be purposeful about.
Derek Thompson—Offline | 59 minutes
Democracy in the Next Cycle of History:
Things go up and down [..], and now we're on the downslope. Now, in part, this is inevitable. There are these cycles of history and the post-war institutions that were created for the era of mass media can't work in the era of distributed everything. We're going to have to go through a turbulent period. Even if social media was never invented, we were gonna go through this.
Jonathan Haidt—Long Now Foundation | 57 minutes
🎁 One More Thing
Thoughtforms is in its 3rd year, collecting mostly hype-free tales of the digital paradigm shift as it calmly chips away at behaviour, expectations, and institutions inherited from the previous paradigm.
What would happen if we lined up all of these stories? Would they tell of great futures, of new shapes of prosperity, and of the novel ways to get there? Of digital oases forming?
This Google Doc collects almost all pieces of Thoughtforms, and it seems to make for an exciting and never-ending document of whatever will be next. Have a look, and, as always, feel free to add, comment, and remix.
📬 Suggestions?
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