👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three reads and three listens; no fluff, just stuff ⚡
There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening—Marshall McLuhan
📚 Reading
The Human Premium in the Age of AI:
People will not regard your AI-induced products and services as meaningful anymore if you just cut humans out of the equation. We don’t want humans to start thinking like machines, right? We want humans to think like humans and we want human-centered AI. If only because if people stop seeing meaning in what we do, AI will suffer as well. We will not use it optimally.
David De Cremer—Peter Hinssen | 6 minutes
The Internet Is Not Boring, You Are:
The real internet, the living, breathing, pulsating network of human creativity and connection, is alive and well. It's still thriving in niche forums, obscure subreddits, small newsletters and blogs, in private Discord servers, often even here on Substack, where passionate individuals debate everything from quantum mechanics to the philosophical implications of meme culture.
Felix Futzbucker | 11 minutes
Capitalism Has Been Killed By Technofeudalism:
Every capital good that we had since antiquity was something we produced in order to produce something else with it, whether it's a fishing rod or a hammer or a tractor or, today, a very advanced industrial robot. Cloud capital is not a produced means of production; its purpose is to modify our behavior, to replace Don Draper, to replace the market. And to replace it with a machine that interfaces with you in real time forever and extracts you from the market.
Yanis Varoufakis—Aftermath | 11 minutes
🎧 Listening
A confusing time for mass brands:
Yes, you may want to be for everyone, but you don't talk in the same way to everyone. That segmentation of not just products but also communication around, that is number one. Be very clear. Don't put all your products on your website or don't use your website just for members. Understand what do you have on different marketplaces or resale on your website […] Who are your superheroes in your product universe and then build around them, build your marketing around them?
Ana Andjelic—The Rebooting Show | 63 minutes
Digital Delusions:
Manipulating large numbers of people or creating a national narrative to something that became very niche. So I think that's particularly different. You could point back to maybe the era of the printing press and the pamphleteering wars where there were niches then, but there was a significant trend over time towards the mass, the mass media, the mass narrative, and now we've reverted again to the niche.
Renée DiResta—Sam Harris | 56 minutes
The Death of Friends:
So Nvidia is a $3 trillion company selling a machine that takes meaning and generates a bunch of noise around it. And then flips around and compresses back the noise to the meaning. And what have you done? You've created no value. And I do think that I'm obviously being a little bit flippant […] but that's a tough way to have a $3 trillion company
Sam Lessin—More or Less | 67 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—You Are Not Destined to Live in Quiet Times
2️⃣ years ago—Do We Still Need Teams?
3️⃣ years ago—Entrepreneurship is contagious