👋 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 algorithmic feeds and click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
🧝♀️ Plastic (and payments) in the fantasy supply chain:
[The] supply chain implicates a high-volume aggregated-then-distributed subscription commerce service needing to make multinational pay-ins and pay-outs [..] And the capability to offer this allowed entrepreneurs to create a business model which looks very little like existing firms; it is neither vertically integrated nor does it recapitulate the supply chain for most physical items with embedded IP.
20-minute read by Patrick McKenzie in Bits about Money
🤡 Send in the Clowns:
[M]edia is becoming a just a feature to non-media service offerings. This struck me as an interesting idea, suggesting that media is becoming less of a business unto itself and more of an appendage to other things. Like media is a just a product feature for Apple. It sits next to free delivery on a list of benefits that come along with your Amazon Prime membership
9-minute read by Troy Young in People vs Algorithms
👻 Not Normal:
There is no such a thing as “normal.” [..] “Normal” is a habit. It’s the way that we - as societies, economies, and as individuals - are used to doing things. Our habits gave us staggering income inequality, inaccessible healthcare, and unsustainable growth. It also gave us the climate crisis and “disaster capitalism.”
3-minute read by Ana Andjelic in The Sociology of Business
🎧 Listening
👷🏻♀️👷🏻♂️ Building Towards American Dynamism:
You have to hire the first batch of people who are poised to understand the other world is possible, but you have to start with this core to build off from. Once you have that core 10 or 12 people who really get it, you can build cultural reinforcements that set the stage that anyone new coming in gets the plan
54 minutes with Chris Power on a16z Live
🔮🤔 What Could Go Right:
I don't want to talk as if the entire culture has become completely negative on technology, and now it's just the worst. I think our culture is very conflicted about technology. On the one hand, we love a lot of what it does for us. And on the other hand, there's a lot of fear and skepticism and distrust. So there's still a conflict, and there's a lot of inner turmoil, I think, and still a lot of soul searching going on.
48 minutes with Jason Crawford on The Progress Movement
🧬 🤯 The Primacy of Context in Complex Systems:
The thing with genetic information is, it's digital. It comes in these digits, we know how it's copied, how it's encoded, and that's what makes the study of DNA and genetics such a cool and powerful thing. Just because we can digitize something doesn't mean it's the most important part of the information in that complex system; it's just a piece of information in that complex system [..] Just because you can't study it don't mean it's not the thing driving that system
74 minutes with C. Brandon Ogbunu on Complexity
📬 Suggestions?
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