In this latest issue of Res Extensa, I wrote about the need to escape from the passive consumption trap. We wake up, pick up the phone, and wait for algorithms to tell us what to read, watch, and listen to. Our attention is captured by things we didn’t even decide to give it to.
I’m making a conscious effort to return to engaged, active consumption as much as possible. Appreciating. Carefully reading and listening. Choosing specifically what I want to give my attention to.
If you haven’t checked it out, it’s worth taking a look at Farcaster, a new permissionless protocol for building social networks. Think permissionless Twitter — a protocol for communities to build their own Twitters. Here’s me on Warpcast, the pillar first app on the protocol.
Developer Carlos Matallín is building a cool tool for discovering interesting content on the Farcaster. Pincaster currently supports books, where you can see a feed of posts on the network discussing the topic. Interesting idea, built permissionlessly thanks to the Farcaster network model.
Elad Gil describes the trend of continuing consumerization of enterprise software.
Part 2 in Eugene Wei’s series on TikTok. See part 1.
Venkatesh Rao’s Breaking Smart podcast is always a must-listen.
Of this year’s reads so far, Martin Gurri still holds the crown on my favorite with his 2014 book The Revolt of the Public.
That book has the best diagnosis of the current state of politics, the culture war, polarization, and the media’s inability to make sense of all of it (while contributing themselves to the chaos).
This is a wide-ranging interview on public trust, social media, and the state of our institutions:
I would not say that our institutions are mired in a period of secular incompetence and decline. That is actually...
My friend Joe Morrison’s latest is an extended rant on the commercial satellite imagery market, and a plea to that industry to rethink how they might improve their go-to-market approaches for selling to commercial businesses.
I can vouch for his account of what it’s like to work with a commercial provider first-hand. Their business models make it challenging to go direct-to-customer, even at fairly high price tags. Until they can lower the barrier to entry into the two-...
I’ve been following Gurri’s work closely since I read The Revolt of a Public a couple months back. I think he’s one of the sharpest minds we have right now thinking and writing about what’s going on in politics, media, and public opinion.
He was on this week’s EconTalk talking to Russ Roberts about his book. The show notes for the episode provide excellent additional material on his core ideas.
More on Gurri previously:
Martin Gurri on the growing similarities between west and east coast elites:
The effect, I suspect, will be the exact opposite of the reactionary dream. In wild and seedy digital gathering-places, far from any pretense of idealism, political discussion will inevitably grow more unfettered, more divisive, more violent. The attempt to impose Victorian standards of propriety on the information sphere will end by converting it into a vicious and unending saloon brawl. No matter how revolting the web appears at present – it can always get...
I ran across this piece about a month ago, but avoided it after sensing spoilers for the book I was in the middle of at the time.
Is our universe an empty forest or a dark one? If it’s a dark forest, then only Earth is foolish enough to ping the heavens and announce its presence. The rest of the universe already knows the real reason why the forest stays dark. It’s only a matter of time before the Earth learns as well.
This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest.
In...