👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
The Winners of Remote Work:
When most companies hired only employees who lived within commuting distance of the office, the size of the labor market was capped. This put a ceiling on the employment options and earning capacity of employees with the most specialized, in-demand skills. It also put a floor beneath other professionals who enjoyed a decent salary and relative job security by virtue of living within commuting distance to a central business district or office park.
🤭 Gradually and then suddenly—Dror Poleg, NY Times
Design for Care? Narratives of Climate Care in Design:
The problem with optimism and pessimism is that they reduce a complex tangle of crises to a two-dimensional story of how we have lost all or how we will overcome all [..] Oppositional as they may seem, both narratives present the future as known. Stories of either salvation or the final countdown tell you the end of the story while the plot is still unfolding. This is what is going to happen. We are here now. And for better or worse, this is how things will end.
👩🎨 Design is not just how it works; it’s what it frames—Institute of Network Cultures
Turns Out The Hardest Part of Making a Game Is...Everything:
Hints are surprisingly hard to get right! You can't just tell players what to do, you need to shift their thinking in the right direction. It takes a light touch and subtle reminders. That means rigorously testing to find out where players most commonly lose their way. And what you write needs to be very precise! I've seen the wrong word choice send players spiraling off into strategies that'll never work. And then it's twice as hard to get them back on track from a bad hint!
🕹 Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail—IGN
🎧 Listening
Are We Actually Addicted To Our Phones?
When you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck" [..] Every new technology has downsides; that is part of the process of innovation. So what we do, is what we always have done as a species. When there is a new technology that has goods and bads, we do two things: we adapt and we adopt. We adapt our behaviours to cope with a new reality, and we adopt new technologies to fix the last generation of technologies.
Nir Eyal—Big Technology Podcast
Do or DAI:
Bitcoin and the Blockchain are a step-wise function up for digital scarcity. And then Ethereum is a step-wise function up again for programmability. And the money legos concept: you are essentially parallel processing innovation where you can move in a very literal sense a hunders times faster [..] And then you can have competition [..] that gets you best-in-class for collateralization, best in class for lending, best in class for insurance.
Rune Christensen—Signal by Consensys
Why Airline Loyalty Programs Are Really Just FinTech Companies:
Growing a financial services company is so brutally difficult and the growth constraint is so dominated by customer acquisition cost, that it is literally worth it to start buying planes and flying people around the country, and to have this heavily unionised workforce and have all these safety regulations and things like that, and that is actually the most cost effective way to sign people up for credit cards. And the credit cards business is so lucrative that it is actually worth it.
Byrne Hobart—World of DaaS
📬 Suggestions?
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