Einfach machen
When we left Australia a little over two years ago, we left behind many friends. One of them imparted a piece of wisdom I’ve come back over and over:
Don’t worry about our friendship. Friendship is not about intensity, but rather consistency.
His point was that friendships are less about the grand gestures and more about staying in touch. Even if it is just once a year for a birthday note. A quick photo to share an experience or a message to share a thought.
(more…)But in the world of webpages, gaze functions differently: It is more empowering. When a powerful website — say Google or Facebook — gazes at, or links to, another webpage, it doesn’t just connect it — it brings it into existence; gives it life. Metaphorically, without this empowering gaze, your web page doesn’t breathe. No matter how many links you have placed in a webpage, unless somebody is looking at it, it is actually both dead and blind; and therefore incapable of transferring power to any outside web page.
[…]
The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking.
The Web We Have to Save – Matter – Medium
The Wall Street Journal recently had a story on Netflix’ corporate culture. It reads similar to the 2015 New York Times piece on Amazon’s culture or going way back to the late 1980ies piece on Microsoft’s culture. There are probably a lot of pieces about other high performing companies that hit a similar note: high performance comes at the expense of a humane culture. I’m not sure whether I agree with that.
An anecdote between Steve Ballmer and Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of Facebook comes to my mind. Mark asked for some leadership advice and Steve recommended writing down “what it means to be one of us”. The story goes that Mark took that advice to heart and compiled a list of ten-ish traits, which were highly opinionated. Most people who read the list would have a hard time identifying with those traits, but the few who that list spoke to were highly attracted and motivated by it.
The lesson here is that culture is not one-size-fits-all. In that it can produce work environments that look very odd and even hostile to most, but appealing and accommodating to some. In that I wouldn’t view those articles as condemning write ups, but rather an (at times sensationalist) account for a moment in time. I’d even go as far as saying that those cultures drive higher employee satisfaction and performance than most cultures that don’t take a stance.
Offscreen is an offline magazine telling the stories of the people behind the web. When I receive my copy I’m always impressed by the depth of the interviews, the photography and the overall production of the magazine. If you are interested in the web I very much encourage you to order a copy and check it out.
If you like podcasts, keep reading. If you don’t, you can stop here – the rest is probably not interesting for you.
Have you ever received a YouTube link to a talk that you wanted to watch, but never got around to it? Or did somebody recommend you this one episode of a podcast, but you didn’t want to subscribe to the entire podcast? HuffDuffer is a service that let’s you pinpoint interesting MP3 files so that they are automatically downloaded with your normal podcasting app. Here’s how it works:
The service does a lot more and it does take a bit of time to set it up, but it is well worth the time investment. By the way, once you have set it up, here are the instructions to add the audio tracks of YouTube or Vimeo videos.
Interesting article by Albert Wenger from USV in the context of US Labor Day: From the Job Loop to the Knowledge Loop.
People do need a purpose in life and they do have the need to be recognized by others. But we have to stop trying to define and find purpose in labor and instead seek it in knowledge and in our relationship to other humans and to nature.
Short disclaimer: I’m not a religious person and I’m not Jewish. So, I hope I don’t offend anybody with this post. But I think the concept is so good that I’d like to share it.
A couple of months ago, I listened to an OnBeing episode where Krista Tippet interviewed Tiffany Shlain, a filmmaker and founder of the Webby Awards. In that episode Tiffany mentioned something she calls Tech Shabbat. It applies the concept of Shabbat as the day of rest for technology. It’s pretty simple: on Friday at sunset you turn off all your devices and only turn them on at sunset on Saturday. For our purposes we defined devices as phones, computers, tablets and TV. We allowed kindles without wifi and old-school iPods.
This arrangement creates some interesting constraints on your life:
We greatly enjoy tech Shabbat whenever we commit to it. Time suddenly expands. All those little moments that are sucked up by a quick check of email or Twitter, are suddenly empty. You mind slows down and takes a well-deserved rest. It’s like a day-long mindfulness meditation. A Jewish friend recently described Shabbat as a block at the of the week that allows you to slow down, take rest and reflect. It prevents life from becoming a constant blur, where everything flows and becomes indistinguishable. Tech Shabbat seems like the light version of it, as I noticed that I’m definitely more present during those 24 hours.
The other aspect I greatly enjoy are the constraints that tech Shabbat imposes. To listen to music, I had to dig up my old iPod and connect it to a pair of speakers. It was nice to rediscover old playlists and albums. When we met with friends, we had to print out the map in advance. Normally I’m totally reliant on Google Maps navigating me through the world. Reading a paper map was a nice challenge. Uber is no longer an option and I had to figure out the public bus system for certain trips. People often say that creativity thrives on constraints and I can say that I get a lot more ideas on Tech Shabbat.
Most people I’ve told about this experiment are intrigued, but also commented that they wouldn’t be able to do it. We don’t do it every week, but I can highly recommend it and encourage anybody to at least give it a try. It’s only 24 hours and afterwards you get back into the connected world.
Tiffany produced a short video explaining Tech Shabbats in more detail. Have a look and find your courage to give it a try. It’s worth it.
Photo credit: Andrew Huff via Foter.com / CC BY-NC
What an amazing treasure trove of goodness. The Internet History Podast is dedicated to telling the story of the Internet, organised in chapters like Netscape and the start of the Internet era, Microsoft gets the Internet, Online services, … The episodes are a mix of narrative (similar to audio books) and interviews with people of the era.
I started somewhere in the middle with an interview with Jan Brandt, the lady who led AOL’s marketing. She came up with the idea to spread first floppy discs and later CDs to promote AOL. It’s an amazing interview giving insights into how difficult it was to convince non-tech people in the 90ies how amazing the Internet was. Little fun fact: At some point AOL used 50% of the global CD production capacity for their CDs.
While I found it weird that I haven’t heard of this podcast before, I’m happy to be able to binge on more than 100+ episodes and I’m very much looking forward to it.
Ben Evans writing a highly insightful piece on the current state of artificial intelligence, machine learning and how Google and Apple approach the topic. Evans offers a definition of the term “technology”, that I find most helpful:
“That is, technology is in a sense anything that hasn’t been working for very long. We don’t call electricity technology, nor a washing machine a robot, and you could replace “is that AI or just computation?” with “is that technology or just engineering?””
It’s a very good read with and I recommend it to anybody interested in the field. If you don’t want to invest the time, just skip to the last paragraph, which offers a good summary.