👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week's most remarkable stories at the intersection of #ecosystem #innovation and #platform #organisation
Why Rogan is the media’s “inverted yield curve”
But long formats in professional media do make a lot of people nervous. This is because they’re as close as you can get to a true reflection of someone else’s unfiltered reality. This can open the door to unexpected realisations, some of which go against mainstream narrative assumptions. Well known villains can be humanised through the process, while much beloved celebrities can be exposed as being far from perfect. Usually this reality check doesn’t matter, because the time-limiting factor of the content keeps it on the fringe. Broad public opinion is unaffected.
🤔 Inefficiency over efficiency, or inefficient information flows that dominate - by Izabella Kaminska
Beware the FOMO Bullies of Technology
I believe that Ethereum, the cryptocurrency that powers much of Web3, will be around for a good while. Blockchain technology has attracted so much interest and talent already, and established such a durable culture, that dismissing it out of hand ignores the reality on the ground. As the writer Robin Sloan argues Web3 will likely influence the direction of the internet incompletely and unpredictably. But the FOMO-fueled marketing of this technology can still be deeply problematic: It strong-arms people into markets and ideas, attracting grifters, scammers, and the greedy while repelling those who want to build sustainable communities and products.
😵💫 on information dizziness - by Charlie Warzel
I’m a creator. You’re a creator. We’re all creators!
The creator economy, or the network of people working as creators and the businesses that rely on them, is related to but distinct from the gig economy. Both offer promises of flexibility and “being your own boss,” but in one scenario the worker agrees to participate in a particular place in an existing system, and in the other, the worker chooses to add something to an existing ecosystem that wasn’t there before. (That’s not a value judgment, by the way. Consider the number of YouTube or Instagram or TikTok creators whose entire business model is repurposing or ripping content found elsewhere — these offerings, while technically “new,” are hardly original.)
👷♀️ On the primary need to create - by Rebecca Jennings
🎧 Championing Progress
If you look at the history of media, every time we have some new media technology that makes it easier for more people to get the word out. It very often leads to some kind of social upheaval. This is even true just for the printing press itself. It can be said or hypothesised that the printing press brought about the reaffirmation and the religious wars less than a century after it was introduced. That was an era of a major upheaval for Europe, it was an era in which people were looking around at the ways in which information spreads and they were very worried about it. Especially the elites and the authorities were very worried about loosing control over important subjects of discourse like politics.
I read a fascinating article about the coffee house culture in England in the 1600s and especially the 1660s through 80s which was a very sensitive time in english history where it was politically very sensitive and you had King Charles and others who were really trying to retain tight control. They were very worried about coffee houses, because the coffee houses were - it’s really funny to read this because it’s almost exactly the same things that people say about twitter and social media in general - so the coffee houses were places were all sorts of classes and every type of person can mix and mingle together. They weren’t separated into their proper social classes. It was a place where information just sort of flowed very quickly, and even misinformation and fake news. The elites and the authorities were very concerned about this, in fact somebody proposed to King Charles that in terms of what books are printed we should make sure that the only books about philosophy and politics must come from these people or these universities, these special authorities. And they should only be printed in latin so only the elites can read them...
🕰️ And so much more on how we got here and - Where We Go Next with Jason Crawford
If you like this digest, you might appreciate the sister newsletter at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture as well. This week's edition is all about Less Heroes!
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