👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week's 19 remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
The Rise of Platform Brands:
Rather than building skill-based career moats, workers of the future may be using their audiences to secure permanent employment ... While some individuals will still want to build audiences on their own, many will opt to gain legitimacy and investment by partnering with an employer who can help them grow their reach and status.
🧐 The new nature of the firm—Nick deWilde
The End of Industrial Society:
[P]ost-industrial society isn’t our name for the next stage of civilizational progress. Instead, the term is true in its most literal and pessimistic interpretation: a society after and without industrial civilization . . . We have lost the implicit knowledge upon which our industrial systems functioned even as recently as a few decades ago. That knowledge cannot be regained absent the people who actually built and understood those systems.
🤔 Time for a proper renaissance then?—Samo Burja
Jack be nimble, Jack be quick:
Tech needs a new hero. Bezos is about to dip, and Zuckerberg is doing everything in his power to stem a federal dismantling of the industry. Elon’s taking us to Mars, and that’s a kind of spiritual direction I’m always here for, but we need someone focused on the fundamentals — will we be able to speak freely in ten years or not?
😉 Tony Stark is strong is this one—Pirate Wires
🎧 Listening
Do Build:
We need to have a conversation about what sustains us for an eternity. What actually can help us feel that we can be part of something. Wheter you're a making a vineyard, or a bank, or an energy company, or a farm, or a trainer brand ... that actually you can be in service to something which is of a greater good.
Alan Moore—The Wicked Podcast (iTunes, Spotify)
Sovereign Podcasters:
The Internet is going to drive everything. If look at it on an individual basis, it's going to get very narrow. But systematically, there's going to be a million narrows ... Every particular publication, or every particular author is very narrow, but you have access to every author in the world. It's an inversion of the market and it's OK!
Episode 193—Exponent
All about NFTs:
One thing that was missing was markets for these digital assets. The idea that digital assets have value is sort of a prerequisite for digital media assets like NFTs having value ... The markets had to come first: markets are volatile and drive speculative frenzies, but they also drive infrastructures and mental models that stick.
Linda Xie, Jesse Walden—a16z Podcast (iTunes, Spotify)
📬 Suggestions?
Please, feel free to send tips and ideas for the next issue by replying to this email. Or, send them directly to hello@futuring-architectures.com 🙏