sari

what the fashion industry can do right now to become more equitable:

We’ve spilled a lot of ink over decentralizing social networks, but most users are still on centralized ones. Why hasn’t this changed already? There are three challenging problems with decentralizing social networks that have slowed adoption: scaling networks, decentralizing the name registry, and building novel social primitives. But for the first... See more

While a return to what is essentially piecework in the place of waged labor seems to promise a salve against white-collar malaise, it opens up another set of problems. Work Without the Worker, a new book by labor researcher Phil Jones, tries to make sense of the rise of “microwork,” best exemplified by platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk... See more

Using small amounts of money requires a small sacrifice. These exchanges of value small acts of creation, recording users’ subjective judgement in the objective world. Sacrificing value, rather than using likes or upvotes, creates a more honest signal reflecting the upvalued content’s worth.

You didn't end up burned out overnight, and undoing burnout can be a long term effort that demands some pretty drastic changes. Even if you're feeling good short-term, chances are you may not be ready to jump back into it, or that jumping back into the same role isn't a good idea. Be prepared to end up in an entirely different place to where you ar... See more

Start somewhere bad to get somewhere good. A few weeks ago, I interviewed psychologist Adam Alter about his book Anatomy of a Breakthrough . In it, he writes about the “creative cliff illusion,” the notion that good creative ideas will either come quickly or not at all. Unfortunately, our intuition has that one approximately backward. In studies of... See more

A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our relationship to our own stuff: more passive and more dependent. And indeed, there are fewer occasions for the kind of spiritedness that is called forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or to make them. What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they onc... See more

If we have unlimited time to focus on ‘what matters to us most’, are leisurely intellectual pursuits, volunteering, or cultivating new skills in a non-urgent, low-stakes environment enough to give life meaning?