shiny things 11/
I'm enjoying substack's graphic AI tool: "put a parrot on a Stax record"
I REALLY WANT TO HEAR DEANIE PARKER: the secret sound of Stax
They were just demos, thrown together on the fly to convince a producer or a performer that a song was worth recording, but there was nothing tentative about them. Deanie Parker didn’t sound like an ordinary songwriter on “Until I Lost You.” She sounded like a star.
Parrots are everywhere in Singapore, and some of our cultural baggage with parrots as a species complicates our ability to grapple with the fact that they’re non-native species in MOST places. What are we to do when the invasive species are so darn adorable?
Always fun when a travel article makes the streets around you look fun and exotic.
The new holacracy: flat, transparent, global pay. What I find interesting is that this is an Org Design predicated on employees maximizing their comp through the global nomad ecosystem.
Whether a ‘golden visa’, or Argentina setting preferential policies for digital nomads, AirBnB as a concept, the freedom of movement across borders is something certain layers of certain cultures have enjoyed for centuries. Now it is being commercialized for a wider population of tech workers. If you extrapolate this trend out, a few directions firm up: one direction is Balaji’s networked state idea; another direction is to compare it to how various countries / states / cities compete for movie / TV productions. A third is to simply look at, I don’t know, me (Expats — post-colonial knowledge workers from WEIRD countries). A fourth direction is Morlocks and Eloy. You were thinking it too.
What’s consistent in all circumstances are some underlying assumptions:
A global pool of service workers are around to actually run these communities and make them vital, interesting and functional enough that nomads want to cosplay as residents.
These digital nomads pay fees substantial enough that some communities will continue to pursue them
These fees also replace any obligation a Nomad might have otherwise had for civic participation or engagement.
it all comes down to CLaaS — Civic Life as a Service. I just made that up.