A day late this week because America’s born day. Thanks, as always, to those of you who’ve shared Dark Matter with friends, followers, and colleagues. I appreciate it profoundly.
This week in text-to-speech engines with native Nadsat support:
If you work in a service firm, spend a few minutes with Peter Parkes’ (Made by Many) excellent piece for Creative Review on client/firm co-location models and principles (5min). I’ve long felt that agencies/studios/firms dramatically undervalue co-location as an asset to both speed and client satisfaction, usually due to the cost implications of this sort of arrangement. Peter, brilliant as always, has some thoughtful ways for navigating that particular obstacle.
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I’ve featured a handful of pieces lately on sound design. Two more to bookmark and read at your leisure:
- Will Littlejohn of the Facebook design team on some basic sound interaction principles and the Facebook interaction sound library (7min) How very Teehan+Lax of them.
- The BBC R&D lab has posted a wonderful piece outlining the internal prototyping of a voice-powered product (10min) with the BBC Children’s team. It’s a pretty involved overview, and makes for great reading. I wish deeply that more organizations would open up this part of their product development process.
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Addy Drencheva linked to a piece in ArchDaily on designing city streets and thoroughfares for an age of public protest (8min). 2 questions related to the historic intent of urban street design:
- Was this street designed to embrace protest or squash it?
- Was it made more for protecting the government or for creating a place for its people?
Fascinating stuff, really. As usual, stick around for the comments.
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Colin Nagy published a quick, smart piece in Skift on startups innovating at travel’s in-between interactions and waiting periods (3min). Give it an equally quick read.
This week in Neal Stephenson was the original woke bae:
The wonderful Anab Jain points us toward speculative machinery designed to obfuscate tracking/personalization algorithms. I’m reminded of the words of Tom Armitage, probably cited here before, who wrote in 21st Century Camouflage (3min) (2012) that:
The camouflage of the 21st century is to resist interpretation, to fail to make mechanical sense: through strange and complex plays and tactics, or clothes and makeup, or a particularly ugly t-shirt. And, as new forms of prediction – human, digital, and (most-likely) human-digital hybrids – emerge, we’ll no doubt continue to invent new forms of disguise.
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As someone with a non-fiction habit in need of breaking (as advised by Mr. Weigel, among others), this makes me sad: Ben Malbon points out that we appear to be less interested in what might be, through the demonstrable decline in search volume for ‘sci-fi’ as illustrated in Google Trends.
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One of the best things I’ve read in a while: an extensive thread in Stack Exchange’s ‘Workplace’ community that seeks to address the question: ‘Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer that I’ve automated my job?’
My hot take (echoed in some of the threads) is this: this gets to the heart of value-based pricing vs. time and materials models, making it a relevant question for agencies and firms, as well. If we’re paid for the value/productivity we generate, then the ethical dilemma disappears. As hourly workers, delivering LABOR, the question is a lot more complex. Tip of the hat to Tom Hulme for the link.
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An eye-popping figure from a Business of Fashion piece on the burst of the pop-up bubble (8min):
“Retail leases in traditional high street shops are getting shorter every year. They’ve gone from about 25 years [to just] three years,” says Ross Bailey, founder and chief executive of Appear Here. “And in places like New York at the moment, there is a huge amount of vacancy, and we’ve seen a massive price discrepancy.”
Pop-ups have been a novel means for lease-holders to manage distressed inventory in urban real-estate markets, but it feels like we’re at the precipice of a massive re-think around those spaces. What happens when leases are measured in days, or even hours? Thanks to Brianna for the link.
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This is endless fun: 18F has created a US crime data explorer powered by the FBI’s UCR program. The inevitible theft of my Wrangler will be performed on a public street by a Caucasian twenty-something male I’ve never met.
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Sam Ford and Grant McCracken’s journey through artisanal systems takes them this week to a flash ethnography of a Kentucky convenience store (5min), delivering this gem:
The RC Cola and the Charleston Chew serve as tokens in a larger exchange system, an indirect form of payment for the unofficial services the store offers: the daily labor of preserving, maintaining, and solidifying a community, relationships forged one at a time.
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Matthew Trinetti asked 13 people the hardest question in the world to answer succinctly: “what do you do?” (7min) My favorite response, courtesy of Brene Brown:
“I actually have two answers. One if I want to keep talking, one if I don’t. If I don’t want to keep talking I’ll usually just say I’m a shame researcher, and usually that scares people. If I’m in a normal conversation I’ll say that I study vulnerability and courage, shame and worthiness.”
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This is pretty fascinating: an Atlantic piece on a question posed by ex-DARPA head Arati Prabhakar to the audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival on the coming age of neuro-enhancements (4min):
“Do you think the future we’re going to live in a society where neuro-enhancements will be a privilege? Will they be a right? Might they be a mandate? Or maybe the whole idea is gonna creep us out so much that we won’t want anything to do with it.”
This week in everyone who pretended to like Ethereum is gone:
Fodder for the next trends deck you present to a room of generally underwhelmed junior marketing clients: AI vs. human performance in image recognition, chess, book comprehension, and speech recognition — courtesy of Chris Dixon.
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Joshua Gans asks a fascinating question in Digitopoly: if our phone numbers are viewed as portable property, can our social graphs be subject to the same designation? (4min) To wit:
The basic premise of the argument is that network effects make it hard for consumers to switch to new entrants. Switching costs was the basis of mobile number portability but there were not the network effects issues as you could call anyone on any network. Facebook is a different story. If you were to switch to another social network, let’s call it Newbook, you could not read your friends posts on that network and your friends could not read your posts on Facebook. Not surprisingly, that is a big problem for Newbook’s ability to compete and Newbook — even if it were far superior to Facebook for some (or all) consumers — would not get many (or any) customers.
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This is amazing: Sam Lavigne created a programmatic hack called The Inifinite Campaign that creates ‘portraits of Twitter users generated according to the fantasies by which Twitter understands us’. Read all about it in The New Inquiry (5min).
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You should absolutely read Neil Perkin (with an able assist from Gerrie Smits) on the Basic Attention Token and blockchain’s capacity to salvage the legacy of digital display advertising (6min).
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Finally, this frame-by-frame look at the opening credits of Silicon Valley (7min) is glorious. Until next week.