👋 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
🤷♂️ You Can Give People What They Want. Or You Can Give Them Web3:
If you’re a VC, financialization might seem natural and even fun. But most normal people don’t find financialization fun in the least [..] The idea that they’d want to get into a complicated financial transaction, with a nuanced risk/reward calculus, to play a game or listen to a podcast, probably sounds fun to a few galaxy-brained VCs—and pretty much no one else.
6-minute read by Max Chafkin in Bloomberg
🍪✨ The Magic Cookie: How Lou Montulli cured the Web’s Amnesia:
It was the Wild West for releasing stuff and trying to make it all work together. It's amazing that we were able to have such agreement, but none of us had a lot of ego about things and nor did we have any corporate vested interest in a particular direction [..] By the time it got to 1993, the small group of people who were working on this were really convinced that we were building the information superhighway that Al Gore was talking about. We wanted the Web to be that thing.
20-minute read by Steve Johnson in Hidden Heroes
🎭 World-building in hybrid organisations:
A key point often missing from this office vs ‘remote’ working debate is that it is not just about the physical location of work, but rather how we work and how we connect and coordinate with each other. It is about smart, online-first working versus manual, analogue work processes that require an army of management ‘water carriers’ to join things together.
6-minute read by Lee Bryant in Postshift Linklog
🎧 Listening
🦸🏻♀️ Greatness Without Goals:
Again and again and again, you see this phenomenon that, in hindsight, you can see what happened. But looking forward, you would never imagine that these connections could be made [..] You need to take your eyes off the ball in order to be able to accept the stepping stones that ultimately make finding the ball possible, which I think is totally contrary to our culture, to our way of making a discovery, the way we think things should be done, which is always objectively driven.
73 minutes with Kenneth Stanley on Invest Like The Best
💰🍕👶 Crypto, pizza and the future of humanity:
You want to see bad companies go out of business, and you want to see bad actors get wiped out. As much as I complain and as much as I have been a critic, the people who are pilling on now and saying, "It's all a sham, it's all terrible, and everyone is going to lose their money", I think is just as wrong as the people six or nine months ago saying DeFi is the most amazing thing to have ever happen and you should put all your money into it. There is some nuance here.
75 minutes with Mike Alfred, Alex Garden on Danny in the Valley
🤖 🕹 The Metaverse and Gaming:
[W]hether or not you’re adversely affecting someone else’s sense of fun [..] in a video game, they moderate that [..] What a game designer is trained for culturally for decades, what they optimize for, is actually very distinct from how a relatively static, impersonal algorithm and platform does it. That gives me some hope that if the internet’s a force for good, on net, that the philosophies of the companies that seem to be at the forefront of the Metaverse will be marginally better.
55 minutes with Matthew Ball on Conversations with Tyler
📬 Suggestions?
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