Alex Wittenberg

Founded by Grace Chang and Rima Seiilova-Olson, who bonded over the shared past experience of struggling to access mental health care, Kintsugi develops technology for telehealth and call-center providers that can help them identify patients who might benefit from further support.

Now, this isn’t necessarily a problem created by the technology. It’s created by terrible business models. You could certainly improve the lives of truck drivers with some simple policy changes. For starters, you could pay them by the hour, instead of by the mile. That wouldn’t fix everything, but it’d help reduce the most pernicious dynamics... See more

To start, we have to cover the pros and cons of where the yields are coming from.

It begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some indistinct way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future. Sometimes this pressure takes the form of the explicit argument that you ought to think of your leisure hours as an opportunity to become a better worker (“Relax! You’ll Be More Productive,” reads the... See more

While short-term value may accrue to the token through gating access (e.g. to Discord, content, product, events, etc.), long-term value accrues when community members are holding to:

On the simplest level, web3 can allow us to “bring our whole selves” to platforms without fear of scrutiny or judgment by aggregating our online data and sharing the parts we find relevant to receive better recommendations and find better opportunities. Web3 enables us to traverse all these spaces and carry this identity—in the form of an address... See more

The trouble with being so emotionally invested in planning for the future, though, is that while it may occasionally prevent a catastrophe, the rest of the time it tends to exacerbate the very anxiety it was supposed to allay. The obsessive planner, essentially, is demanding certain reassurances from the future—but the future isn’t the sort of... See more

You might also be aware that all this is delivered by means of “persuasive design”—an umbrella term for an armory of psychological techniques borrowed directly from the designers of casino slot machines, for the express purpose of encouraging compulsive behavior. One example among hundreds is the ubiquitous drag-down-to-refresh gesture, which keeps... See more

So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life. Seen this way, “distraction” needn’t refer only to momentary lapses in focus, as when you’re distracted from performing your work duties by the ping of an incoming text message, or a compellingly terrible news story.... See more