YOLO Economy
The end of Empires, and Algorithmic Feeds. 'cause YOLO.
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week's remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
The road from Rome:
Wasn’t it preferable to lead peaceful lives in a large and stable empire than on a continent where people were constantly at each other’s throats? […] Designed to cater to the needs of a small ruling class and drawing heavily on the services of local elites, empires were relatively easy to build and cheap to maintain. But they came with built-in limitations: on liberties, on innovation, on sustainable growth
🤭 Can’t help but think of the platform economy—Aeon
Paid in Full:
As Web3 matures, creators will eventually be able to do away with Web 2.0’s legacy approaches to monetization and give their audiences the ability to directly invest and even speculate in content, purchasing tokens that correspond to specific images, texts, or relationships with creators and communities, while that content continues to circulate as widely as it could in Web 2.0. Instead of paywalls, NFTs.
🤔 And the end of algorithmic feeds?—Real Life
Welcome to the YOLO Economy:
If “languishing” is 2021’s dominant emotion, YOLOing may be the year’s defining work force trend. A recent Microsoft survey found that more than 40 percent of workers globally were considering leaving their jobs this year. Blind, an anonymous social network that is popular with tech workers, recently found that 49 percent of its users planned to get a new job this year.
🥴 Getting off the treadmill—Kevin Roose, NY Times
🎧 Listening
[S]o let’s break up Google, okay into what and what problem does that solve? YouTube is still YouTube, it still doesn’t have any competition. Let’s break up Facebook, okay that doesn’t stop teenage girls looking at self-harm content on Instagram. Those are different kinds of problem. The stuff that is going to hurt is regulating where the buy box can appear around Marketplace; it’s regulating the price that Amazon charges for shipping.
Benedict Evans—Jason & Scot Show
Injection some realism into the Token Economy:
Tokens are like emails. In the beginning they are a bit awkward and it took my mom a while to know what the strange '@' is for, but in the end she the figured it out and used it on a daily basis, as some many others did. Tokens is little bit like: we now have a framework, there's something like a webpage, there's an HTML thing and you can actually do something with it. It's almost like a blank canvas, so what can you do with it?
Katharina Gehra—METACO Talks
The Art of Productive Disagreements:
When your talking about reason, you got to think about it as an inherently social activity. What we're doing is swapping back and forth ideas, and in this social process of giving reasons back and forth we are collectily creating new insights and getting to truth. And that's really how human reason evolved: it involved socially. 07:10 (never learned), 18:00 (losing face), 35:00 (reasoning is social)
Ian Leslie—Building Bridges
📬 Suggestions?
Please, feel free to send tips, comments, and ideas for the next issue by replying to this email. Or, send them directly to hello@futuring-architectures.com 🙏