Rituals, Not Habits
What to Watch in AI, The Next Era of Social, and Elon (of course)
👋 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 relentless algorithmic feeds and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
What to Watch in AI:
In the world we actually see evolving today, new AI tools effectively democratize facility and efficiency in unprecedented ways. In doing so, they're empowering individual professionals to achieve new productivity levels while enabling society to achieve productivity gains that may exceed those unleashed by the Industrial Revolution.
Reid Hoffman, Saam Motamedi—The Generalist | 22 minutes
In the Next Era of Social, Build Rituals, Not Habits:
In consumer social, rituals have been likened to just a feature, a mechanic, or a new entry strategy. They haven’t been celebrated as the main thing. But I see huge potential for rituals to be a core element of social products. In fact, I believe the next era of social will be defined by products that create rituals rather than habits.
Anu Atluru—Every | 11 minutes
On Elon Musk’s Vision of Twitter as a Hive Mind:
So, Elon’s premise that Twitter can behave like a collective intelligence only holds if the structure of the network and nature of interactions is tuned to promote collective outcomes. Everything we know suggests the design space that would promote effective collective behavior at scale—if it exists—is quite small compared to the possible design space on the internet.
Joe Bak-Coleman—Tech policy Press | 6 minutes
🎧 Listening
Transitional Times:
Silicon Valley platforms, in particular, have been really good at basically being toll booths. Google is just a tax that you pay, Facebook is a tax that you pay, and that's what they seem to excel at, and it works if everyone is using your products. But maybe the future, particularly with these social products, is going to be more vertical; we're going to have a verticalisation of social media.
Troy Young, Brian Morrissey—People vs Algorithms | 50 minutes
Does Progress Make Us Any Happier?
Progress is not automatic or inevitable; it's the result of human choice and effort, ultimately of human agency, and so we need to recognize and exercise that agency in order to keep driving things forward. I think that applies to the past, and it applies to the present and future. If we stop believing in progress, then ultimately, it will slow down, stagnate, and perhaps even stop or regress
Jason Crawford—Arjun Khemani Podcast | 38 minutes
Where Tech Goes Next:
Bill Gates saw his company get so dedicated to Windows that it missed the next transition [Mark Zuckerberg] doesn't want to be that type of leader. He's only 38; he has plenty of time left, and he thinks that the technology is eventually going to get there, and he has the money to do it. So, how does Zuckerberg funding the Metaverse defy the law of physics? It doesn’t…
Alex Kantrowitz—The Rebooting Show | 49 minutes