Tech moguls; Unwrapping Spotify; Digital nostalgia
Milk, No Sugar #306
💡Think
For the next two weeks I’m going to be in our office every day, and it certainly feels alien. It’s wild to think how much working life has changed in the past 18 or so months.
The schedule transforms your morning from slow, paced, intentional, to rushing around and eating toast on your walk to the tube station before standing inside someone’s armpit for 30 minutes and arriving home at 7pm.
When we think about “balance”, the way things were tipped those scales significantly. However, being always on in a work-from-home world means that balance is still heavily work focussed, but you’re wearing sweat pants instead of slacks.
📷 Look
📖 Read
❶ Tech moguls are looking for a new playground
This is a great little article about Jack Dorsey, his exit from Twitter and betting on the “future” of the internet by going all in on Square. The thing about this though is that tech’s leaders are changing the narrative to shift focus away from something that isn’t working. Related: Facebook’s rebrand.
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❷ Spotify Wrapped, unwrapped
I’m sure you’ve also been flooded with people’s Spotify Wrapped this week on social media, but have you stopped to consider that it’s actually just a mass surveillance feature? With our data, Spotify is able to create virality, and that’s kind of the opposite of how we’d normally react to this kind of tracking, isn’t it?
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❸ Pokémon and the first wave of digital nostalgia
Ahhh, Pokémon, every millenial’s favourite grainy pixel game. There’s a general trend in tech for throwback tools, artistic style, or full blown websites – someone recreated the MySpace website. This digital nostalgia is informing entire industries now, with the NFT boom being driven forward by this old style pixel art. Anyone fancy chatting on MSN?
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Bonus round
An 11 minute short movie starring Will Ferrell
🎧 Listen
Boostrapping, with the Mailchimp CEO
Although this episode is a rerun, it’s timely because of Mailchimp’s recent acquisition by Intuit. Before this, they had been running for decades without raising a single dollar of investment, which in this day and age is just unheard of. It’s really inspiring to see how they landed on Mailchimp as a business, almost by mistake actually.
Listen to this podcast (49 minutes)
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🙌 Share
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🙏 Thanks
Have a great week,
Luis Ouriach
@disco_lu
Founding member special shoutouts:
Kevin Fernandez (@kvnfz)
Karl Barker
George Sumpster