The Next
Silicon Valley's Prophet, a Pathetic Tech Future, and the Next Economic Transition
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this week's algorithmic feeds and click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
🔮 What the Silicon Valley Prophet Sees on the Horizon:
That type of work led many to label Mr. Brand a futurist, a category that in the 1980s and 1990s became closely associated with Silicon Valley’s generally rosy view of the world [..] “If you change your perspective from futurist to long-term thinking, everything gets better. Because long-term thinking invites you to consider at least an equal amount of past to whatever amount of future you’re considering.”
8-minute read by John Markoff in NY Times
👻 At SXSW, A Pathetic Tech Future Struggles to Be Born:
[I]t seems to largely center on creating an ecosystem that can be fully commercialized by community members who will also be content creators and consumers. All that is then wrapped up in rhetoric about creating fully commodified and commercialized communities where interactions are mediated by transactions and markets that will actually liberate people from a world dominated by transactions and markets.
8-minute read by Edward Ongweso Jr in Vice
🧐 It will take more than technological innovation to realise the next economic transition:
[E]ach transition has involved mutually reinforcing factors and innovations that both contributed to, and were contributory drivers of, social and economic change. And it is these reinforcing loops that have resulted in each of these ‘ages’ being recorded in history as transformative. Without these reinforcing loops of social, public, and civic innovation the technological innovations, and the subsequent ‘transformation’, would not have been possible.
5-minute read by Griffith University Yunus Centre in Y Impact
🎧 Listening
💪 Setting Your Own Expectations:
There is a shift in power from corporations to individuals that's been going on for quite some time. Now, you see a trend where the best talent doesn't basically work for anyone if you look around. And that's why we have a Creator Economy now that can be monetized [..] I know that my most talented friends they either work for themselves or small groups of like-minded people.
25 minutes with Ana Andjelic on The Freelance Founders Podcast
♠️ Private Equity, Poker, and Military History:
[T]here's basically a big shift in how consumers and businesses consume financial services. And there's a lot of excitement around that. And we're sitting here trying to figure out who are the pioneers. The pioneers get the arrows, the settlers get the land. And try to figure out which of these things work and which of these things don't. Not everything works yet.
56 minutes with Steve Begleiter on Infinite Loops
🏄♂️ Risk-taking, scientific revolutions, and economic progress:
[W]hile you could argue that innovation is still solid, going on very strongly, at the level of discoveries and at the level of invention, there is a slowing down. We discover less and less new laws of physics, of nature, biology and so on. There’s really a clear slowing down. And in terms of invention and really inventing, it’s not going well.
21 minutes with Didier Sornette on Political Economy
👷🏻♀️👷 Our Work
A presentation for IE University on digital transformation: championing transformation over digital, and creators over experts, and why embedding financial infrastructures is the next Inevitable Thing™️ (Slides).
📬 Suggestions?
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