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When you have money flowing through your conversation tools, you can begin to use it to coordinate actions, including creating financial incentives for conversation. For example, you can pool some money into a question and promise to pay it to an expert that answers it in a real time crowd fund.

We believe that umami has been both literally and figuratively the key commodity of the experience economy. Umami, as both a quality and effect of an experience, popped up primarily in settings that were on the verge of disintegration, and hinged on physical pilgrimages to evanescent meccas.

Vocational schools are, by definition, focused on training people to a specific set of skills. They don’t necessarily offer everything that a college student would receive from an undergraduate education, especially one with a liberal arts focus, which (theoretically, anyway) prepares students with foundational skills like critical reasoning and pr... See more

The flip side of that trade, of course, is algorithms. In giving up the act of organizing, we’ve ceded much of our control to whatever the machine thinks would be best for us. Alexandra Samuel had a good piece on tagging for JSTOR Daily in 2019. It included this bit on what could have been with tagging:

When we fret about the perils of an algo

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I believe that we can build something that offers people a chance to participate in these new types of experiences, punctuated by silence and other opportunities for reflection. And they must be offered—because they no longer emerge naturally in the world that we live in. In other words, people don’t naturally fall into them or opt-in to them. They... See more

That doesn’t mean that business models can’t get better, though. They’re simply evolutionary. Banner ads used to be the only game in town for revenue. Then we started seeing the rise of native advertising. It fit more naturally into the experience. Fast forward, we’re now seeing this trend where the ad carries a semblance of brand validation.

Psychedelic drugs are undergoing a surprising renaissance; they’re now being used to treat depression, addiction, and the existential fear of death faced by many people with cancer