Nieuwe aflevering!

In aflevering 386 hebben we het over ‘subscription hell’, messaging op Android, Twitter-paswoorden en we komen te weten of Toon zijn centen heeft gekregen.

Sarah Jeong bij The Verge:

Of all people, I know why I shouldn’t trust Facebook, why my presence on its network contributes to the collective problem of its monopolistic hold on people. Everyone is on Facebook because everyone is on Facebook. And because everyone is on Facebook, even the people who aren’t are having their data collected in shadow profiles. My inaction affects even the people who have managed to stay away. I know this, I barely use Facebook, I don’t even like Facebook, and I find it nearly impossible to leave.

Yuval Noah Harari, auteur van het veelgeprezen boek ‘Sapiens’, in The Guardian met een gigantische doordenker van een opiniestuk:

By 2050 a new class of people might emerge – the useless class. People who are not just unemployed, but unemployable.

The same technology that renders humans useless might also make it feasible to feed and support the unemployable masses through some scheme of universal basic income. The real problem will then be to keep the masses occupied and content. People must engage in purposeful activities, or they go crazy. So what will the useless class do all day?

One answer might be computer games. Economically redundant people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D virtual reality worlds, which would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the “real world” outside. This, in fact, is a very old solution. For thousands of years, billions of people have found meaning in playing virtual reality games. In the past, we have called these virtual reality games “religions”.

Fast Company:

We are experiencing a fundamental paradigm shift in our relationship to knowledge. From the “information age,” we are moving towards the “reputation age,” in which information will have value only if it is already filtered, evaluated, and commented upon by others. Seen in this light, reputation has become a central pillar of collective intelligence today. It is the gatekeeper to knowledge, and the keys to the gate are held by others. The way in which the authority of knowledge is now constructed makes us reliant on what are the inevitably biased judgments of other people, most of whom we do not know.

Fortnite is echt zwaar de max. De manier waarop ze de opbouw en lancering van seizoen 4 hebben aangepakt vond ik echt magistraal. Zo getuige ook dit artikel bij The Verge:

Epic crafted a narrative for an online multiplayer game exclusively out of contextual clues, in-game hints, and other forms of environmental storytelling. The end result is a game that feels richer, deeper, and more purposeful than its battle royale trappings would have you believe.

Geniaal concept, deze Chrome extension:

Inspired by the Time Well Spent movement, Greg Greiner and I built a Chrome extension that helps you save your money (and your time). Enter your pay frequency and salary and it will automatically convert prices on all websites to time. You’ll see how many days, minutes, hours it takes you to earn the listed dollar amount.

Weer een heel goeie editie van de nieuwsbrief ‘The Discourse’, waarin ene Sean telkens een deel van het nieuws fileert. De titel van deze achtste versie is ‘The News is Boring’ en hij poneert een heel interessante these:

It’s about values. You have the value of X. You think it would better if X was reflected more in the way the world works. So you remain hyper aware of examples where X isn’t reflected, and you attack them.