Automation and an oversupply of human labour are narrowing traditional career paths. Meanwhile, new online platforms and tools are demolishing barriers to entry, and allowing individual creators and innovators new routes to customers.
All systems with flow, whether energy, materials, or digits in the banking system, experience a similar trade off between efficiency (and brittleness) and resilience (adaptive to shock but slow to change more fundamentally).
The recent historically long market expansion began with the recovery from the 2008 global financial crisis – and its inevitable end seems to have arrived via virus. Your impression of these high times might vary. You might remember the period for austerity, the Arab Spring, Trump, Brexit, Yellow Vests, the rise of the far right, rising costs of... See more
Rather than hold on to technostalgia for a time when it wasn’t this bad, sometimes it is worth asking what it would take to uninvent social media, so that we can chart a course for the web we want—a web that promotes democracy, knowledge, care, and equity. Otherwise, every unexplained decision by tech companies about access to information... See more
One of the worst trends in Silicon Valley is conflating the company’s culture with the company’s cosmetics. The flexible work hours, open desk layout, office designs, lack of office attires, and perks often paint the picture of the culture of the company. But that’s absolutely silly—no perk tells me anything meaningful about the company, other than... See more
brands are about trust and signaling. They’re a substitute for incomplete information. When information is scarce and asymmetric, consumers flock to trusted brands. But in many parts of the economy, when consumers have reviews at their fingertips, they no longer defer to brands when they make a purchasing decision.