👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week's most remarkable stories at the intersection of #ecosystem #innovation and #platform #organisation.
How to Read the Internet
At the same time, though, we’re all learning how to read the internet. We’re adapting to what still feels like a new paradigm for communication. Following the lore through its elaborate virtual networks strengthens a different sort of sensory muscle. We’re learning to see patterns in incoherent streams of data. We can communicate the stories that emerge without language, read without comprehending, and write without prescribing. ‘Reading the internet’ is an ongoing and participatory act, unfolding stories without ossifying them.
🤓 ...an unfolding story - by The Lore Zones
The Internet Killed Mainstream Culture
Interestingly, the breakdown of mainstream culture shares its roots with much of the web3 movement: it’s a reaction to centralized authority. For the past century, a handful of studio executives, talent agents, and music producers—mostly in LA and New York—controlled American culture. Now, it’s anyone’s game. There are no rules. This is the same “down with the gatekeepers” attitude powering other major trends, like the rise of self-employment and the Great Resignation.
🏰 Gatekeepers seem to shift to become infrastructures - by Rex Woodburry
The Skill of Org Design
The key difficulty with this task is that organisations are complex adaptive systems — meaning that they consist of individual humans responding to a messy combination of social, cultural, and economic system incentives. Their individual responses to those incentives will themselves create new org dynamics that you have to deal with. As a result, you cannot predict how the humans in your organisation will react to your changes — not with perfect accuracy, at least. So the nature of org design demands that you iterate — that you introduce some set of changes, watch how those changes ripple out in organisational behaviour, and then either roll-back the change, or tweak in response to those observations.
👨👩👧👦 People are the organisation - by Cedric Chin
🎧 The fight over anonymity is about the future of the internet
Some bad things will happen anonymously but a lot of bad stuff is also happening under people’s real names. There is actually a research that has looked at how aggressive people are commenting both under their real names and under pseudo-names. What the research found was that they are actually more aggressive when they are commenting under their real names. They feel more ownership and they feel that they have to get more defensive... I spent a whole chapter talking about some particularly bad stuff that happens with someone using VPNs and other sorts of stuff, he was a computer science maker and I question what sort of legal requirement would have kept him from doing. And I worry that some sort of real name requirement, which has been proposed informally over the past few years, I think that would prevent a whole lot of well intentioned people who have valid reasons for speaking under pseudo-names from speaking at all.
👩🏻💻 Should we protect anonymity? - by David Pierce and Issie Lapowsky
👷🏻♀️👷 Our Work
A presentation for IE University on digital transformation: championing transformation over digital, and creators over experts, and why embedding financial infrastructures is the next Inevitable Thing™️ (Slides).
If you like this digest, you might appreciate the sister newsletter at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture as well. This week's edition is all about The Next!
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