👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods
Put simply: who belongs in this great post-national society the crypto community aims to build? [A] public always exceeds one's known protocol. It is a relation among strangers that's historically contingent and culturally complex. A public is constituted by the friends you have never met, with whom you share cultural coordinates without even knowing it. How does what we build render benefits for the most people possible?
👼 The good in public goods—Other Internet
A Project of One's Own
People who care a lot about their work are usually very sensitive to the difference between pulling, and being pushed, and work tends to fall into one category or the other. But the test isn't simply whether you're told to do something. You can choose to do something you're told to do. Indeed, you can own it far more thoroughly than the person who told you to do it.
👊 The reward in ownership—Paul Graham
It’s time to consign the “selfish gene” to the history books
We can conceive of evolution, now, as a multidimensional force acting through both competition and cooperation at multiple levels—within the organism, in symbiotic relationships, within a species, between species, and within an ecosystem. At each level, competitive and cooperative forces create their own dynamic tensions, while simultaneously impacting other levels.
🙏 Networking over combat—Jeremy Lent, Salon
🎧 Listening
The future of privacy and your data:
The reason why it was centralized [..] is when you're first doing something it's hard, it's expensive, the processors are not good enough, and so it's just more efficient and possible to do stuff in a centralized place and then push the data out [..] This secular shift in technology happens to align quite well with ongoing regulatory pressure and (Apple's) positioning in the marketplace, and that is leading to a perfect storm of inverting the model.
Ben Thompson, Eric Seufert—The Pull Request
Silicon Valley's necessary delusions:
There is a lot of necessary delusions that keep this Silicon Valley thing going [..] I just wished people would understand there's kind of a trade-off there [..] If you go back through all of history, whether it would be Thomas Edison, J.P. Morgan, they were all raving lunatics, all of them. The current crop is in many ways no different, frankly, than the past. So, a little realism around that..
Antonio Garcia Martinez—Danny in the Valley
Systems Leadership for Disruptors and Incumbents:
The last 40 years of strategy was about the or, which was: pick your business, stay focussed. It was more about what you couldn't do or shouldn't do. Strategy today and a key part of the systems leadership is about the and. It's about doing this and that [..] We are in the and generation, whether you're a legacy company or you're a startup. That's what you have to be thinking about, whether as part of an ecosystem or do it yourself.
Robert Siegel, Jeffrey Immelt—The a16z Podcast
👷🏻♀️👷🏻♂️Our Work
Solving the Innovator's Dilemma: uncovering opportunities for ecosystem innovation—R&D Innovation Conference
📬 Suggestions?
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