History of smiling; Online anonymity; The bubble
💡Think
It was a pretty nuts week for me, I was in Paris and then Berlin to support us launching office there.
We threw two huge in-person (yes!) parties and had an opportunity to meet our community face to face for the first time in a long while.
I had kind of forgotten (mostly because I've done very little) how tiring it can be to be "on" whilst at events, especially when you stack them up like that.
Either way, it was really great to meet so many people in different countries, and I'd love to do more of it. If you'd like to hang out in your city, let me know! I'll try and engineer a little tour.
📷 Look
📖 Read
❶ The rise of anonymity online
The actual title of this article of "the personal brand is dead" but it insulted me so I changed it 😂 It raises some interesting points for sure – why have we been so obsessed over the past 15 years to make sure that everything is so public? Even thinking about how a public Facebook profile used to be the standard is a little creepy, right? The obvious concerns here though are about safety, and with trolls being very real, how do we have both?
❷ A history of the smile through art
This is a long one, but a really cool article. It looks at smiling's cultural importance throughout art history, and in particular when it first became "a thing". For the language nerds amongst you, it even goes briefly through how the word came to be. Even now, we have cultural norms about when it is appropriate or not to smile e.g. in a photo. Are you a grinner or not?
❸ The liches of Silicon Valley
I couldn't not include something this week about the crashing of crypto currencies, could I? It's quite businessy, but this article is essentially a rant at how messed up the industry has been, allowing for massive corporates to pump money into it under the premise that at some point there will be huge returns, rather than crashes. Of course, this isn't too dissimilar to the world of venture capital, which the author says it kinda the point.
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Bonus round
The history of Uruguayan design, and its influence on us all
🎧 Listen / watch
The actual cost of preventing climate breakdown
This is actually a TED Talk from this week by historian Yuval Noah Harari, who looks backwards (as in, back through history) to look forward into the future and analyse with figures what the cost of us messing up the climate would be. It's a unique take, and he's a great storyteller.
Watch / listen to this (11 mins)