Friday’s Finds

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

Stephen Downes – “Consciousness is, in other words, a community phenomenon, and not merely an individual phenomenon.”

The (not so) secret life of a networked and networking scholar, by @14prinsp

“Yes, I know Facebook uses my clicks and ‘likes’ to profile me. Yes I know the space is increasingly becoming creepy. I am increasingly guarded on what I share. I continuously look over my shoulder to see who is watching. I installed ad-blocking software, use Ghostery and my search engine is DuckDuckGo. I check my privacy settings almost on a daily basis. And yes, I know it will not undo the surveillance and the collection of my data.

But for now, I am playing with friends in the park, discovering, sharing, growing and learning. Yes, I am increasingly aware of those watching. But for now, Twitter and Facebook are my oxygen that allows me to breathe. For now…?”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

Making Sense of the Emerging Economy with Yochai Benkler, via @lfbenjamin

“[Hierarchy] Uber rides on a brutal hierarchy. Financiers are at the top, then investors and directors, then engineers and managers, then drivers and riders, and finally everyone else, those people known as ‘externalities’.

[Privatization] Uber doesn’t pay for the cars, maps, driver’s licenses, roads, or the health insurance plans of their drivers. Yet they can build a thin layer of software on top of all that value and use it to hoover as much wealth as possible towards the top of the pyramid.

[Tyranny of the Margin] Uber combines the efficiency of high technology with the leverage of high finance to strangle one marketplace after another. The global ecosystem of cooperative taxi companies is rapidly being replaced by a monoculture of precarious independent contractors. If they have an ethical commitment, it is delayed so far as to be invisible.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@Chris_Mahan: “Sometimes, to really internalize knowledge, I’ll handwrite an article, a passage. I’m doing it now.”

The rising importance of great curators, via @RobinGood

“Increasingly I’ve become more and more reliant on a handful of brilliant curators to cut through the noise and who dip a well-chosen cup into the torrent on my behalf.

Flipboard is a great tool, and I use it every day, but I look for real humans with an expert eye who manually choose the things I’ve probably missed. My kind of people who like the things I like and give a damn about the things I care about. The people who seem to go, ‘here Tim, read this, I know you’ll enjoy it'”.

Guarding the Decentralized Web from its founders’ human frailty: Video by @doctorow, via @petervan

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

The future of work is beginning to look increasingly like the past – via @WillRich45

“For centuries, the workforce comprised a host of artisans who had been apprenticed to a trade and learned their skill on-the-job. These people would typically include stonemasons, cabinetmakers and blacksmiths and they earned a living in their local area carrying out work for local businesses, farmers, gentry etc. They were predominantly self-employed, but often shared workshops and tools and sometimes teamed up with others to take on larger or more complex tasks. They relied on word of mouth and reputation to provide them with a steady stream of work and had a range of loyal and satisfied customers.

Much of these same principles apply in today’s so-called gig economy.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

Ray Bradbury : “I define science fiction as the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible.” – via @DavidBrin

@HughCards: “As the Internet makes everything cheaper, access to real networks (Harvard, Wall St., Silicon Valley etc) gets even more expensive.”

@nielspflaeging: “Remember: In complexity, steering collapses. Bosses cease to be the boss, outside becomes the boss. Self-organization becomes inevitable.”

Noam Chomsky: The Purpose of Education | The highest goal in life is to inquire and create – via @leadershipABC

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Torture the data, and it will confess to anything.” – Ronald Coase, Economics, Nobel Prize Laureate, via @BigDataGal

“the stuff that can be done by technical people today will be provided by some application for everyone tomorrow” – @downes

“When experts are wrong, it’s often because they’re experts on an earlier version of the world” – @axelletess

“being a student is not a disease, and education is not a cure” – @gbiesta

“Spend less time criticising others’ work and spend more time creating work that others criticise.” – @DecaSteve

“Wages have stagnated to such an extent that it’s impossible for labor to insure itself.” – @YanisVaroufakis, via @RWartzman

“The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.” – H.L. Mencken, via @normsmusic

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@kurt_vonnegut: “I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of reward or punishment after I’m dead.”

“He who would travel happily must travel light.” – Antoine de St. Exupery – via @WorldBikeGirl

@umairh: The Infantilization Economy – via @osakasaul

“Infantilization Apps are probably going to make us less capable of changing the world for the better … The planet’s melting down, the economy’s stuck, the young are toast. And the Infantilization Economy is going to make it less possible for us to change it. Not just by making 80 percent of us neoservants. But also by making 20 twenty percent of us overgrown babies. Who, like all babies, cry for the Gigantic Nanny Machine when the monsters come — instead of bravely venturing into the darkness to fend them off.

The Gigantic Nanny Machine won’t save the world. We can’t call on-demand TaskRabbits to fix climate change, economic stagnation, social decay, lost generations. We can’t call an Uber to drive the globe into a better future.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@Tom_Peters: “Average unicorn coder’s goal today: Destroy my privacy to sell me more crap so that founders can add another billion to their net worth … Make no mistake: Google’s animating goal is to destroy my privacy by knowing more about me than I do. The rest is details.”

@dria: “Search results are decreasingly reliable because of SEO polluting top results with junk. I’m going directly to known-good sites more & more.”

Why Theater Majors Are Vital in the Digital Age via @CreatvEmergence

“The aptitude called ‘foresight’, which is the talent to envision many possible outcomes or possibilities, was present in all theater workers (playwrights, directors, designers, actors). When actors try out various line readings or interpretations of a scene, when they improvise or create backstory, they are using foresight … But foresight would be impossible without empathy. The actor’s ability to envision multiple outcomes or motivations in a play must be based on the character’s circumstances, not the actor’s.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.” ― Leonardo da Vinci, via @gfbertini

“Millennials: the landless peasants the founders warned each other would happen.” – @girlziplocked

“Blessed are the weird people …  for they teach us to see the world through different eyes.” – @JacobNorby

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@Goonth – “Our so-called leaders will not create our futures for us. That is entirely up to us. Nothing to concede.”

8 Symptoms Of Organizations On The Cusp Of Change by @MarkRaheja

“In theory, organizations are meant to enable us — to make us faster, stronger and more effective than we’d be on our own. And yet today, in listening to my clients, it feels as if the exact opposite is true — as if the organization is actually getting in their way. The symptoms of this are many and may sound familiar: Siloed teams with misaligned incentives; bureaucratic processes governed by inflexible policies; paralyzed decision-making strewn across way too many meetings. The list goes on.”

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