👋 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
We Have Entered the Self-Loathing Stage of the Internet:
Do you remember the carefree early days of the web? Brand names were innocent and playful—they sounded like something from a nursery rhyme: Yahoo, Google, Tumblr. Twitter was one of those cutesy names. Its symbol was a chirping bird. So sweet. So innocent. But nowadays, web platforms take on names straight out of an H.P. Lovecraft horror story—Threads, X, Ghost, Twitch, Discord, etc.
Ted Gioia—The Honest Broker | 9 minutes
The Cloud Is a Prison. Can the Local-First Software Movement Set Us Free?
If you and I wanted to work on a document together, we would no longer have to depend on some Google data center in the Oregon high desert to maintain the master copy. Instead, we would each have copies stored locally on our devices’ hard drives. I could edit my copy offline, and you could edit yours, and the two files would reconcile our changes anytime they connect, whether once a minute or once a week.
Gregory Barber—Wired | 18 minutes
You Are Not Destined to Live in Quiet Times:
Our political parties and institutions took shape long before the internet and social media existed. Our government bureaucracies, our schools, and our legal system were all built for conditions that no longer exist […] Many of our political ideas and ideological assumptions also reflect the conditions of an earlier era. If society’s operating system is running on the equivalent of a long-outdated version of Windows, that makes real reform difficult to imagine, and harder still to carry out.
Walter Russel Mead—Tablet Mag | 26 minutes
🎧 Listening
Future of Computing:
[F]or the first time, we're automating things about which we only have tacit knowledge [...] So unlike in the Industrial Revolution, unlike in plant floor automation, unlike in white collar automation during the office automation waves of the 1980s [...] we're automating things where it's not always clear to us how we do it or even clear how someone else does it. And that's a dramatic shift in terms of the composition of the things that we end up automating.
Paul Kedrosky | 48 minutes
The Path to Prolific Innovation and Making 130+ Games:
[O]ne of the really interesting things about programming, especially back then, was that the programming experience was extremely immediate [...] the iteration speed of learning was as fast as it gets. I could type something in and run it. Either it's gonna bomb and tell me there's something wrong or it's gonna work and I just learned something new [...] And then it's like, I'm not just solving problems, I'm starting to architect what I want to do.
John Romero (Doom Legend)—Tim Ferriss | 93 minutes
The New Gatekeepers:
[O]n the narrow level both Shein and Netflix are liberated from inventory constraints; Shein doesn't have to put inventory in a thousand stores; Netflix doesn't have a constraint on how many Saturday nights there are [... But] all the questions that matter for Netflix are TV industry questions [...] All the questions that really matter for Shein are apparel industry questions [...] It's not a tech company. It's a company that's using software as a new channel.