👋 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
🏴☠️ View a SKU:
For years, local merchants complained that their customers were “show-rooming” them: wandering their shelves to make sure the thing they were about to buy on Amazon suited their needs, then whipping out their phones and buying the goods on Amazon. I’m saying we should turn Amazon into the showroom: hijack its organization, reviews and recommendation algorithm to help us spend money locally.
6-minute read by Cory Doctorow
🤔 Delivering People:
Tech users were seen more as producers than the product. The unwaged or “free labor” that users of digital tech had begun to provide, generating data and content for sites, became structural as tech companies found ways to capture this value. From this perspective, the free gift of knowledge and community that early internet users happily produced became the source of its own eventual negation in the form of giant tech monopolies and the platformized web.
10-minute read by Daniel Joseph in Real Life
🔮 The future of tech as I see it:
[T]echnology only moves in one direction. There is no going back. It is not as if Zoom lost its value along with valuations. Who wouldn’t rather talk to a screen than fly five hours for a meeting? No matter how much we want to use the past as a reference point for the future, we have to override our biases and go where the value takes us. And where it takes us isn’t always where we might think [..] We have to consider what we know about the foundations of tech.
7-minute read by Om Malik
🎧 Listening
😼 Freeloaders, Fat cats & Ne'er-do-wells:
All of corporate America tried to recreate this tech perk lifestyle phenomena because it had so much trouble people recruiting out of college [..] The tech industry to a company, but especially Facebook, talked about how great this was in terms of getting the best work out of people. They were never willing to concede this was just going to create an incredibly entitled workforce. There's something very poetic about this incredibly entitled workforce to come and bite Facebook in the ass.
71 minutes with Alex Heath on Deadcat
😸 The FTC's antitrust thesis:
Are you going to say that large companies cannot buy small leaders in small emerging spaces so that they can bring that in and make it part of their company? Because that's an extremely broad shift in how not just tech but any industry would work [..] To say Google couldn't buy Nest, Amazon couldn't buy Ring: Nest would have probably gone out of business, and Amazon now has critical mass to compete with Apple in the smart home. So what's your pro-competitive policy here?
26 minutes with Toni Cowan-Brown, Benedict Evans on Another Podcast
🙀 Our Best/Worst Crypto Debate:
You're still trusting institutions, you're still trusting people somewhere in the chain, and crypto cannot solve that [..] The idea that technology fully solves any human problem is candidly like an overstatement of technology's abilities. Technology layers and new tools and new ways of trading and interacting, but in the end of the day, it's turtles all the way down and always hits back to humans and human institutions, and how we coordinate and how we act.
120 minutes with Sam Lessin on Cartoon Avatars
📬 Suggestions?
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