Havoc
Elon and Twitter, lessons from Pebble, and NFTs (again)
👋 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, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
😰 Twitter, and Elon’s World of Pain:
There is this old culture of the internet [..] that had a very strong free speech culture. Many of the older tech leaders today (GenXers basically) grew up with that internet. To them, the internet represented freedom, a new frontier, a flowering of the human spirit, and a great optimism that technology could birth a new golden age of mankind [..] I believe that too. But I also ran Reddit.
5-minute read by Yishan Wong on Twitter
📉 Success and Failure at Pebble:
Startup founder lesson learned — never forget to define and talk about your long term vision for the future. When things are going well, it’s easy to get caught up in growth. But you need this to carry your company through hard times [..] We should have just stuck to what we knew best and continued to build quirky, fun smartwatches for hackers
14-minute read by Eric Migicovsky in Medium
🙈 Chimp City:
Wouldn’t “Web3,” in its supposed reversal of “Web 2.0,” produce something like that — a world less tailored to algorithmic virality and performance for the largest possible audience? Wouldn’t one expect NFTs to encourage something that didn’t look like influencer culture, something that wouldn’t need celebrities to pump it up?
10-minute read by Drew Austin in Real Life
🎧 Listening
🤹♀️ "Taste Communities" + Brand Research + Veblen Goods:
Esthetically, the entire value and the entire appeal of those NFTs is socially determined. Which means people want it because other people want it. So if the price increases, you want it even more because all of a sudden, it becomes a Veblen good; it becomes something that shows that you have status signaling and money to buy that [..] You're buying into that esthetic, and the only reason is that not everyone can have it.
22 minutes with Ana Andjelic on Art $ Attention
🐦 The future of Twitter:
It was a protocol, and it was completely open. A lot of people looked at it kind of the way they talk about Bitcoin now: it's like this data store, so you could publish data onto Twitter, and other people could pull that out like a data feed. There was this very early phase 1 of Web 2: it was open, it was a protocol, it was federated and distributed. The problem was: they couldn't build an ad business...
35 minutes with Toni Cowan-Brown, Benedict Evans on Another Podcast
🤬 Social Media’s Havoc:
So there's the Internet, and then there's the smart phone, and then there's social media. If you think of these three things separately, you can say the Internet obviously is magnificent and changing the world and links people together. And connecting people is generally a good thing [..] Social media is very different [..] What social media did is it connected people in a way that encourages not communication but performance. Now it's inauthentic and it's performative.
58 minutes with Jonathan Haidt on The Weekly Dish
📬 Suggestions?
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