You Should Read - June 23
Just One Thing
Techdirt Seven Rules For Internet CEOs To Avoid Enshittification
first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
Collected Ephemera
Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control is one of those movies that I love but drives my wife insane with its slowness, weird dialogue (or lack thereof), and style-heavy cinematography. It's less of a movie and more a very long photograph. For some reason it popped back into my head the other day and I ran across this crazy music video for "Seven Souls", featuring a spoken word narration by William S. Burroughs. I think it's a fan-created cut?
Deem Journal On Digital Gardens: Tending to Our Collective Multiplicity
New York Magazine Reddit and the End of Online ‘Community’: A standoff between the site and some of its most devoted users exposes an existential dilemma.
Fast Company How Do You Build a Brand to Last? It’s About Evolution, Not Revolution: Over the past few years, we’ve seen major rebrands steal the spotlight. Here’s why companies should be thinking smaller.
⇛ A soup-to-nuts rebrand is an incredibly expensive undertaking. I think brand evolution is probably the more common approach, in actual practice. Few marketing departments have the resources of a Coke or Disney and have to make compromises every day in how the brand is built, step by step, little by little.
Jason Godesky Why Scrum Fails: Why is it that we all follow a process called “Scrum,” and yet no one actually follows the process that the Scrum Guide defines as Scrum?
Creative Boom Carl Rylatt of UnitedUs on How to Use Symbols in Graphic Design
Jennifer Pahlka Recoding America
⇛ I've been peripherally aware of the civic technology movement through following people like Pahlka on Twitter. My favorite concept from this book, “No More Concrete Boats”, applies to big business as well as big government:
Doing what you’re told even if you know it won’t work is not leadership. “If they ask us to build a concrete boat, we’ll build a concrete boat,” one government technology leader told me. “Because that way, when it goes wrong, it’s not our fault.”
Vox The Hottest New Perk in Tech Is Freedom: How small tech companies are using remote work to compete with the big guys.
Ars Technica Camera Review Site DPReview Finds a Buyer, Avoids Shutdown by Amazon: Amazon layoffs were supposed to shut down the 25-year-old site back in April.
Science History Brave New Butter: In the early 20th century, chemists prophesied a future that seemed both surreal and somehow within reach.
⇛ I will never understand the view of a certain type of person (Scott Adams is one) that eating food is a bothersome chore and we would all be better off it was replaced by something that is strictly a nutrient delivery vehicle.
Byline Who Builds The Internet? Meet Wikipedia's Architects
American Prospect The Socialist Emergence Inside the Democratic Tradition: At a conference for socialist elected officials, the task is to ‘represent the movement of the future in the movement of the present.’
Our Current Dystopia
PBS UN Chief Says Fossil Fuels Are ‘Incompatible With Human Survival,’ Calls for Credible Exit Strategy: “Trading the future for thirty pieces of silver is immoral.”
The Register Google Warns Its Own Employees: Do Not Use Code Generated by Bard: Cautioning its own workers not to directly use code generated by Bard undermines Google's claims its chatbot can help developers become more productive.
The Verge AI Is a Lot of Work: As the technology becomes ubiquitous, a vast tasker underclass is emerging — and not going anywhere.
Erin in the Morning US Internal Refugee Crisis: 130-260k Trans People Have Already Fled: A growing refugee crisis is occurring in the United States, and it is getting very little coverage. I highlight the growing migration crisis, the people fleeing, and the laws they are fleeing from.