👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
Thoughtforms will be taking a short break. Back on Friday, July 30th.
📚 Reading
Tech Monopolies and the Insufficient Necessity of Interoperability:
When companies are small and trying to build up their customer-base, they love interop, love the idea of selling ink for someone else’s printer or a way to read your waiting messages on someone else’s social media giant. Facebook once had a whole suite of interoperability tools to make it easy to plug Facebook into other services, but it has whittled these away over the years and today it routinely threatens and even sues rivals that try to interoperate with it.
🧐 The S-curve of interoperability—Cory Doctorow
The future of (ads) privacy:
As with most problems in tech, the issues are really human ones: the entire business would have to be refactored along with the engineering. The only companies who can drive this foundational change are the two companies who control the smartphone operating systems themselves. Everyone else in that logo landscape, to a greater or lesser degree, plays a reduced role in the drama; some may no longer even have a role.
🤔 Refactoring tech's social technologies?—The Pull Request
Why Are Gamers So Much Better Than Scientists at Catching Fraud?
The rigorous format in which the speedrunning community asks players to provide video proof of their runs is itself significant. For many games, you need to show not just a recording of your screen, but also a video of your hands on the controller or keyboard, so moderators can ensure that it really was a human—and not a script or a bot—that clinched the all-important record.
🤭 Any disruption starts out looking like a toy—The Atlantic
🎧 Listening
The Art of Bureaucracy:
Agility has value to a business, it's just that can't project it in the same way you project other business cases. It's more like valuing a financial option, In order to avoid that no-saying bureaucracy you have to establish that there is business value in saying yes to things. And in saying yes in general, and having a process that lets new innovations get tried hard, and that's a little hard for companies to get used to sometimes.
Mark Schwartz—The Wicked Podcast (iTunes, Spotify)
Why civilizations fail:
[I]t deeply matters what your codes of laws are, what your ethical intuitions are, what mechanisms you use to resolve disputes [..] All these things produce very different societies and there is a way in which societies must be in a certain way to support certain material technologies. So there is an overlap between material and social technologies; they shape each other over time.
Samo Burja—The Vance Crowe Podcast
Making Intuition Work For You:
We grow up and we have experiences which create storylines of how things are supposed to be. And how we are supposed to be treated, and how we fit into the world, and how much risk we can take. We learn our place, and how we are to react from our environment. Then, we thinks as adults we are reacting to the environment, but we are not. We are playing out this narrative, we are playing out this storyline, we are playing out the expectations...
Denise Shull—Infinite Loops
👷🏻♀️👷🏻♂️Our Work
🎥 The Movie Creator’s Manual to help turn presentations into movies.
🥳 The very first edition of Thoughtforms, one year ago on LinkedIn.
📬 Suggestions?
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