Labor of Love

Work that sustains, the Future of The Corporation, and Entrepreneurship

👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.

Photo by devn on Unsplash

📚 Reading

Labors of Love:

While automation is purportedly intended to free people from monotonous labor, it may indeed have the opposite effect [..] To truly guard ourselves against automation, perhaps the way forward is not to continually remake ourselves to meet the demands of the economy — and suffer as “failures” if we prove unable or unwilling to do so — but to reconnect with the work that truly sustains us.

👊 —Real Life

Disruption at Work: It’s More than just WFH

While most of us assume corporations (e.g., big tech) as existing today, the idea of a corporation was new post-war. Not simply the legal definition, but the very nature of how work was done. Perhaps surprising, but the answer to future of work was once: “The Corporation” [..] The question is not “work remotely”, but what is the very structure of getting things done?

🧐 Back to First Principles—Steven Sinofsky

Entrepreneurship is contagious:

I suspect entrepreneurship is only “contagious” to those who normally wouldn’t consider it. Maybe, for most people, starting a new business is literally unthinkable, in the sense that they just don’t think of doing it. But being around someone who has done it plants the seed in your mind that it’s a possibility, something you really could do [..] For them, exposure has a measurable positive effect.

🤷‍♂️ Seeing is believing is seeing—Matt Clancy

🎧 Listening

Emerging Technologies and China’s Crackdown on Tech:

We are slowly experiencing this, bit by bit (pun intended), and eventually the real and the unreal start to blur. And that me is one of the really interesting opportunities: who is going be doing it better, who is going be producing the really good content on top if the layers, who is going be ingesting reality with whatever higher fidelity.

Josh Wolfe—The Prof G Pod

Unlocking “Disruptive Power” For Your Marketplace:

Many marketplaces superimpose some form of infrastructure on an existing market. To help the people doing transactions already do them more efficiently or better or with more assurance that will go well [..] What they don't unlock, is they don't bring new consumers who have never been able to participate in the transactions before, or new producers-same thing- who for whatever reason couldn't be in the market.

Scott Kominers—NfX Podcast

The Motivations Of Facebook Reporters, And Their Sources:

A lot of Facebook's mistakes were really adhoc. A lot of those decisions they make, which are hugely consequential down the line, are just of group of like twelve people in a room hammering it out, trying to figure it as they go along. There isn't this grand plan motivating Facebook's action like some people, both Republican and Democrat, like to put on that company.

Sheera Frenkel—Big Technology Podcast (Apple, Spotify)

📬 Suggestions?

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