👋 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 that deserve saving from this week's algorithmic feeds and click-bait chum. No fluff, and signal over noise ⚡️
📚 Reading
Drip is the new drop:
A drip is a continuous stream of products, signals, content, incentives, rewards, tokens, points, interactions, events or access [..] Drips reward long game over short-term gains. Drips also galvanize communities, incentivize collaboration and membership, and decrease competition. Drips are the opposite of the winner-takes-all: they are decentralized and governed by activity in their communities.
💧 7-minute read by Ana Andjelic in The Sociology of Business
A Declaration of the Interdependence of Cyberspace:
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to co-opt our language and expand your reach. But the global web of care no longer requires your siloed servers and data farms. We do not bow to monopolists, surveillance capitalists, or philosopher-kings.
👻 4-minute read by many
What I Learnt From Complexity:
Here is one worldview implied by a complex adaptive system: you cannot predict what will happen in the future. History is like traffic: even tiny events might snowball into world wars. This is perhaps blandly obvious to you, as it might be to anyone who has read their fair share of history. But here’s the kicker to that worldview: “… and therefore you must learn to act without prediction.”
🔮 16-minute read by Cedric Chin in CommonPlace
🎧 Listening
How to think about tech:
Having a good website is not a tech conversation anymore; it's a retailing conversation. "What's your shopping cart abandoning rate" is not a tech question anymore; it's a are-you-a-good-retailer question. "How full is the car park at your supermarket every day", that's not a car question, that's a retailing question, and you don't need to hire people from Detroit to do that.
🤷♂️ 36-minute chat with Toni Cowan-Brown and Benedict Evans on Another Podcast
Forecasting the Metaverse:
The flip on this was when it started to go from a consumer technology to a business technology; the incredible upside you get from just having creative people working on hard problems together and creating a sense of presence. [And] that's not what the office is that you have anymore. So many people have left, so many people's expectations around how they are going to work and where they are going to work is going to change.
💁🏻♀️ 64-minute chat with James Allworth and Ben Thompson on Exponent
Crisis Proof:
The interesting thing, though, is that organizations who do invest in planning for a crisis not only make sure they are ready to respond if the worse does happen. By going through that process, they reduce the chance of it happening in the first place, and they actually learn business-as-usual skills. Decision making, situational awareness, critical thinking...
🤔 37-minute chat with Jonathan Hemus on The Wicked 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 🙏