👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
Hundreds of Ways to Get S#!+ Done—and We Still Don’t:
If you feel adrift on a turbulent sea of unmanageable tasks, that might be because there is objectively more expected of us [..] And quite apart from one’s paid toil, there’s been an increase in social work—all the messaging and posts and social media garden-tending that the philosopher and technologist Ian Bogost calls “hyperemployment.”
🤷♂️ Life is too complex!—Clive Thompson, Wired
Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?
Without a large industry and the promise of scale, it is hard to justify investment in digitizing an entire process. The world is too complex! The high upfront costs contribute to slow market share growth. Each incremental customer requires increasing amounts of effort to build the service they need [..] Remember, we need 1s and 0s accuracy! Current software reduces the costs within firms more than it reduces the cost of market transactions.
🤭 The world is too complex!—Austin Vernon
Why CAPTCHA Pictures Are So Unbearably Depressing:
They weren’t taken by humans, and they weren’t taken for humans. They are by AI, for AI. They thus lack any sense of human composition or human audience. They are creations of utterly bloodless industrial logic. Google’s CAPTCHA images demand you to look at the world the way an AI does. It’s no wonder we wind up feeling so numbed and depressed as we click through them, day in and day out.
👻 We are ghosts in the machine—Clive Thompson, OneZero
🎧 Listening
Braving New Intellectual Journeys:
Journalists are very much members of their own class, and are extremely concerned, perhaps more than ever, what their own peers think about them; and are actually very vulnerable to social pressure [..] You don't want to alienate your peers and increasingly your peers are all taken from a pretty narrow socio-economic base who hold very similar opinions and that that has become truer over the last 20 years.
Andrew Sullivan—Conversations with Tyler
Moose Heads on the Table:
Self-management can work at scale, but you see it in a kind of fractal way. In principle it works at scale but you have to have this team of teams thing. You have to have at a microlevel teams with high trust and openness, that are connected to another team where at least one person has high trust and openness with them. So you have to have a clever sort of structure to hold it all.
Lisa Gill—The Wicked Podcast
Roots of Progress:
That's what's unique about the Industrial Revolution: that it wasn't a flash in the pan or a brief kind of one generation long thing. Somehow we got something fundamentally right and built it into the culture, built it into what got passed down to later generations such that we kept this thing going over many generations. And it's just built on itself..
Jason Crawford—Energy Impact Center (YouTube)
📬 Suggestions?
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