Arc, the first product of The Browser Company of New York, is slowly adding people to their access list. According to some early reviews online, Arc looks like a minimal browser with some handy additions for note-taking, whiteboarding and ‘multi-tasking’.

A reader recommendation (thanks Milly!) that is supposed to help with the jet lag of long-distance travel. You enter your flight details and the app tells you how to shift your exposure to light, your sleep and your caffeine intake two days before and after your trip. I’m in the middle of my first trial of this app with my flight to Germany leaving in a few hours – keen to see if it makes a difference!

This visualisation by The Pudding is particularly relevant at the moment: when a famous person dies their Wikipedia entry explodes with activity: edits, updates, and millions of visits. “While not perfect, Wikipedia traffic serves as a solid proxy for the ebb and flow of a celebrity’s cultural relevance.”

DD reader and Friend Vadim Demedes created a fan page to honour the French duo’s lasting contribution to electronic music. “Listen to the radio, play some Tetris or test your knowledge of track names and just have a good time!”

Unsustainable Inequalities →

Social justice and the environment

It seems contradictory at first but, as Lucas Chancel argues in this book, a sustainable and healthy environment is tightly connected to alleviating social inequities within countries as well as across the globe. “To rise out of poverty is to consume more resources, almost by definition. And many measures to combat pollution lead to job losses and higher prices that mainly hurt the poor. In Unsustainable Inequalities, economist Lucas Chancel confronts these difficulties head-on, arguing that the goals of social justice and a greener world can be compatible, but that progress requires substantial changes in public policy.”

Open Spaces Magazine →

The connection between art, nature & humans

A new-ish indie print magazine devoted to the connections between people, art and the natural world. The beautifully laid out pages explore “uncharted destinations, unique journeys, personal stories and artist practices that are connected with, and rooted in nature”. Friends of DD enjoy a 20% discount on the upcoming issue 2. Become a Friend to access specials like this.

What a great read! I recently discovered the writing by ‘Gurwinder’ and have been enjoying it a lot. Here he writes about how finding a successful niche audience for your work online can dramatically reshape your identity – or rather lead to a forced-upon fake identity. This has been on my mind lately too and he’s expressed it much better than I ever could. “This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame; to become a prisoner of one’s own persona. The desire for recognition in an increasingly atomized world lures us to be who strangers wish us to be. ... it’s worth remembering that when you become who your audience expects at the expense of who you are, the affection you receive is not intended for you but for the character you’re playing, a character you’ll eventually tire of. And so be warned: being someone often means being fake, and if you chase the approval of others, you may, in the end, lose the approval of yourself.”

With so much of our behaviour online shaped by algorithms, how much control do we really have? Is it really us making intentional decisions about the things we purchase, the people we end up dating? We think that algorithms learn from us, adapt to our behaviour. What if it’s the other way around? “When we talk about ‘the algorithm’, we might be conflating recommender systems with online surveillance, monopolization, and the digital platforms’ takeover of all of our leisure time – in other words, with the entire extractive technology industry of the twenty-first century. Bucher told me that the idea of the algorithm is ‘a proxy for technology, and people’s relationships to the machine’. It has become a metaphor for the ultimate digital Other, a representation of all of our uneasiness with online life.” (Possible soft paywall)

A lovely observation by the wonderful Uri Bram, publisher of The Browser: “If someone (including yourself) is struggling with low well-being, it’s important to ascertain which of two problems are happening: not enough happiness [or] too much unhappiness. If someone has a lot of unhappiness, they need to get rid of some negative influence in their life. If they don’t have enough happiness, they need to add something positive to their life.”