👋 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 salvaged from this week's fire hose and algorithmic feeds. No fluff, and signal over noise ⚡️
📚 Reading
⏳ Yesterday Once More:
If you want to freeze culture, the first step is to reduce it to data. And if you want to maintain the frozen status quo, algorithms trained on people’s past behaviors and tastes would be the best tools [..] A culture that thinks like an algorithm also “projects a future that is like the past,” [..] nostalgia in, nostalgia out.
27-minute read by Grafton Tanner in Real Life
🔮 Science Fiction Is a Luddite Literature:
Luddism is the key to resolving the tension in some of our most important labor and technology debates [..] Democratizing access to the means of production isn’t intrinsically anti-labor — it’s only bad for workers when the bounty of automation is disproportionally allocated to a small number of capital owners, and not workers.
6-minute read by Cory Doctorow in Medium
🤭 GE, Toshiba, J&J: Reorganizing Is Not Transformation:
For the most part, what we will be watching is reorganization, not transformation, and what we are seeing at the moment is much more akin to simple dismemberment than to real transformative change [..] there is no suggestion, at all, of different work styles or of distributed leadership autonomy; mindset goes totally unmentioned.
9-minute read by Bill Fischer in Forbes
🎧 Listening
😵💫 From the great attrition to the great adaptation:
Leaders might want to reconsider the actual nature of their relationship with those employees. They’re not servants. They’re not there to do your whim. They’re there because they have a purpose. They have an identity. We’re not saying it’s not hierarchical for work allocation, but it certainly is egalitarian when it comes to being human.
33 minutes with Aaron De Smet and Bill Schaninger on The McKinsey Podcast
🧐 Can you disrupt? What does it take?
People in the more established companies [..] they haven't built the companies from scratch themselves; they are already big, and they don't have to. When you want to change and innovate, often that is sort of the characteristics and principles you have to apply [..] There's a lot of expectations in big organizations: "I'm spending 5M, and now I expect a return on investment in 6 months time"
38 minutes with Juana-Catalina Rodriguez on The Wicked Podcast
💣 The Media's Facebook Deflection:
The attribution to Facebook has to be seen in the context of the overall coverage of Trump and Russia. [There is] this term: "resistance journalism," and there is a lot of that going on. There's a bit of a moral panic, and as long as you say stuff that is about the targets, there's not a lot of pressure from other journalists to get it totally right; there's a lot kind of logical-leaping...
48 minutes with Alex Stamos on Newcomer
📬 Suggestions?
Please send tips, comments, and ideas for the next issue by replying to this email. Or, send them directly to hello@futuring-architectures.com 🙏