More than 325 of you clicked the link in last week’s Dark Matter to Unidos por Puerto Rico. I’m hoping that many of you were able to assist their work with a donation. Thank you. I am floored.
If you’ve not yet donated to their mission — and are able to do so — I hope you’ll consider it. For a readership invested in learning about services, networks, empathy, and infrastructure, it’s worth remembering that many Puerto Ricans woke up this morning with minimal access to any of these.
On to the soft underbelly of the Interwebs:
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This week in interrobangs and sarcmarks:
- the existence of cross-group organizations and partnerships among organizations originating in the separate groups
- person-to-person relationships across groups (through neighborhoods, places of work, or family relations)
- policing and law enforcement as an important buffer against the escalation of ethnic or religious tensions
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By increasing awareness of unused punctuation marks, we hope to begin a discussion about the present and future states of our writing, and eventually integrate the marks into our language, ending misunderstandings and misinterpretations once and for all.
(HT to Colin Raney for the link)
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From a Wharton School interview with Andrew Essex (7min) — late of the Tribeca Film Festival, later of Droga:
We used to have this bizarre model in which you’d watch a show and there would be these arbitrary interruptions for messages from brands that you didn’t ask to see. That model just doesn’t make sense anymore. People look down at their phones. They don’t want to see things they didn’t ask to see. Brands have to be the thing, not the thing that interrupts the thing.
Not a terribly new sentiment, but well-articulated for sure. Read the whole piece. Closely-related, this chart on the opportunity space for attention courtesy of The IPA.
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Superflux has all the films. I’m partial to “Our Friends Electric”:
The film explores our developing relationship with voice activated AI assistants, and the future potential of these relationships through three fictional devices.
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Worth having set in cross-stitch, framed, and sent to every founder you can think of — Fred Hersch on Thelonious Monk (3min) for The Paris Review:
Some pianists feel obligated to play Monk Monkishly: they use his pianistic devices and play loudly. I go at it by looking at the sheet music or learning his tunes by ear, I try to take his own playing out of the equation and just look at the musical DNA in the composition itself. Then I put it through my personal pianistic filter. You can’t compete head-on with Monk, you have to be sneakier about it.
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This week in the trying to unleash the hypno-drones:
Taylor Pearson for Ribbonfarm, taking Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt and running with a vision for the decentralized knowledge worker of the near future (14min):
The Blockchain Man’s career will look like a combination of a lifestyle business owner and free agent. The metaphor of a “career ladder” with its linear, upward sloping path worked well with the corporate pyramid. In a world dominated blockchains, careers will transform into something more like Sheryl Sandberg’s career jungle gym where each crossbar of the gym may represent a blockchain. This will result in a career for The Blockchain Man alternating between project sprints and periods of unemployment or mini-retirements, much like Hollywood operates today.
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All the kids are playing Frank Lantz’s new game, Paperclips in which “you play an AI that makes paperclips”.
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Rodney Brooks’ piece for the Tech Review on seven kinds of common errors in predicting artificial intelligence futures (12min) is an absolutely essential bit of reading (HT to Tim Malbon for the link). This, over and over and over:
When people hear that machine learning is making great strides in some new domain, they tend to use as a mental model the way in which a person would learn that new domain.
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The incomparable James Bridle in a brilliant essay on self-driving cars and the culture that springs from them (9min):
The self-driving car is in fact a fantastic example of this tendency. It is, properly regarded, the opposite of autonomous… It must continually re-examine and revise its view of the world, adapting to and learning from its environment and the experiences of other vehicles. Its perceived intelligence is always and utterly a networked intelligence.
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A reminder of the Internet we grew up with: Roger Water is a lush, VR-lite, digital world, created for the band Niagara, that responds to both keyed and audio prompts (via your device’s microphone). Spend a few minutes exploring it.
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Thrill seeking meets strict adherence to code: playing the knife game with a robotic arm.
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Somewhere between a Disney ride and Metallica powered psy-ops against Noriega: Ear Hack Shooter appears to be a device for projecting sounds (2min) — a swarm of bees, an alarm, presumably the weaponized music of Steely Dan — within earshot of an unsuspecting other.
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Arielle Kuperberg has written a blistering piece for Scatterplot on declining Western marriage rates and the flawed argument that a hypersexed culture is a disincentive to marriage (7min). Her argument is an economic one:
The solution is not to tell women to shut their legs, or to make birth control more expensive. The solution is to build an economy in which young adults can get established in stable, well-paying jobs. The solution is to build opportunity. If the opportunity is there, marriage rates will follow.
Read the whole piece. It’s quite good.
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This week in Betterment is not Fidelity, friends:
Ross Breadmore has written a very smart, eminently-shareable piece on getting started with Causal Loop Diagrams (4min), which should absolutely be part of your arsenal. Circulate liberally, friends.
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Bot Ad School is a bot built into Facebook Messenger that’s likely to be nearly as comprehensive as your typical advanced comms degree. Nice work by Daniel, Kostia, Kate, and Sam.
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“Leaders need to know how to amplify differences, work with passionate people and deal with creative abrasion, and the conflict that will come from that,” she says. “It requires a completely different leadership mindset to take advantage of these types of (artificial intelligence) platforms. It’s not about being visionary (6min). Hierarchical cultures actually make it harder to take advantage of the benefits.”
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Chris Bolman has been drinking heavily from the cup of Sharp/Ehrenberg, and has a brilliant post on narrative myths around startup disruption and scale (7min):
big brands don’t get disrupted by startups, they get disrupted by the few startups that become big brands themselves (faster than an incumbent can buy them).
Read the whole piece. HT to Gareth Kay for the link.
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I loved Shefali Roy’s brief notes from her keynote talk (3min) at the Ada’s List Conference last week. Spend a few minutes with both her post and the Ada’s List team, who are doing wonderful work in building a stronger community for women in tech.