👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
Why Are So Many Knowledge Workers Quitting?
[T]hey worked long hours, they made good money, they had lots of stuff, they were exhausted, and, above all, they saw no easy options for changing their circumstances [..] The absence of visits with friends and family reinforced the value of social connection. The unceasing presence of video conferencing and e-mail enhanced the Kafkaesque superfluousness of many of the activities that dominated the pre-pandemic workday.
🤷♂️ “Modern Times” all over—The New Yorker
Bad News: Selling the story of disinformation
[A] “deeply opaque” marketplace, automated and packaged in unseen ways and dominated by two grimly secretive companies, Facebook and Google, with every interest in making attention seem as uniform as possible. This is perhaps the deepest criticism one can make of these Silicon Valley giants: not that their gleaming industrial information process creates nasty runoff, but that nothing all that valuable is coming out of the factory in the first place
🧙 “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain“—Harper's Magazine
The Other Invisible Hand:
The health of the whole must trump the self-interest of any part. Otherwise, the parts become parasitic, gaining at the expense of the viability of the whole. Unregulated parts can kill their wholes. Humans are obligated cooperators: To survive, we have no choice but to cooperate with other humans. We are evolution’s most productive super-cooperators — our economies are our social metabolism, facilitating our techno-political form of globe-spanning super-cooperations.
💪 Invisible, and strong—NOĒMA
🎧 Listening
Curation in the Age of Information Abundance:
I think that a lot of people get into real trouble in life when they become maximally abstracted. When you're living completely in the map, and not in the territory, that's actually one of the descriptions of major depression. It's basically when you're map doesn't get updated by new territory, and your network is completely closed for new information and there's no connectivity whatsoever.
Tom Morgan—Infinite Loops
Can We Still Be Optimistic About The Internet?
Sometimes I'm curious when I'm listening to Mark Zuckerberg: what is some kind of head in the sand, what is needing to keep up corporate messaging? But I also love the actual vision and optimism there, which I believe is most be mostly heartfelt [..] I believe more than ever in the power of people together to find meaning, to find power, to find connection and purpose. People need each other more than ever now.
Scott Heiferman—Big Technology Podcast (Apple Podcasts, Spotify)
The Passion Economy, Part II:
If you are worried about your place in the global economy, you are fine, you know enough to be worried. It's the people who are not worried that are really screwed [..] The passion economy is coming, it is here, it is baked in to the way the world works now and the way technology works now. It is coming and it is gonna have an unimaginable change.
Adam Davidson & Li Jin—Means of Creation
📬 Suggestions?
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