👋 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 salvaged from this week's fire hose and algorithmic feeds. No fluff, and signal over noise ⚡️
📚 Reading
Schumpeterian Waste:
Organisations don't fail at innovation because they're bad at the 'innovating' bit. That is, taking an idea and building out a product/service/business concept (though there’s still a lot of room for improvement in designing viable businesses). Instead they're bad at the bit around that: managing the investment in innovation.
13-minute read from Al Cottrill in Class35
95 Theses on Innovation:
The fall of innovation-speak will be a chance to reorient our society around values that actually matter. Will we seize this opportunity? Or will we allow corporate executives and other elites to seduce us with another wave of shiny, sparkling nonsense? The most radical thought is that there are principles beyond usefulness, beyond utility.
26-minute read from Lee Vinsel
The Rise Of The Aligned Web:
The [..] great thing about the aligned web is that everybody can see who's paying for what. None of the fees are invisible — it's all public and tamper-proof because it's on-chain. Unlike the adversarial web, the aligned web isn't incentivized to lie to any stakeholder about what's really going on [..] — no data brokers, experiments, engagement metrics, and so on. That stuff isn’t necessary, so it isn’t there.
12-minute read from Jon Stokes
🎧 Listening
What causes progress? And how can we stop it from slowing?
For most of human history, in most times and places, people didn't think of progress as a thing that was happening, or could happen, or should happen. They didn't see history as an upward line or upward trajectory; they saw it as much more cyclical. In fact, they looked back to their ancient ancestors as the wisest and most accomplished people who ever lived. All knowledge that matters was revealed to them in ancient times, and we can never surpass their achievements.
📈 86-minute chat with Jason Crawford on Clearer Thinking
The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb:
A digital closed loop, prior to crypto, you really could only do that with advertising. And so we build this giant infrastructure, the Internet, powered by banner ads and search ads, and things like this. That has been great for a few companies, and generally has been really bad for creative people [..] "Web2 companies convinced you to give away your creations in exchange for little hearts; tell me how NFTs are the real scam."
🤯 151-minute chat with Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant on The Tim Ferris Show
Effective Communication: Jesters and Saints
There is this fundamental problem in the value of the salesman. Because we sell ourselves the myth that we know what we want, the salesman seems like a distraction, but the role of selling you things that you didn't know you wanted until you experienced them is actually a vital component of human progress, in many ways.
🕺 77-minute chat with Rory Sutherland on Infinite Loops
📬 Suggestions?
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