Provocation-Driven
Questions as tools for thinking, the Social Internet is dead, and we're all programmers now
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three reads and three listens; no fluff, just stuff ⚡
The past is written, but the future is left for us to write. And we have powerful tools, openness, optimism, and the spirit of curiosity – Capt. Jean-Luc Picard
📚 Reading
Provocation-driven development:
I love these provocations. They are intriguing, expansive. They don’t provide answers. Not really. Instead, they pose questions that want to be answered. An architecture for information? An Intergalactic Computer Network? What does this mean? […] To answer the provocation is itself an act of creation. The provocation acts like a seed crystal, around which interesting answers may grow. Questions as tools for thinking.
Gordon Brander—Subconscious | 3 minutes
Social Internet Is Dead. Get Over It:
The internet, as we have known it, has evolved from a quaint, quirky place to a social utopia, and then to an algorithmic reality. In this reality, the primary task of these platforms is not about idealism or even entertainment — it is about extracting as much revenue as possible from human vanity, avarice, and narcissism […] We were all hooked on the likes, hearts, retweets, and followers and the boost they gave to our egos.
Om Malik | 7 minutes
We’re All Programmers Now:
Citizen development, if executed aggressively and carefully, could change the relationship between employees and organizations. Information technology has historically involved builders (IT professionals) and users (all other employees), with users being relatively powerless operators of the technology […] Citizen development has sparked a new era in which employees not only improve or streamline their own processes and tasks but automate them entirely.
Davenport, Barkin & Tomak—HBR | 14 minutes
🎧 Listening
Creating your culture:
We go to market to get people to adopt behaviour. And culture is so important in that calculus because there is no external force more influential to human behaviour than culture […] To understand these conventions and expectations, these beliefs, ideologies, social facts [...] requires a tremendous amount of intimacy and getting that intimacy, getting that level of closeness to a group of people, it requires a lot of work, and marketers do not want to do that work.
Marcus Collins—Lancefield on the Line | 43 minutes
The Conservative Futurist:
I propose what I call the Genesis Clock, a clock about new life and new beginnings. And instead of being how many minutes to midnight, how many minutes are we from dawn, from the dawn of a new age of abundance and prosperity? […] How many people are in deep poverty still? If that's decreasing, well, we move closer to dawn. What do our cancer cures look like? […] We can actually have a path where we all live better together.
James Pethokoukis—Infinite Loops | 64 minutes
Product People:
Somebody is brought in and quite literally called the adult in the room but doesn't have the software experience or the experience of building anything but understands business in quotes, understands how things should work […] And there was a lot of that at Facebook and Google and other companies, which has made a lot of unremarkable people a lot of money and give them a loud voice in product, even though they're not people who know how to build.
Alex Schleifer—People vs Algorithms | 49 minutes
🛌 On the Nightstand
Accidental Empires by Robert X. Cringely; a tongue-in-cheek narration of the PC industry’s honeymoon period and the ascent of tech priesthood. Reading it now, more than thirty years on, still serves as an explainer of the manias and foibles shaping tech.