Greetings from Taipei! Enjoy this weeks reads!
#1 Radicalization: An essay on how the internet, starting in the late 90s and being supercharged by 9/11, enabled people to become radicalized much easier while living in their own alternative universes.
Consider Liliane, a forty-year-old mother from Grenoble whose daughter Nathalie, seventeen, announced to her one morning at breakfast that she had just married, through text messages the previous evening, a man she had never met physically, whose name she did not know, but that as a married woman she nonetheless had to cover herself with a niqab 24/7.
#2 No-Code: I've been fascinated by a shift happening in the coding world. A number of "no-code" tools are emerging to make creating on the internet easier and cheaper than before. Either this will enable more people to carve their own path or it means we are closer to complete automation.
I wouldn't mind a robot helping me login to different websites. Something I seem to be spending more and more time on these days.
#3 An Attention Tax?: This essay argues that many people are opting out of work because of the endless supply of practically free (and interesting) content on the internet.
Today, you can pretty much always spend yet another hour consuming some new and interesting content freely available on the internet, so once you have paid the (quite cheap) cost of access to your ISP or mobile data provider, you no longer require additional wages to pay for additional consumption of media as a leisure activity.
The article goes on to hypothesize that many people are not driven to the consumer and spend money on "conspicuous consumption" as much because they can find groups digitally where they belong rather than needing to "compete" in their real life community.
The authors see this as a problem because firms are keeping more money rather than hiring people at higher wages. Since less people are willing to work, they propose an attention tax to solve this problem:
One view of the status quo is that media companies are aggregating human attention and selling it at a discount–far below minimum wage–to advertisers in a massive arbitrage on human capital. So, the state could set the price of an hour of human attention at the minimum wage rate, and charge media companies 12% (the federal income tax rate on minimum wage) of that wage rate for each hour of human attention they consume.
Worth a read...
#4 Moral Foundations: Jonathan Haidt gained acclaim for his 5-factor model of morality in his book "The Righteous Mind." A professor challenges this model and claims there are in fact seven-factors.
#5 Podcasts: Shane Parrish had a great interview of Jason Fried (of basecamp) on doing "enough" in business and Chip Conley made an amazing speech calling for more of a place for "elders" in business and society as part of the Long Now Seminar; Daniel Hamermesh talks about time in general and how much time Americans spend working:
The United States is now the champion of total work among rich countries. We work about 8 hours more per week than Germans, on average; about 6 hours more than the French. This wasn't true at all 40 years ago. At that point we were smack dab in the middle. It's not because more of us are working during the year: we're about in the middle of that. Our work week, if we're working, is about the same as other countries. Okay? The big difference is we get very few holidays, paid or unpaid, compared to other countries. And most important: Much shorter very vacation time.
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