Paper and pencil: “The tool which allows you to plan, record, create, schedule, sketch, brainstorm and write a love note. Never be without the pair.”

The Death of the Follower: “Something that’s not contorting our online personas in the image of the algorithm to reach ~10% more strangers who probably don’t care, and won’t stick around.”

We Need More Calm Companies: “The path to success isn’t to “grind harder” but to build products that people want that you can sell with healthy profit margins.”

The truth is that whether or not AI determines our future will be decided by a confoundingly small minority of humans who nevertheless control a counfoundingly vast majority of the world’s wealth. This is not a technology issue, really, but one of structural inequality.

From Out Random the AI.

See also, Jon Stewart on the False Promises of AI

“Night Driving” for Volkswagen. Man, I forgot ads used to have the capacity to be amazing. See “Milky Way” also for Volkswagen. Via @genmon on accessing something other: “escape time, escape selfhood, whether that’s driving in the dark or sitting in a hotel lobby or walking.”

No joke, loveless grilled cheese sandwiches suck.

Little Nuggets of Pride

Walden Pond “is a little paper zine that comes once a month in the mail. It’s full of a selection of the articles you’ve saved to Pocket.”

I miss human curation. Same, I’m doing my best at thingstoclick.com!

Recommended dosage of work: “to get the mental wellbeing benefits of paid work, the most “effective dose” is only around one day a week – as anything more makes little difference.” Not an Onion article.

Deepening a relationship. Visiting a sick friend. Serving at a soup kitchen. Andreessen’s “techno-optimist” mindset is confounded by acts of love. They don’t make money, they don’t supercharge a market, and perhaps most heretically, they’re typically low-tech or even involve no technology at all. What is a techno-optimist supposed to do with this “love” idea, this thing that keeps people out of markets and off the internet? It literally doesn’t compute.

Marc Andreessen is right – love doesn’t scale

There were devices that simply did what they were for, without demanding attention. For their makers, they had some real problems. They had moving parts, which meant that they required more factory tooling and had more warranty returns. They were terrible for displaying advertisements. Without always-on internet connections, they were really bad for buying other things with.

From Glow by Tom MacWright.

Some of my favorite non-glowing devices that are still in use:

The LightPhone II An e-reader A digital watch

They talk about you, gurgling sugar through their roots …

Source: Root Words

A touchscreen, then, operates as a digital platform where features can be locked or unlocked by the company at will, depending on customers’ rent payments. Physical buttons, on the other hand, can’t be turned into rent. They only serve the customer, so they’re less attractive.

Source: Creative Good: Why car companies (still) ignore customers

Rad Reader by Alexander Cobleigh. “It’s like a pokedex for personal websites, and designed to surface the latest posts for you to view rather than juggle an ever-increasing inbox.”

If your concept of “progress” doesn’t put people at the center of it, is it even progress?

Source: I’m a Ludite (and so can you!)

A TODO “App”