Things I Like
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I increasingly believe that one of the hidden impacts of the hyperactive hive mind is that it inflates external transaction costs. This happens because the hive mind has a way of muddying up internal work into countless informal requests and unstructured conversations, archived haphazardly into ad hoc collections of old messages.
I currently work on a team that is very heavy on slack usage, along with documents to sort things out with more formality, and very low on email usage (I get almost no email most days from workmates, just automated notifications). And I'll admit I've had a hard time adjusting, because slack demands you attention all the time. Our culture is one that understands the need to turn that off, to go heads down, to do deep work, but I still struggle with it. And this post had intriguing ideas in it that I'm still thinking about in relation to how we do work.
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I want to be one of those people who is trying, too. Trying to share things I like in unexpected ways.
I really like this sentiment and I too want to try things and I want to share the things I like. I've been thinking a lot about how I share and how I want to share and it's helpful reading the blogs and newsletters of folks who are thinking about the same thing.
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I want a kind of work where I can calmly advance a single issue at a time, where every solution is better than an improvement of 1%. And maybe I’d like a kind of work that makes me smile when it’s complete, too.
I'm with Robin here, I don't want to make a big splash or do work that will affect thousands or even millions of people. I want to do good work, to work with good people, to make sure my work is accessible to everyone.
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But today, just three years later, we are, in fact, at the beginning of a profound change in how we view tech monopolies. Since that time, the German led European Union has fined Google 7.7 billion dollars- American- the largest anti-trust fines in history- for abusing its search monopoly, the British parliament has picked up the torch, and there is increasing evidence that American politicians and regulators are open to new regulation of these tech monopolies. Within the next six months the FCC will probably fine Facebook billions of dollars for the Cambridge Analytica breach. This is in part because the mounting evidence of the destructive role that both Facebook and Google played in the American election of 2016 proved to be one of the primary causes of Individual One’s so called victory.
A fascinating mix of history of monopolies, history of tech and the internet, and history of artists' rights to their creations. Plus there are some great turns of phrase in this and descriptions of various people and things.
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A complex system of styling that ultimately is only safe if you add to it cannot sustain this. It leads to poor performance on our readers devices, which ultimately devalues both their reading experience and the journalism, and is unpleasant to develop.
Really good piece on the problems of systems as they develop over the years and how to possibly mitigate the problems. I'm in the midst of thinking through how to create a complex design system and definitely in a situation where the confidence in being able to delete code isn't there, so we're adding to it instead. I'm not sure I'd go the route this team is going, but I really enjoyed all the options that were laid out. Hat tip to Ethan for the link.
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The cost of breaking up Facebook would be next to zero for the government, and lots of people stand to gain economically. A ban on short-term acquisitions would ensure that competitors, and the investors who take a bet on them, would have the space to flourish. Digital advertisers would suddenly have multiple companies vying for their dollars.
There are parts of this piece that aren't great, but it lays out the historic precedent for getting rid of monopolies and talks about the way forward.
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As Facebook knows well, every choice involves a trade-off, and every trade-off involves a cost. The decision to prioritize encryption and interoperability meant, in some ways, a decision to deprioritize safety and civility. According to people involved in the decision, Chris Cox, long Zuckerberg’s most trusted lieutenant, disagreed with the direction. The company was finally figuring out how to combat hate speech and false news; it was breaking bread with the media after years of hostility. Now Facebook was setting itself up to both solve and create all kinds of new problems.
I've been reading all the Facebook articles because I'm fascinated how a company can continue on with so many mistakes. In many respects I get why they keep making them, the top leadership doesn't get it, ultimately, and so they keep making foolish choices. But I still love reading these pieces to get a glimpse inside the company.
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I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing effects on our brains, but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically. In many cases, gardens and nature are more powerful than any medication.
A beautiful piece about nature and gardens and illness and healing. One of the benefits of where we moved to is how easy it is for me to be in a green space, I only need to walk about 5 minutes from my home.
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Webster is with me (or I with him), but no one else. Despite all of his artful delineations for the words we have, we still lack some that can describe the most notable moments of our consciousness: when we are a loving witness to the world. Our box for those experiences stays unlabelled, identifiable and real, but as inexplicable as everything that it holds. The secret stays a secret.
A thought provoking piece on words and how we use them today and have used them in the past.
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While society has grown a little wiser to how the technologies can be exploited by foreign governments and boiler rooms spewing misinformation, the costs of allowing our attention to be commandeered remain drastically understated. It was not Mary Oliver’s intent to critique this new world—and it’s hard to imagine she even owned a flip phone—but her poetry captures its spiritual costs.
I love Mary Oliver and I love this piece about reading her work and thinking about it as it relates to how we use technology.
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And yes, all that stuff I mentioned before still applies — I’m getting older and I’ll be getting older faster as I go along. Some things I’ve idly wondered about will always have to be idle wonders. And who I am now is likely to be who I’ll be moving forward. Beyond that, life is almost never a best case scenario. In the next decade life will throw me curveballs and potholes, because that’s what life does. You never do know what’s next, until it happens. I could be consumed by the proverbial bear tomorrow.
I really enjoyed this piece about getting older, especially as he says just after the quote above, he never expected most of what happened to him previously in life to happen, so why should he expect to know what will happen next now. This is my life. Most of the way I've gone was not a long term goal and I'm terrible at long term goals, to be honest. But that's OK, because somehow it's all seemed to work out.
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We’d felt a connection to a pair of siblings—a hyperactive six-year-old and a non-talkative four-year-old—named Star and Devlon. But we didn’t reach out for them. And when I knew I was ovulating, we didn’t have sex. And my husband never pushed me. Because it turns out, “If it happens, it happens” is Southern Lady Code for we don’t want kids.
I really relate to this piece a lot. If you asked me in my twenties if I was going to have kids I would've said yes. But then it never happened and I'm very much OK with that. I married someone and we lived life and we liked our life the way it was and the way it is. It's nice to see more people talking about being childfree, to be honest.
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During all these years I did come to understand stuff about power that I wanted people to know. You read in every textbook that cliché: Power corrupts. In my opinion, I’ve learned that power does not always corrupt. Power can cleanse. When you’re climbing to get power, you have to use whatever methods are necessary, and you have to conceal your aims. Because if people knew your aims, it might make them not want to give you power. Prime example: the southern senators who raised Lyndon Johnson up in the Senate. They did that because he had made them believe that he felt the same way they did about black people and segregation. But then when you get power, you can do what you want. So power reveals. Do I want people to know that? Yes.
Caro has a new book out about how he's worked over the years and so there are a barrage of interviews with him. He is a fascinating person and I love reading the interviews and will be reading the book as well. The New Yorker has a longer piece by him that is just as good, I highly recommend it.
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I remember this wonderful Korean lady came over for a meeting at my house, and the next day she called me and she said, “You didn’t offer me a glass of water.” And that never crossed my mind, but I have to be conscious of the fact that people who come into my home are coming into a place that feels daunting and intimidating, and I need to go to the extra mile to make them feel welcome. And I didn’t know about that until someone just came out and said it to me. Just like I watched my father increasingly surround himself with yes men, I started to deliberately surround myself with no ladies. And so they would, a lot of the time, really jerk my chain, and that was important.
I found this interview fascinating, especially since the truly crazy wealth happened after her childhood. But I also found that the way she recognized what is truly soul destroying about wealth and made changes to her own life to ensure that she's around people and isn't isolating herself.
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As I read stories like Brenda’s, and about new developments in using (I can’t believe I’m typing this) prison labor to produce training data, this is the thing I keep coming back to: our industry’s excelled at creating new classes of work, and then deciding those workers are effectively invisible. And then we often decide that work, those workers, matter less than the automated solutions they’ve helped create--and perhaps, in time, we decide they’re ideal candidates for automation themselves.
Ethan's writing and thinking about how we as an industry are treating people, both those who work in the industry and those who use and consume our work, is some of the best being done right now. And I'm so grateful he writing and thinking about this, sharing it, because we need to hear it.