Issue #20: the perils of audience capture, democratizing access, and how social media shapes us

🥸  MOOD

🪐  COOL THINGS CURATED IN OUR UNIVERSE

A thoughtful essay on the perils of audience capture and how it leads one to become a prisoner of one's own persona:

 

Which reminds me of Tavi Gevinson's 2019 essay for NYMag, Who would I be without Instagram:

 

Which brings me to this blog post published by Shaun Wang on the meta-creator ceiling. He defines a “Meta-Creator” as someone who creates content about creating, instead of just creating:

 

More thoughts on the intersection of the creator economy and fame here.

 

As someone who is constantly hunting for content that makes my soul sing on the Internet, it has felt harder to stave off despair these days. If you're looking for a refuge from awful headlines and generic life advice, check out the the Inspiration page on startupy. Or just sit on this tweet.

More people should study the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, a media theorist and philosopher. Ezra Klein wrote a beautiful essay about how social media reshapes the way we talk and think, and how little attention we pay to that.

 

Related insights in future of media, tech and society, information ecology, and attention economy.

 

The history of the Internet is the history of democratizing access. Here's a wonderful collection of content + companies on the subject, including Pacaso (democratizing access to second home ownership), Arkive (the first decentralized museum where people are responsible for curating culturally significant items instead of being locked into private collections and controlled by a select few), or Thematic (where anyone can build investable products)

 

Just marveling at the glory of this site: dayjob.work

*DayJob is the agency behind the branding for Recess and Taika.

🌱  COMMUNITY HEALTH

Welcoming our new curators who joined us this week and virtual high-fiving Stuart Evans, Kaf, Mike Tannenbaum, Jordan Bester, Jimmy Cerone, and Sarah Owen for their contributions.

✨  CURATOR SPOTLIGHT

 

 

For hundreds of years, societies with a central focus on building public knowledge — from the Royal Society to Wikipedia — have been at the core of innovation and progress. 

I would argue the past 50 years or so has been a historically low moment for these societies in terms of capturing and coordinating the value they create, as exemplified by the huge shift in power in science away from societies towards publishers. 

But what’s really interesting is that I think we’re starting to see a turning of that tide, where knowledge focused societies rise again to some of the most important, valuable, and prestigious communities in the world.

 

This is a huge topic, but to get inspired I’d start with:

 

Self plug here, but I thought the interview Sari and I did with Cherie Hu from Water and Music was really interesting in terms of how to incentivize and share value built by a decentralized community of knowledge builders.

 

 

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