The Underlying Trend That Ties Together Popular Narratives About Technology
Episode 4 of Containers is out. This one is about the hidden backend of the coffee industry that's enabled all this fancy third-wave roasting to occur. I put together a Medium collection with a bunch of notes and making-of stuff, too. For those of you who like to read not listen, there are full scripts there, too. If you like the show, subscribe and rate. It really helps a niche documentary like this. Thanks! (Available on: iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Spotify, Google Play, and iHeartRadio.)
"Platforms are, in a sense, capitalism distilled to its essence. They are proudly experimental and maximally consequential, prone to creating externalities and especially disinclined to address or even acknowledge what happens beyond their rising walls. And accordingly, platforms are the underlying trend that ties together popular narratives about technology and the economy in general. Platforms provide the substructure for the 'gig economy' and the 'sharing economy'; they’re the economic engine of social media; they’re the architecture of the 'attention economy' and the inspiration for claims about the 'end of ownership.'"
2. On the science of pleasure.
"Aristotle argued that what we call pleasure is comprised of least two distinct aspects, hedonia (pleasure) and eudaimonia (human flourishing or a life well-lived). However, as Morten Kringelbach, associate professor and senior research fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford, points out this instalment of Aeon’s In Sight series: ‘It’s surprisingly difficult to show that somebody who is happy is also somebody who has had a lot of pleasure.’"
3. You won't find many people pushing as hard for deep answers to the climate crisis than Alex Steffen.
"Fossil fuels have no future. Not only are fossil fuels not a prerequisite for a thriving economy (we’ll come back to this point), they’re completely unnecessary for most of the economy we have today. On the other hand, climate change is creating economic losses across the entire economy, and those losses are growing rapidly."
4. Inside China's Cold War-era nuclear hideout.
"Located in the municipality of Chongqing, it was built over a 17-year span by 60,000 soldiers toiling day and night in dangerous conditions. The facility covers 100,000 square metres, the equivalent of 14 football pitches, with a volume equal to 600 Olympic-sized pools. It has the world's largest known network of man-made tunnels, its maze-like corridors extending more than 20km. The world's largest artificial cave was designed to withstand thousands of tons of explosives and 8-magnitude earthquakes, as well as atomic and hydrogen bombs. The mountainous, fog-covered Baitao Township was chosen as the location for the facility due to the thick forest that surrounded it, so the town was erased from maps."
"I went to a restorative yoga class a couple days after the sinkhole incident, and the teacher told us that we were all weathering the storm, literally and metaphorically. This isn’t the kind of thing that people in New York say with a straight face; it was the kind of speech that, a few years ago, I might have rolled my eyes at. But as I sat there with my eyes closed and my hands resting on my knees (palms down, to feel more grounded), I found myself nodding."
1. nytimes.com 2. aeon.co 3. thenearlynow.com 4. ibtimes.co.uk | @subtopes 5. buzzfeed.com
The Underlying Trend That Ties Together Popular Narratives About Technology