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#1 Reality Is Weird: The Cut walks through this fake instagram beef with fake computer generated people/bots/avatars?! and the thousands of people who follow them. Weird.
#2 Rent-Seeking: Matt Ridley argues that rent-seeking and risk-aversion stifle innovation and that we are shifting away from a contract-society:
“The normal state of human affairs is what The jurist Sir Henry Maine called a “status” society, in which income is assigned to individuals by authority. The shift to a “contract” society, in which people negotiate their own rewards, was an aberration and it’s fading.”
Part of me disagrees here and thinks that we never really abandoned the “status society” - it was just hidden by the suit and individuality of the organization man. It seems that the employment numbers indicate that the “future of work” is about a shift to a “contract” society, but it doesn’t seem as much because we are still playing by the rules of status/hierarchy/authority (or at least by the people writing about it).
#3 Fidel & The Reporter: This story has it all. The temporary secret backchannel and romantic relationship between Fidel Castro and Lisa Howard in the aftermath of the cuban missile crisis followed by her tragic downfall and suicide.
#4 Mimetic Desire: On college and elite institutions as a fertile ground for “mimetic desire” - my first fascinating introduction to this phrase. Also a potential explanation for why I hear so many first-hand accounts of anxiety from within the corporate world: “The closer we are to other people—Girard means this in multiple dimensions—the more intensely that mimetic contagion will spread. Alternatively, competition is fiercer the more that competitors resemble each other”
#5 Optimism: Fascinating and thoughtful essay. Dan Wang argues for “optimism, imagination, and hope for the future” to be factored into how we measure success in the world. He argues that our distance from the “material world” or industrial/manufacturing world has led us to embrace more rent-seeking type knowledge work that is propped up by regulation or complexity.
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