Links

1. The Knowledge Project Ep. #202 – Matthew Dicks: How to Tell a Story so That Everyone Listens

   Matthew shares some terrific advice for storytelling, structure and listening styles.

2. rolltime - A New HOPE (2022): ActivityPub Four Years Later: The Good, the Bad, and the Fedi

   This talk by rolltime helped me to understand the concepts and history of the Fediverse how it has been implemented and what make it better than a straight-up Xitter replacement. They have some interesting thoughts and provocations for creating more curated and valued engagements.

3. Cory Doctorow - DEF CON 32 - Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation

   A fantastic ~50 min teardown of the what, how and why behind big tech companies are taking a shit on the internet. This talk gave me hope for a better future!

4. Jason Hickel: It's either degrowth for the rich or climate disaster

   This podcast with Jason Hickel really helped to build an understanding of degrowth and how it differs from austerity and green growth. Lots of other nuggets of information about social indicators and GDP and how equality is a core principle of degrowth. Inspiring stuff!

5. Fermentation as Metaphor – An Interview with Sandor Katz

   Fascinating conversation about the fermentation process, its role in history and our current lifestyle, and as a metaphor for our investment in the future of the planet.

   Fermentation is ultimately a very hopeful practice because it does not yield immediate gratification. There’s always delayed gratification in fermentation, and so in a quite literal way it’s an investment in the future. If you are despondent and despairing and don’t know if there’s a future, why would you invest your energy into fermenting? It is quite literally an investment in something that you’re going to be able to enjoy in the future, so there is an intrinsic hopefulness to any practice of fermentation.

   […] like any aspect of food production, requires us to cultivate a connection to the natural world and in the case of fermentation specifically to invisible forces in the natural world.

   […] so many people who are fermenting now in the West don’t have those same traditions in the same way because they’re transient. They’ve moved from those places, or the generations that held those no longer practiced them in the last generation or two and they became disconnected. It seems like there’s a reclaiming of ancestral roots that is also part of this fervor in fermentation. But it also seems like those ancestral roots that they’re trying to reconnect to are not going to take shape in the same way. They’re not going to appear like they did for their grandparents or their great-grandparents or back in the old country where they might have come from. It’s going to take on new shapes and forms but it’s still about this desire to find roots and go deeper.

6. You're Dead to Me – The History of Timekeeping

   Time is funny. A very hilarious and fascinating history of time and timekeeping. Well worth your time.

7. Tech Won’t Save Us – Plastic Recycling Is a Scam

   Fascinating discussion about the state of recycling in the 21st century and a look at how the plastic industry has historically reframed the problem and blame on consumers.

8. Material Matters – Bas van Abel – Repair and conflict minerals

   Great conversation with Fairphone founder Bas van Abel about the trials and tribulations of starting a business and product focused on longevity, repairability and ethically sourced minerals.

   If consumerism was a religion we’d all be extremists.

9. Blackbox Episode 3 – Repocalypse now

   Loneliness, love, lust and LLMs… what could possibly go wrong?

10. PaperNet Boarding Pass

    A fantastic example of playful design and elevating the value artifacts based on the context of use. By Brian Suda and the creative folks at https://optional.is/.