👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
Against Scarcity:
[O]ur online worlds should enable a post-scarcity infinitude of freely shared ideas, goods, and protocols, but of course that would only make sense if they were untethered to the actual world where we need money to sleep and eat. Is the web’s artificial replication of scarcity economics an early-stage quirk, or is it a more fundamental reflection of the fact that we can only visit virtual worlds, but ultimately have to live in one of rocks and trees?
🤔 Or the ultimate skeuomorph?—David Phelps
"In this Era, openness wins":
I can be a participant and guide to moving things forward, I can set up the structure, but the decisions do not all need to come from the top. Everyone can own, share, and facilitate growth. This is a crowd-based movement, and they should be involved, even if I help steward. Today we can build things that self-perpetuate with or without us. This is always been the goal of business, but the nature of our firms directed flows of power to the top, centralizing power to only a few.
🧐 Defining The Living Company—David Sherry
A Framework for The Metaverse:
The internet was once envisioned as the ‘Information Superhighway’ and ‘World Wide Web’. Neither of these descriptions were particularly helpful in planning for 2010 or 2020, least of all in understanding how the world and almost every industry would be transformed by the internet [..] We have a good sense for the individual technologies and behaviors needed to enable the Metaverse, but how they come together and what they produce is the hard, important, and society-altering part.
😎 Still 30 years to go—Matthew Ball
🎧 Listening
The State of the World:
The heroes of the story of Modernization Theory are (as my book calls it) the Mandarins of the Future, the technocratic elites who are going to be able to guide the process of national development towards this happy outcome of liberal democracy, towards what Fukayama would call the End of History. It casts the intellectual leaders and technocrats of a society as the heroes...
Nils Gilman—European Straits (Apple Podcasts, Spotify)
Games philosophy, agency, real-world gamification:
A game designer not just tells a story or or creates an environment, they tell you what your abilities are and what your environment is, and most importantly tell you what your motivations are in the game. Another way to put it is that a game designer sculpts a form of agency. And then, when you play different games, you pick up and learn different kind of agencies.
C Thi Nguyen—Ben Yeoh Chats
Paying attention to Apple again:
The more that advertising doesn't work or produces less revenue because the ads are less relevant and less efficient, the more that people move to different models. That makes it attractive to have a paywall, to do sponsored content, to shift your other revenue models [..] The aggregate of all of this is basically the strong get stronger, the big get bigger, advertising moves to big, strong established sites.
Benedict Evans, Toni Cowan-Brown—Another Podcast
📬 Suggestions?
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