👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
FILE NOT FOUND:
“I grew up when you had to have a file; you had to save it; you had to know where it was saved. There was no search function” [..] But among her students, “There’s not a conception that there’s a place where files live. They just search for it and bring it up. They have a laundry basket full of laundry, and they have a robot who will fetch them every piece of clothing they want on demand.”
💁🏻♀️ We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us—The Verge | 12 minutes
How ‘Maximizing Shareholder Value’ Re-Emerged As ‘Value Creation’:
[T]here is a fundamental dichotomy between those firms that are continually asking themselves the self-interested question, “what’s in it for us?” and those firms that start from the customer’s needs and ask, “what’s in it for the customer?” They are two fundamentally different ways of looking at and operating in the world. Over the last two decades, firms that have crossed the Rubicon to the world of customer capitalism [ ..] are now eating the world.
👯 Thriving with, not on, customers—Steve Denning, Forbes | 8 minutes
Why Novels Will Destroy Your Mind:
But the big problem was they deformed your mind! [..] Novels wildly excited the imagination, but that didn’t always seem like a good thing. Indeed, critics worried that young people would become so besotted with romance novels that they’d struggle to tell fantasy from reality. They’d be more empathetic to the fake people in their books than to the real people around them.
👻 Newsletters can be pretty nefarious too—Clive Thompson, Medium | 11 minutes
🎧 Listening
Innovation, intangibles, inequality, sustainability and measuring beyond GDP:
[T]he gap between GDP and what we might care about in terms of economic wellbeing or welfare is growing and making the GDP less and less useful [..] And it's because ideas are creating so much more of the value and that might be because it's in services and the quality of the service really matters. And so the price there is a signal of quality and you can't use it to calculate real GDP in the same way all those quality changes and all the electronics goods that we buy all the time.
Diane Coyle—Ben Yeoh Chats | 69 minutes
Evolution of Social Hierarchies:
I realised, maybe there is this dearth of people who are espousing common sense. That it is a luxury belief that common sense is kind of vulgar. It's gauche to say things that make perfect sense. If you want to be a member of the elite you have to say things that are not common sense in a way.
Rob Henderson—Infinite Loops | 75 minutes
The Great Stagnation’s End:
[I]t takes longer to put the internet to good use than you might think, and that we had been overrating how much the internet already was doing for us and underrating what it will do for us in the future. So just having greater exchange of ideas, a broader, more global, more diverse scientific community, more rapid exchange of ideas, nearly universal access to computing power through, say, cloud computing — all that has mattered a great deal.
Tyler Cowen—The Ezra Klein Show (Apple, Spotify) | 78 minutes
👷🏻♀️👷🏻♂️ Our Work
One year of Thoughtforms on Substack; the first issue looking somewhat quaint now.
📬 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 🙏