Sliced bread; Innovation slowdown; Earth's intelligence
💡Think
I'm back! A one week break from the newsletter turned into two. Sometimes you just need a little rest.
I went on vacation and didn't think about work or personal projects for longer than I think I ever have (I normally travel with a laptop), which felt very very very good.
It's very easy for us to get swept up into a world where all we're doing is staring at computers and scrolling feeds. Inspiration doesn't thrive here, it grows in space; both physical and mental.
Staring at the same setting every day, and committing to a routine, can get you pretty far when it comes to consistency of delivery, but you will definitely stall when it comes to motivation and idea generation.
So take a vacation.
📷 Look
📖 Read
❶ The curse of sliced bread
Ahh, sliced bread. The ultimate metaphor for convenience and peak productivity. The issue is though that we've effectively tried to slice our lives like we've sliced our bread, making sure that every waking second is optimised and used efficiently. Maybe this...isn't healthy? Just like the way our modern day loaves contain all sorts of preserving chemicals and compounds. It's probably time we started savouring our time, rather than slicing it up at every opportunity.
❷ Big technology is actually slowing innovation
This article focuses around voice technology, and how the original pioneers in the industry were all but wiped out by the likes of Apple, Amazon and Google with their investing firepower. It explains how we once looked at startups to push innovation forward, but they are now strangled by the larger businesses who want a piece of every single pie. A wild stat here: Amazon employs 10k people to work on Alexa. What startup is going to be able to compete with that?
❸ Is Earth smart?
This is a pretty wild article. The authors attempt to define the "planetary intelligence" of Earth and measure how smart it is. Don't worry, you did read that right. If we can measure the intelligence of our planet as a whole, we can maybe think about it in comparison to others, or use it as a benchmark for how smart other lifeforms may be.
Bonus round
Typography horoscopes. Because, why not?
🎧 Listen
Context collapse
Do you have a different personality online versus offline? Maybe you even have completely separate groups of peers in both too. This difference is useful for us, as they are separate spaces, but what happens when we sprint into a new world (read: metaverse) that requires us to be both on and offline at the same time? How will this impact our relationships? There was a fantastic quote in this podcast that has been repeating itself for me: "privacy is aspirational".
Listen to this podcast (30 minutes)