Issue #17 · June 28th, 2016 · View in your browser

*Kept it short! *

Ok, UK, what the fuck happened? Everybody is still feeling a bit hungover since the UK voted to leave the European Union last week. As a dear friend told me, though, “it is happening”. Why did they vote to leave? Here are some suggestions: failure of Western institutions in the globalised world? Anger towards the elite and manipulation by Trumpists such as Johnson and Farage? Lack of conviction on the British left? 

The Internet is fundamentally changing History. Academics will have an unprecedented abundance of raw material, in the form of tweets (about the events in Ferguson for instance) or Tumblr posts (e.g about trans identity). The sheer quantity of social media data is poised to make History multi-faceted, a bit more prismatic. Official accounts of “what happened” will not be the only resource we'll have in the future. History shall not be written by the victors any longer. [NYTimes Magazine]

Looking for inspiration to quit Facebook? Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, compiled a list of reasons to not use Facebook. A couple of interesting arguments: (psychological harm) reading the news feed makes us feel envy towards others. We can reduce this feeling by posting about ourselves, thus giving Facebook more of our personal data ; (privacy) Facebook knows when you sleep, scans the photos on your phone (non-Facebook ones too) and studies/logs the text you type but don't submit on Facebook. Cool, cool. [Stallman.org]

Mongolia will change all its addresses to three-word phrases. The traditional address system does not function well in countries without named streets. So to solve this problem, a British start-up named What3Words assigned a three-word phrase to every point on the planet. I know a country where that'd solve a lot of problems. [Quartz]

Random links that might satisfy your curiosity: 

+Open Culture [VIDEO] : 1937 fashion designers imagine what the clothes of 2000 will be like

• Marginal Revolution : China bank spank

• Viljamis: Typography for User Interfaces [an excellent introduction on how to use typography in your digital designs]

*Thanks and have a nice week, 

Ulysse*