👋 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
Picture Limitless Creativity at Your Fingertips:
Our machines have crossed a threshold. All our lives, we have been reassured that computers were incapable of being truly creative. Yet, suddenly, millions of people are now using a new breed of AIs to generate stunning, never-before-seen pictures. Most of these users are not […] professional artists, and that’s the point: They do not have to be.
Kevin Kelly—Wired | 28 minutes
Decentralization:
We’re heading towards an era of greater decentralization on all fronts – geopolitics, finance, education, journalism, and energy are just a few examples – driven by technologies including, but not limited to, the internet. This newly decentralized era will require new infrastructure and organizing principles that can adapt to the chaos and complexity inherent in decentralized systems.
Packy McCormick—Not Boring | 60 minutes
The Cost of Being Right:
[W]hat we are witnessing in crypto is industry suicide, not only by the hands of scamming lenders operating out of hastily-labeled google sheets, but by investors who loved this technology for all the right reasons that they couldn’t help but smother it to death. We’ll see how many survive; we’ll see how many post any kind of returns. At the same time, if you take the long-view, we’re fine.
David Phelps—Three Quarks | 12 minutes
🎧 Listening
Extremely Hard Core Reality Checks:
The people that are able to use modern tools to create value start to live in a distinct and privileged world; that's what we created around these powerful tech companies [..] It's a sick world where an enterprising you-name-it in any other category, even in finance, doesn't have those kinds of privileges and benefits; I think it's entitlement and it's overdue, and Elon, in some ways, will come to represent a force challenging that crazy culture [..] Silicon Valley privilege.
Troy Young, Brian Morrissey—People vs Algorithms | 55 minutes
Surviving the Latest Technological Revolution:
I'm pessimistic because I do not see the leaders moving forward. I'm pessimistic because the business community has bought into this 'get the state out of the way story' which is catastrophic because precisely what happens at turning points is that the state comes in and changes the playing field, that everybody moves in similar directions and that all the possibilities that the new technologies offer are used across the board in the economy.
Carlota Perez—Mik + One | 37 minutes
Indie Life & The Future of Work:
The predictability and insurance of a free-agent life, once you've found your footing, is much higher. Because the short-term uncertainty is higher, but since you get into the habit of maintaining a portfolio of clients, a couple of non-consulting things going like book publishing or a Substack, your short-term volatility actually buys you long-term insurance from all the layoffs going on right now in the tech industry.
Venkatesh Rao—The Pathless Path | 80 minutes