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Another Monday, Another Naive Weekly - Curated stories on Technology and Internet Culture.
I’m constantly looking on my phone. 3h 41m per day according to Screen Time. Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Inbox, Chrome, Pocket, I spent more than 1h and 30min in each of these apps over the past 7 days.
It is fair to say that I’m living in feeds. I’m responding to the incoming email. Reading another article. Watching the next video. Liking another tweet. Tapping another Instagram story… It is a never ending story. There is always something new being loaded and I’m pulling refresh.
Tuesday I rushed out the door. Mathias had sent me a calendar invite with the title: Upgrade your life. I didn’t know what I was going to attend, but I was running late. It was raining - or maybe it didn’t - but it felt like it was raining as I was biking too fast through the city trying to catch up on lost time.
While my body arrived in due time, my thoughts was still lost somewhere between the to-do’s and the fact that I had manage to lock myself out when I ran out the door.
One and a half hour later I had attended my first Feldenkrais class. It was a very timely reminder to sometimes close my eyes, move slowly and be aware of my body. Going into this week I’ll try to leave the phone and feeds alone more often. I’ll put my feet on the ground. I’ll try to see what happens when I’ll let reality feed my attention.
Five updates on technology and internet culture
This week most of Twitter went crazy with Jeff Bezos brave Medium post about blackmailing. Roughly the same amount of Twitter users went crazy about Sahil Lavingia’s personal tale of failing to build a billion dollar company.
Okay, with those good (!) reads out of the system, here are five stories I’ll be thinking more about in the coming weeks.
Improving What’s Next
After 13 years of existence, YouTube has changed its strategy on what videos to recommend. Concretely YouTube will stop recommending conspiracy videos. Guillaume Chaslot has the best reflection on why this historic, referencing many of the articles and issues I’ve covered in past issues of Naive Weekly.
The Man Behind The Egg
New York Times found the guy who broke Instagram with the photo of the world record egg. He is 29 years old and works in advertising. Of course it is a freak event, but I’m happy Eugene came to world, it feels like a real internet moment.
Fortnite and The Metaverse
I’ve been sharing quite a few articles about Fortnite lately. As a cultural phenomenon it catches my attention and sparks my imagination of something new, something different. Last week Matthew Ball wrote the best breakdown of Fortnite to be written! It is not the revenue, popularity, business model or inter-operability that sets Fortnite apart, it is the step toward a collective, shared virtual space.
Can You Gamify Love?
This is the title of an article on The Next Web. The author spent two weeks testing Desire, an app for post hook-up health. It might be my lack of imagination, but I fail to see anything positive in letting an app take charge of nurturing our most intimate relationships. Of course we can, but why would we?
AI 1 Humans 0
Deepmind posted a short video about AlphaStar’s victory over professional human StarCrafty players. As was the case with the AlphaGo documentary, the best part of the video is the faces of all the humans. Especially the faces of +15 engineers sitting behind an one-way window following the single human play against their algorithm. (Related: roughly a third of the content on Bloomberg News uses automated technology).
Naive Weekly
Hi, I’m Kristoffer and I’m one of the founders of co-matter. You just read Naive Weekly - Curated stories on Technology and Internet Culture.
Last week’s story on keystones received a handful responses, thank you! I really enjoy when you find highlights in the writing or share links to new concepts like Internet Metaphors.
Please don’t forget I’m just a reply away.
<3
K