👋 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 algorithmic feeds and click-bait chum. No fluff, and signal > noise⚡️
📚 Reading
😵💫 Vertically Challenged:
In general, tech companies want us to think that it’s literally impossible for them to be vertically integrated with the parts of their business that impose costs on the rest of us – the divisions that pollute, or maim workers, or oversee fraud. At the same time, they insist that it’s impossible for them not to be vertically integrated with the parts of their supply chain that prevent competitors from emerging.
9-minute read by Cory Doctorow in Locus Mag
👩🏻🔬 What Evolution Can Teach Us About Innovation:
With innovation, variance generation is not spontaneous, as it is in the natural world. It must be instigated by people looking for new ways to do things or seeking new understanding. But most of the time, innovation teams limit their thinking to tweaks and refinements of ideas that are known to work [..] Breakthrough innovation requires contemplation of alternatives beyond current scientific, technological, design, or economic horizons.
26-minute read by Noubar Afeyan, Gary Pisano in Harvard Business Review
🤖 False Futurism:
Tech companies have always overstated the benefits their technologies will grant us and understated how much they serve their own ends of power and profit. The metaverse will be no different, especially since it’s unlikely to arrive in the form currently being sold to us. But the concept builds on the pressures that have shaped the internet’s development since its inception: the need to control the people who use it and find new forms of commercialization to generate profit.
15-minute read by Paris Marx in Real Life
🎧 Listening
🕹 Hacking Digital:
If technology is not the defining sector then who's gonna make the decision? And it can't just be the CTO and the tech people to influence how the organisation should look like after [..] Digital transformation is just a starting point to tell everyone that transformation is not digital anymore.
38 minutes with Didier Bonnet on Wicked Podcast
🔮 Ideas for the Future:
I am pretty hopeful that in 100 years, when we look back on our era, we will have moments of great literature that may not resemble what we think of as great literature, but through the sort of mill of time, it'll start to come out and we can look back and say, "Oh, so that's what the 2010s were about," that somebody will actually make sense of it
73 minutes with Rohit Krishnan on Infinite Loops
😵💫 What’s Next For Our Crazy Economy:
How should I deal with risk? What we have been thought is that there are those among us who are fearless; there are those among us who are better than you are at handling these tough situations. So go hide in your little cave and let the heroes do the tough stuff. And that's a load of crap [..] I can tell you, the work is not done by heroes, it's done by people who are equally terrified of the situations that they're in.
44 minutes with Jim McKelvey on Big Technology Podcast
📬 Suggestions?
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