👋 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 relentless algorithmic feeds and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
💪 The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class:
Perhaps [..] Web 3.0 will play a role in the future of online creative careers, but it’s also clear that Ball and Enjeti, Hilton Carter, Maria Popova, and any number of successful podcasters didn’t depend on a technological breakthrough [..] The key to their success seems instead to be the willingness of their audiences to step outside of the algorithmically controlled streams and interact with creators directly, using more varied and independent tools.
22-minute read by Cal Newport in The New Yorker
🔓 Trustless:
Trust is expensive, which is another way to say it’s valuable. But it’s also free — among the most valuable assets you can build are not lying and demonstrating competence. We’re in an era of overpromising, and it often feels there are few consequences for exaggerating, or just outright lying. The richest man in the world has been overpromising what his (very good) cars can do for years.
8-minute read by Scott Galloway on No Mercy/No Malice
💈 ‘Wallets and eyeballs’: how eBay turned the internet into a marketplace:
Combining the community with the market was a lucrative innovation. The interactions that occurred in the guise of the former greatly enhanced the financial value of the latter. Under the banner of community, AuctionWeb’s buyers and sellers were encouraged to perform unpaid activities that made the site more useful, such as rating one another in the feedback forum or sharing advice on shipping.
22-minute read by Ben Tarnoff in The Guardian
🎧 Listening
Ed Catmull On the Metaverse:
You can see two or three orders of magnitude of improvement in image quality available on your local devices at a cost-effective rate. When you increase at that rate, it's going to make the user experience and the ability to interact a lot better [..] The experience may not be good enough, but all the forces aligned with it enable it to advance to the point where it will become good enough. It's going to happen.
72 minutes with Ed Catmull on Building the Open Metaverse
🤯 The economy as a complex and evolving system:
If we buy this idea that problem-solving is really what increases human prosperity and capitalism's job is to give us new and better solutions to human problems, the key to making that work is human cooperation [..] You need other people to teach you, and you need a whole network and a whole culture to transmit that knowledge [..] building on a huge heritage of cooperative knowledge and activity.
41 minutes with Eric Beinhocker on UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose
🫶 Learning to Love the Humanities:
What I’m figuring out over time is, the psychology-sociology elements are as important or more important than the business-finance elements or the technology elements. Like I said, it’s not something that comes naturally. Those of us like me — a lot of us came up through the engineering background. We were quite literally never trained in human behaviour. We never trained in sociology or psychology or any of these things. We back into this through harsh experience over time.
66 minutes with Marc Andreessen on Conversations with Tyler (YouTube)
📬 Suggestions?
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