Kickoff For March 31, 2025
It's interesting what sets some people off. Case in point: a blog post that I recently published. In that post, I mentioned that I drive an electric vehicle (an MG4, in case you're wondering). A couple of readers were actually offended by that and send me short, nasty notes.
I hope this week's selection of links don't set you off. And if any of them do, well that's one of the many things you can expect from this letter.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
The Genius Who Launched the First Space Program — Wherein we're introduced to Sergei Korolev, a Soviet aeronautical engineer who spearheaded his country's space program, and learn how his methods and leadership helped Russia make so many gains in that area.
From the article:
It was no coincidence that power over the early Soviet space program was concentrated in a singular individual, an outcome not dissimilar to Wernher von Braun at NASA at the time, or even Elon Musk, decades later, at SpaceX. The exploration of space was a radical idea that had never been seriously organized before and required significant bureaucratic innovation. The burden of proof that reaching space was even physically possible rested on those working in research and development. While much of the USSR offered few opportunities for independent organization, the country’s research and development institutions served as the ideal vehicles to build a new kind of organization capable of space exploration. Moreover, they were able to stave off direct control by Soviet politicians for decades and allowed individuals to rise in prestige through excellence.
When Do We Have Free Choice? — Wherein Corey Cusimano and Tania Lombrozo look at the ideas of freedom and choice, and how our perceptions of both can be influence by out mindsets.
From the article:
Having a clear model of how people intuitively think about freedom is useful for a few reasons. The way we treat others heavily depends on whether we think they are free to believe, feel, and act differently. For instance, we blame people for holding political beliefs that differ from our own, and we do so because we think that they are free (but unwilling) to change their mind. If only they bothered to think, they would realize how right we are! Their failure to do so, in our minds, makes them ignorant or lazy.
The Antitrust Revolution — Wherein Barry C. Lynn examines the (frankly frightening) power that Big Tech wields, the battles to rein in or reduce that power, and why we need to do that.
From the article:
But what is truly new here—at least in U.S. history—is the centralized system of sycophancy these corporations have constructed. Today Google and its peers choreograph the meting out of personalized punishment and reward in ways designed to ensure that anyone who matters—even the most powerful lords of the realm—not only fears speaking out, but increasingly devotes their days to dreaming up better ways to serve their master.
World in a Box — Wherein Shannon Mattern takes a deep dive into the world of cardboard boxes — how they're made, how they became so ubiquitous, and how they changed design and the environment.
From the article:
The contradictions of a global corporation acting as a global citizen were on display at the 1970 Aspen conference “Environment by Design.” This was a raucous event, where activists and artists protested the superficiality of design interventions that claimed environmental benefits. But it was also a productive one: designers judged a student competition that produced the recycling graphic still widely used on cardboard boxes today.
When AI summaries replace hyperlinks, thought itself is flattened — Wherein we learn that, thanks to AI chatbots, hyperlinks are in danger of no longer being the web's superpower, and about how that might affect us and the sharing of information.
From the article:
The first actual hypertext systems predated the web by about five years in the early 1980s. As the software historian Matthew Kirschenbaum has observed, early hypertext applications, including Apple’s HyperCard and Eastgate’s Storyspace (both initially released in 1987), were products of the personal computer revolution – not the web. Jay David Bolter and Michael Joyce developed Storyspace as a software for creating hypertext fictions, choose-your-own-adventure-type stories in which the reader decides how to navigate episodes that are connected by links.