👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
Stepping out of the firehose:
To come back to those 351 thousand unread emails [..] really, it reflects that there are now close to 5bn people with a smartphone, and all of us are online and saying and doing things, and you will never be able to read everything ever again [..] Yahoo tried to read everything too - it tried to build a manually curated index of the entire internet that reached 3.2m sites before the absurdity of the project became overwhelming.
👩🚒 6-minute read from Benedict Evans
Why We Need More Omakase Creators:
I’m not suggesting that market demand doesn’t matter. We can’t just create things that people don’t want and then complain when you’re not making any money. But market demand is the product of a reflexive process between what is on offer (the supply) and what people want (the demand). Desires are formed, not born out of nothing—not created ex nihilo. We are all responsible for what one another wants.
💌 4-minute read from Luke Burgis in Anti-Mimetic
The Disruption of Expertise:
The New Expert, empowered by the internet, has a nearly infallible editor at her fingertips in the form of Search and sprawling Social Networks. The New Expert can be transformed into a polymath after the fashion of Newton, Locke, Rousseau, et al., as a consequence of both now having no upper-bounds to what she can learn, and having audiences hungry for the same infinite knowledge-horizons made available to anyone with wi-fi ..
👩🏻🏫 4-minute read from Sotonye in Time Well Spent
🎧 Listening
Why Platform Companies Are the Opposite of Traditional Companies:
What we're proposing is, rather then [data] portability, you gain in-situ data access rights. So rather than pointing [data] out of the platform, where it goes stale and you can't act on it anymore, you can grand 3rd-party access with your permission to manage it on your behalf. What that means is that you then create competition inside the platform itself.
👐 27-minute chat with Marshall Van Alstyne on 3 Takeaways
Constraints, Longevity, and Avoiding Competition:
If we can have our smaller team make a tight core that enables lots of businesses to exist around Ghost and around that open-source core, then an ecosystem will evolve around it of multiple economic dependents and it will probably function similarly to a large company, except that I won't control all of it.
👻 54-minute chat with John O'Nolan from Ghost on Indie Hackers
"There has never been an immortal society":
[..] In multi-media culture mediated through the internet, the world loses a sense of time [..] nothing prevents you from watching a series of videos from 20212 or reading articles from 2004. Things might become viral at strange times, people reviving a particular thing. So, if there is a way in which multi-media society might solve the succession problem. I think it would be through persisting online scenes and sub cultures.
🤹♂️ 77-minute chat with Samo Burja on Eclectic Spacewalk
📬 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 🙏