The Unexpected
Getting AR/VR Right, Tokenized Storytelling, and TikTok
👋 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
🤓 We Are Thinking About AR/VR Wrong:
VR may change the way we consume content, and will require new ways to capture that content, but is not going to meaningfully change the way we interact as people. By contrast, AR has the potential to remake human interactions as much as smartphones have, which is to say by a very large degree [..] We cannot really predict these, just like no one could have predicted Uber prior to the launch of the iPhone.
5-minute read in Digits to Dollars
🫣 The Age Of Tokies:
The 20th century was the era of centralized mass collaboration. In storytelling, the movies became the reflection of this era. The Internet has brought the world into a new dimension, globalized and decentralized. Mass storytelling became decentralized, too. When hashtag challenges and memes first came into full force, people dismissed them [..] Imagine the power that can be galvanized by attaching a liquidity component to such a narrative through a token.
24-minute read by Sasha Kapustina in The Defiant
🤯 TikTok Boom:
Then there’s TikTok, where the average session lasts 11 minutes and the video length is around 25 seconds. That’s 26 “episodes” per session, with each episode generating multiple microsignals: whether you scrolled past a video, paused it, re-watched it, liked it, commented on it, shared it, and followed the creator, plus how long you watched before moving on. That’s hundreds of signals. [R]eady to be algorithmically refined into rocket fuel.
8-minute read by Scott Galloway in No Mercy/No Malice
🎧 Listening
👩🏻💻 State of Tech:
Does everyone have to know they're using Web3? Because with Open Source, you don't: it's a way of building software, but it doesn't really fundamentally change what the software is [..] If you were to build some new thing that really, really worked because it was Web3, would I as a consumer have to know it was Web3, and how deeply would I have to dig into all the Web3-specific stuff. And the problem, in a sense, is "probably yes", because otherwise, it wouldn't be Web3.
57 minutes with Ben Evans on Cartoon Avatars
🔮 Embrace the Unexpected:
[A]ll change is interesting. Change actually causes the journey to go differently, go more precisely. You work on it. Frankly, that's also useful psychology right now and for all of the last two years that this decade seems to be really prioritizing rewarding the adaptable. If your reaction to change is fight it and try to revert to what has been before, I think you're in for a really bad time.
84 minutes with Tobi Lütke on Colossus
⏳ How to be a long-term thinker in a short-term world:
You know, or think you know, you're making progress, but it is often very, very hard to drown out the voices of all the people around you saying, "it's all overblown." That's the deception phase. Once we make enough progress to get from 1 to 2, to 4, to 16, all of a sudden people start to say: "wow, where did that come from?" It's been doubling all along; you just couldn't see it. If we're working on a project that's important to us, if we're building a career: things take time.
56 minutes with Dorie Clark on Long Now
📬 Suggestions?
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