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#1 MLK: Matt Taibbi on how we forget how universally the media was anti-MLK at the end of his life. This seems to be normal about the Vietnam era - I was completely surprised to find out from the PBS Documentary that a large majority of americans supported the war until the end...
#2 Wisdom of Insecurity: I highly recommend Alan Watts' Wisdom of Insecurity. Its a shorter read and holds up quite well in modern times even though it was written in 1951 (bold mine):
“The perfect “subject” for the aims of this economy is the person who continuously itches his ears with the radio (cell phone?), preferably using the portable kind which can go with him at all hours and in all places. His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper, to magazine, keeping him in a sort of orgasm-with-out-release."
#3 Generation: An article saying we should quit all the millennial-gen X-boomer nonsense. He identifies the issues of comparing different generations in different periods and argues that focusing on the "what" versus the "why" leads to faulty conclusions and harmful unintended actions. "In the end, the core scientific problem is that the pop press, consultants, and even some academics who are committed to generations don’t focus on the whys. They have a vested interest in selling the whats"
#4 Big Companies: Growing up on a commune to building a company, Luke identifies some of the inherent challenges in organizations: "While the United States operates as a free market economy, the key agent within modern capitalism — the corporation — works more like an authoritarian state."
The article does not end with clear answers, but identifies issues with many of the ideas that big corporations are embracing, like leveraging freelancers, holocracy and other models of doing business:
"I know the solution is not more freelancing and contract work, which America’s corporations are addicted to. That’s the worst of both worlds: The exploitative nature of capitalism with the inefficient bureaucracies of communism."
#5 Venture Economy: I once bought a dry cleaning on demand $200 gift card for $100 and then used 20-40% off coupons to get dry cleaning for about 40-60 cents per pound picked up and delivered at my door. Walking that same laundry across the street would ahve cost me 99 cents per pound. This article talks about MoviePass, a pure power play to build a network of movie watchers on top of a money-losing business model. As owning the customer through a platform becomes the most important thing in our economy, we will soon have to grapple not with the absurdity of these businesses (as the article focuses on) but what it means for wealth, jobs and our economy.
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