World's Fair
It's time to build: creative destruction, and construction
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week's 24 remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
It's time to build: A New World's Fair:
[W]e must have a global conversation about the world we want to live in. However, holding that conversation today is even harder than in the past. The digital dominance of the 21st Century has sorted us into our own tailored versions of online reality, where we drown in ads and information. It's overwhelming, noisy, and ephemeral. It's hard to have a simple conversation, let alone align the globe on a future worth building.
🎡 It’s time to get organising, perhaps—Cameron Wiese
Scale Was the God That Failed:
But the crucial point is that almost all of the elements of good, newspaper journalism—big newsrooms paying middle-class salaries and giving reporters the time to get the story right—were made possible by those monopolies. Without them, there would have been no 20th-century newspapers as many of us knew them.
😣 Creative destruction is, in the end, destruction—Josh Marshall, The Atlantic
How Shopify got their first 1000 customers:
He moved on to continue selling Snowboards and had a pretty profitable first year. But Snowboarding is a seasonal business, so as the summer kicked in, Tobi went back to figure out wtf to do with those 400 people from the Ruby on Rails Community that wanted to license their Software...he didn't build Snowdevil in a way that we could fork (i.e., copy) the code and hand it off to another developer.
🏂 The modern-day version of the Silicon Valley garage—First 1000
🎧 Listening
How technology collides with politics, culture and society:
Social Innovation goes hand in hand with material innovation. You always have a material technology paired up with a social technology. The particular way factories might be organised in 1830 is enabling the assembly line as much as any particular element of material technology.
Samo Burja (author of Great Founder Theory)—Thoughts in Between
Deliveroo. Delaware. Defensibility. Software Digesting the World:
Europe industrialised so well in the 19th and early 20th centuries that some of the institutions that it developed for that period of industrialisation have persisted in many ways ... Institutions that work well for one period don't work for another period, but they are sticky.
Noah Smith—European Straits
The Creator Economy: NFTs and Beyond:
The key thing is that these assets are programmable: you can compose them into all kind of new use cases. They are also portable: you own them in the same way you own bitcoin, it's yours and you can take it with you to another platform. Because they are both programmable and portable, you take your assets and bring them into new experiences.
Chris Dixon, Kevin Chou, Jesse Walden—a16z Podcast
📬 Suggestions?
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