Everyday Magic
The sustainability of ride-hailing, why tech is magical (but shouldn't be mysterious), and Jack Dorsey
👋 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 clickbait chum and algorithmic feeds. No fluff, and signal over noise🔋
📚 Reading
🧐 Ride-Hailing: Is It Sustainable?
[E]ven though some technological advances fizzle or turn out to have massive drawbacks (like leaded gasoline), most new technology improves the standard of living for society, and is in fact almost the only way we can raise living standards for everyone. Replacing taxis with ride-hailing apps does not offer the same leap as replacing trains with jet airplanes, but even small innovations add up.
35-minute tour de force by Philo in MD&A
⚡️ Everyday Magic:
Agency shifts the balance of power—from corporations and startups to everyday communities and neighbors. In the ideal world, individuals would not only have the power to reject agency-deficient and agency-depriving environments, like those with dark design patterns, misaligned profit models, and pyramid scheme-esque incentives; they will also be responsible for using that power towards a future they want to see.
9-minute read by Spencer Chang and Jessica Dai in Reboot
🤭 Twitter Is About to Get Way Worse:
Twitter liberated information. It empowered the counter-voice. Then, most importantly, it gave our stagnant cultural overseers an outlet to simply tell us, honestly, who they are and what they believe, which was, of course, sufficiently horrifying to free us all from the notion they should retain their position of cultural dominance.
7-minute read by Mike Solana in Common Sense
🎧 Listening
⏰ Deep Time:
If you focus on efficiency as the governing value in your personal use of time, all else being equal, a more efficient system will simply attract and process more inputs [..] If you take the approach of trying to clear the decks before you get to the important stuff, firstly, the decks will not be cleared anyway because of the world we live in [..] And secondly, the act of clearing the decks increases the number of things on the decks.
40 minutes with Oliver Burkeman on Making Sense
💫 The Rise of Modernity:
For most of the 2nd part of the 20th century, anyone who lived in—for want of a better term—the West had a life of far less variance than 3, 4, 5, 10 generations before. You could call that the triumph of modernity. And then something happens: amidst of these fantastic variance dampening institutions, we somewhat accidentally unleashed the mother of all variance amplifying institutions, and it's called the Internet. What the Internet does is it selects the weird and amplifies it.
88 minutes with Matt Clifford on Infinite Loops
👩🏻🏫 Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology:
What is science? The task of science is explanation; fundamentally, we are not in the prediction business. Darwin doesn't predict we're going to have birds; he explains how we have birds. That's what makes him a scientist as opposed to an engineer.
81 minutes with Simon DeDeo on Complexity
🎁 Bonus
Every year, Benedict Evans narrates the macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. This year, Three Steps to the Future.
It’s as good as they come, and a masterclass in information design on top👨🏻🎓
📬 Suggestions?
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