👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
Epic Games believes the Internet is broken. This is their blueprint to fix it:
At the core [..] is a change in how people socialize on the Internet [..] interactions will move away from “likes,” comments and posts about people’s personal lives and toward more complex interactions where users share and participate in experiences across various services. If the last generation is about sharing, the next generation of social is going to be about participating [..] having this shareability to move beyond walled gardens.
👩🏻🔬 16-minute read from Gene Park in The Washington Post
Web Design: The First 100 Years:
Our industry is in complete denial that the exponential sleigh ride is over [..] But all this exponential growth has given us terrible habits. One of them is to discount the present. When things are doubling, the only sane place to be is at the cutting edge. By definition, exponential growth means the thing that comes next will be equal in importance to everything that came before. So if you're not working on the next big thing, you're nothing.
😱 30-minute classic read from Maciej Cegłowski in Idle Words
Every Great Business Person Has The Same Mental Model of Business:
Business expertise consists of a handful of properties: it is team-based — meaning that business expertise is actually a form of distributed cognition [..]; it consists of two things: domain-specific mental models of the business and cognitive agility; and there is a deeper mental model that underpins those domain-specific mental models, which explains how good business people are able to recognise other good business people, even if they are from different industries.
🔥 15-minute read from Cedric Chin in CommonPlace
🎧 Listening
Discovering the Lessons behind the World’s Longest-lived Organizations:
The music industry, during the time of music becoming a digital commodity and a subscription service, you could talk to people within the music companies themselves and every single one of them knew that their model was not going to survive what it was. But they culturally didn't have the internal story to fix that: they sold music on plastic circles, that's what they did [..] It's very important it seems to have developed a company or organisational culture to prepare people.
🔭 45 minutes with Alexander Rose on Long Now Seminars
Let's Bridge the Exponential Gap!
The issue was not so much about technologists not having as many humanities people. It was that the other aspects of society were unwilling to learn about how technology worked and therefor unable to have the right conversations with those companies early on [..] It's really incumbent on those people who are not involved in the technology industry to get to grips with how technologies work, where they are going, and what their second and third order impacts are.
🏄🏻♀️ 54 minutes with Azeem Azhar on Building Bridges
Web3 (how he got sucked in):
In Web3, what most consumers will be experiencing is this more decentralised thing build on top of these crypto protocols where ownership and economics go to the participants as much as they do to any centralised entity. I picture something that is a little bit more liquid and all over the place as opposed to everything running through central pipes and people meeting in certain central locations.
🔮 51 minutes with Packy McCormick on Means of Creation (Apple, Spotify)
📬 Suggestions?
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