I use TweetDelete to automatically remove tweets of mine that are older than six months. Semiphemeral does that too, but offers more granular settings. I’m also impressed by it’s clear stance against fascist Twitter users: “If you like tweets posted by fascist influencer accounts, @semiphemeral will block you and you’ll be ineligible to use the service until you’re unblocked.” (via)

IA, famous for their minimalist writing app, have launched a preview and waitlist for their new presentation tool. In typical IA fashion, the interface is centered around text input and strong typography that produce ‘clean’, minimal slides.

If you work a lot with Post-it notes, I recently learned that the brand has an official companion app that allows you to “capture notes from the group and organise them on a shared [digital] board in real-time”.

This is about as much driving as I need in my life: unlike the real thing, driving in Slow Roads is therapeutic. Change the viewing angle, time of the day or entire scenery through keyboard shortcuts. You can also put the car/bike/bus on auto-pilot and just enjoy the ride. Pretty amazing this is possible in a web browser.

What Works →

A new approach to goal setting

I always appreciate Tara McMullin’s writing through which she investigates more humane interpretations of things like labour, career and productivity. I receive her newsletter, but I don’t always get to read it in full. So I’m glad she’s put all that good stuff into a brand new book: “What Works is an antidote to the relentless pursuit of ‘more’ and the culture of striving that we live in. It’s an unconventional approach to goal-setting, planning, and execution that prioritizes practice over achievement in both life and work.”

Survival of the Richest →

Escape fantasies of tech billionaires

In between the many crises making headlines, you occasionally read about some tech billionaire’s newest side project, which usually involves some form of post-civilisation escapism. In this new title, author Douglas Rushkoff “confronts tech utopianism, the datafication of all human interaction, and the exploitation of that data by corporations. Through fascinating characters – master programmers who want to remake the world from scratch as if redesigning a video game and bankers who return from Burning Man convinced that incentivized capitalism is the solution to environmental disasters – Rushkoff explains why those with the most power to change our current trajectory have no interest in doing so.”

This one somehow fell through the cracks. It was a reader suggestion (thanks Vishal!) in response to my intro to DD181 in which I talked about the value of negativity. Like the other pieces I referenced back then, this one, too, highlights the benefits of ‘negative thinking’ – for the self and society more generally. “In the contemporary milieu, the idea of being negative is either regarded as a destructive mentality or else defeatist fatalism. But, at least in passing shades, negative emotions can hold great power. There resides in negativity the seed of critical thought and a beneficial duty to engage with one’s internal feelings. The work of negation, indeed the very act, is a process which remains productive in a sense – a deconstruction rather than a wholly violent act of destruction. The act of being negative is a process of ‘working through’ – a struggle.”

Our understanding of time and the way we organise our lives around it are critically important in our capitalist culture. Anne Helen Petersen points out that notions of efficiency and productivity – both products of our perception of time – don’t just control our busy calendars, they normalise a kind of obedience to existing power structures. “Through the commitment to busyness and its organization, we inscribe and reinscribe a certain understanding of time onto our children, onto each other, onto ourselves. We discipline our messy, distracted, inquisitive, emotive selves into the most valuable possible forms of human capital possible. We suggest that sort of regimentation is not only possible (just organize harder!) but aspirational.”

Huh. This is the first time I read about the weird theories on the death of the internet, such as the idea that the internet is now in control of bots and AI and little actually human-made corners remain. I don’t (yet) buy the base assumption, nor the conclusion that this leads to a renaissance of long-form content, but it’s an interesting theory to contemplate. “In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the power-hungry computer HAL 9000 tries to take over a spacecraft and kill the astronauts. But Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick got it all wrong. We now know that AI prefers to sell us garbage we don’t need and force us to watch stupid 10-second videos.”