👋 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 clickbait drum. No fluff, just stuff…
📚 Reading
🕹🥵 “Play-to-earn” and Bullshit Jobs:
Ultimately, in-game labour is just a re-branding of gameplay designed to be dull enough that rich players will pay to outsource it to poor players. In spite of being presented as the future of work by some venture capitalists, the incentives just don’t make sense. Floors don’t have to be swept in the metaverse unless they’re designed to need sweeping.
9-minute read by Paul Butler
👩🎨👩💼 Entrepreneur: 1 — Manager: 0?
[T]he idea that entrepreneurs are icons of modernity is surprisingly new. Joseph Schumpeter might well be the godfather of the ideal of the entrepreneur as the creative, dynamic, even heroic figure who — against all odds —” imagines and implements new combinations of resources to generate innovation and economic growth”.
7-minute read by Otti Vogt
🥂💸 Luxury x Crypto:
Luxury has always been in the business of simulation: of making its stories believable by the massive numbers of people. Coco Chanel was an artist; Louis Vuitton was a craftsman; Hermès has inimitable heritage; Ralph Lauren is about American aristocracy; Möet Hennessy has been made according to a secret recipe transmitted over generations.
7-minute read by Ana Andjelic in The Sociology of Business
🎧 Listening
👩🎨 Publishing's pivot to individuals:
[Elon, Jeff:] These guys are all memes in the Metaverse. It used to be Trump, and there's a lot of micro ones, and these are the big ones. And their stories unfold across Twitter and TikTok and Page 6, and they certainly have more mindshare than politicians and many celebrities. These are the characters in our weird Metaverse world: it is not coming, it is!
54 minutes with Troy Young on The Rebooting
🥵 Learning and Failing in Public:
If you fail publically, that's worse than failing privately. And failing in general, if you can avoid it, you try to do that. I think we overestimate the cost of failure. First of all the internet, for the most part (unless it's really meme-able), forgets really quickly [..] In general, people are somewhat forgiving of failure unless your stealing or something that's obviously wrong. But if you had the best intentions, then people follow along in your journey.
65 minutes with Frederik Gieschen on Infinite Loops
🦠 Reflections on COVID-19:
Where we are not good is: how do we put in agency and reflexivity? We have beliefs and desires, and superstitions. The great lesson of the last two years was that we didn't know how to do it. And we got frustrated, and the way we manifested our own limitations as scientists is to say: "look how irrational people are." Well, yes, that's what it means to be human, and we know that! What we were really saying is: we don't know how to theorize human agency.
69 minutes with David Krakauer & Geoffrey West on Complexity
📬 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 🙏