Myths and Magic
Myths and Magic
Crypto’s Use Cases, the End of Social Media, and Rethinking Teams
👋 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 relentless algorithmic feeds and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
🔮 Does Crypto Have Any Good Use Cases?
It's important to highlight that crypto is a backend innovation, akin to the first Internet innovation, and very different from mobile, which was a user experience innovation. Just as the first web pages looked a lot like newspaper or magazine pages translated onto a computer screen, we’re still in the early skeuomorphic phase of crypto applications. The front end has not caught up to the backend.
13-minute read by Nat Eliason
🎢 The End of Social Media and the Rise of Recommendation Media:
In recommendation media, content is not distributed to networks of connected people as the primary means of distribution. Instead, the main mechanism for the distribution of content is through opaque, platform-defined algorithms that favor maximum attention and engagement from consumers. The exact type of attention these recommendations seek is always defined by the platform and often tailored specifically to the user who is consuming content.
10-minute read by Michael Mignano in Every
👯♀️ Do We Still Need Teams?
[S]tep down from “true teams” to the use of “co-acting groups.” [..] True teams have a shared mindset, a compelling joint mission, defined roles, stable membership, high interdependence, and clear norms. Co-acting groups represent a loose confederation of employees who dip in and out of collaborative interactions as a project or initiative unfolds.
7-minute read by Constance Noonan Hadley, Mark Mortensen in HBR
🎧 Listening
🧚♀️🧙♀️ The myths and magic of innovation:
Operational excellence is all about getting the variance out; it's about getting the surprises out. That's appropriate at a certain part of an industry's evolution. What happens, though, is that once you leave that zone of familiarity, once you leave that middle of an S-curve, then those characteristics are not only inappropriate, but they actually work against the prospects of the firm.
39 minutes with Bill Fischer on Lancefield on the Line
😡 Convo with Web3 is Going Just Great:
As far as the actual stories on the site, I think they were more fun in the beginning because it was less of people losing their life saving and more of "oh my, this is the dumbest project I've ever seen" or "I can't believe they got away with this NFT scam." They were funnier, I think, whereas now it feels like they're very heartbreaking in a lot of ways because they are damaging.
38 minutes with Molly White on Cartoon Avatars
😳 Meta's Awkward Pivot, Crypto's Future, Amazon's Challenge:
This is why Meta seems adrift: the monopoly era of social networking is ending. It's now splintering into multiple different competitors that no one competitor can gobble up and no one competitor can sufficiently copy. And in that sense, I don't know that Zuckerberg—and I'm using Zuckerberg specifically—knows how to grok this.
70 minutes with Techmeme Ride Home on Big Technology Podcast
📬 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 🙏