Great Timing
Tech Questions, Saving the Internet, and Economics of Creativity
👋 On time for your weekend: this year’s first round-up of remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
This edition picks out the ideas that might matter in 2022. No fluff, and signal over noise⚡️ Thank you for being a reader, and here’s to great times 🙏
📚 Reading
🤓 Tech questions for 2022:
Sometimes the centre of gravity in tech is very clear - everything is about PCs, or the web, or smartphones. But at other times, there are lots of things going on and none of them are The Thing, and all of them are full of questions. Of course, for some crypto people crypto is the only question and the only answer, but as we enter 2022 there are lots of areas where trillion dollar questions are wide open.
14-minute read by Benedict Evans
🧐 Can Matt Mullenweg save the internet?
As more and more of our lives start to be run and dictated by the technology we use, it's a human right to be able to see how that technology works and modify it. It’s as key to freedom as freedom of speech or freedom of religion. So that is what I plan to spend the rest of my life fighting for.
22-minute read by David Pierce in Protocol
👩🎨 The Economics of Creativity: Who Gets Paid and Why:
With the explosion of digital ownership, we’re going to see a lot of different people find their own creative acts. Those who have a skill that lines up with today’s technology will be disproportionately favored. Many of them will be rewarded with status and wealth in ways they never would have before, because we are no longer isolated from each other by geography and time.
8-minute read by James Currier at NfX
🎧 Listening
🤫 The 6 secrets of great timing:
Generally when somebody fails once at something, they'll never try it again. The twist on this is it's not like it's the same founder or the same team trying time after time after time to get the thing right, for the most part. It's almost always new teams. And in fact one of the things that's really funny [..] is often the new teams, including the ones that finally get it right, often they're not even aware of the history.
37 minutes with Marc Andreessen on Masters of Scale
🔮 2022 Predictions:
My wrap around brand strategy: the sun has passed midday. I would argue the 80's and the 90's were the brand era; you took a mediocre car, a mediocre shoe, a mediocre salty snack, and you wrapped it in amazing brand code [..] That algorithm no longer holds, and it's really all about the product again and about innovation that's been unlocked with digital technologies.
61 minutes with Scott Galloway on The Prof G Pod
🧠 Why does the brain exist?
[On the idea of memes as viruses of the mind] I think that's a great metaphor. I think it's a fantastic metaphor actually. Remember that brains wire themselves to their world, literally, okay? So your brain... When an infant is born, their brain is unfinished. So an infant brain is not a miniature adult brain. It's a brain that's waiting for wiring instructions from the world.
70 minutes with Lisa Feldman Barrett on Infinite Loops
📬 Suggestions?
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