👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
Zhang Yiming’s Last Speech:
[M]aybe there are some differences in knowledge and experience, but from a “human” point of view, we are still very similar to one another -- we are all ordinary people. But there is one thing that is different. For people who achieve great things, they often maintain a very ordinary mentality. In other words, if you keep an ordinary mind, accept yourself as you are, and do well for yourself, you can often do things well.
🦸🏻♀️ Ordinary people do extraordinary things—Kevin Xu, Interconnected | 20 minutes
“Rewilding Your Attention”:
It’s like intellectual monocropping. You open your algorithmic feed and see rows and rows of neatly planted corn, and nothing else [..] If you want to have wilder, curiouser thoughts, you have to avoid the industrial monocropping of big-tech feeds. You want an intellectual forest, overgrown with mushrooms and towering weeds and a massive dead log where a family of raccoons has taken up residence.
👨🌾 We are all foragers—Clive Thompson, Medium | 6 minutes
Let’s Redefine “Productivity” for the Hybrid Era:
Under the old definition of productivity, coordinating team collaboration around individual workstyles and thinking hard about whether your team should change its meeting practices might have seemed unnecessary, high maintenance, or even awkward. With the new definition of productivity in mind, these activities are essential.
🤭 How did we ever make that awkward?—Jaime Teevan, HBR | 9 minutes
🎧 Listening
The trouble with building the metaverse:
With respect to virtual worlds, if you choose to go into one and present yourself as an avatar there, you are faced what ends up being a pretty binary choice. Which is: you can either be the real you or you can be that avatar, but you can't be both. You have to invest the majority of your creative, projective, or expressive energy in one of the two. For most of us living in a physical body in the real world, is alright and in fact is our preference.
Philip Rosedale—Danny In The Valley | 65 minutes
Facebook's crypto chief on the long, messy journey to reinvent money:
We used to pay $1 a minute for an international call, or 25 to 15 cents a text message. And then the internet happened, and over-the-top apps were created — messaging apps like Messenger and WhatsApp — and that enabled billions of people to communicate in an unlimited way with a $25 Android smartphone, no matter where you are. It unlocked the ability for people to continuously communicate. We believe we can do that for money [..]
David Marcus—Protocol Source Code | 46 minutes
Why do civilizations collapse? And is ours next?
[These] are the ways societies self-cannibalize. The first one is just changing circumstances, the second one is the failure go knowledge, and the last one is this sort of profound and fractal failure of political coordination [..] fractal, endemic warfare that's dragging down economies of scale rather than dragging them up.
Samo Burja—Clearer Thinking | 89 minutes
📬 Suggestions?
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