An interesting approach to a smaller, more community-focused social network that caps the number of connections you can make: “150 is Dunbar’s Number – or your brain’s limit of meaningful relationships. Converse with your friends (up to 150 people) and your friends’ friends (up to 20,000 people). No ads, no brands, no strangers for just $2 per month with the first year free.”

To backup your photos outside of Apple’s or Google’s walled garden, use PhotoFolder to store them in a regular folder, then sync it with any cloud provider or even save it on a USB drive. Location, faces and objects are stored in the file’s metadata.

With the Talknotes iOS app or web app, you convert relatively unstructured dictated notes into various, more practical text formats. For example, briefly outline the main topics of an email, then select ‘email’ as the output format, and Talknotes will turn it into an email with proper intro and sign-off.

An interesting interactive visualisation that lets users compare the performance of one area – a country, region, or income level – to its counterparts across a wide range of metrics.

Scarcity Brain →

How to change our craving mindset

In his newest book, Michael Easter argues that the scarcity mindset we inherited from our ancient ancestors – who had to constantly seek and consume to survive – has come back to hurt us in an age of abundant food, information and entertainment. “Our world is overloaded with everything we’re built to crave. The fix for scarcity brain isn’t to blindly aim for less. It’s to understand why we crave more in the first place, shake our worst habits, and use what we already have better. Then we can experience life in a new way – a more satisfying way.”

The Trouble With Elections →

Why elections stand in the way of genuine democracy

For some time now I’ve been fascinated by the idea of sortitions & citizen assemblies (see DD209 and DD220) to replace the traditional electoral process. Terry Bouricius is an internationally known political theorist with a focus on sortitions and is in the process of writing a book about it – by sharing each chapter via email. The working title for his book is The Trouble With Elections, and you can read the first eight chapters by subscribing to his Substack.

As I describe in my intro, Jon Alexander and co-author Ariane Conrad with a compelling vision of a society that embraces its agency as citizens, not just consumers. “As the certain world is replaced by great uncertainty, the risk is that we cling to what we know more than ever. The gravitational pull of the familiar exerts itself, no matter how dysfunctional we know the familiar to be. When we recognise this, we can hold the space for this collapse and this transition more gently, more respectfully, with greater care. Otherwise, anxiety flips into anger, and people lose trust and faith in one another and their institutions. The result risks becoming a vicious cycle: as the challenges of our time intensify, we trust our leaders less, the outlets we seek in our dissatisfaction – such as anti-scientific beliefs, or conspiracy theories – become more extreme, and our leaders in turn trust us less. They become yet more inclined to stick to what they know – the old stories – denying us agency as they engage in futile attempts to solve the challenges for us, without us.”

A practical and complementary piece to the above: Jon Alexandar believes that collective agency, rather than individual self-interest, is the key to making positive change in society. He offers a list of advice on how to fully step into your role as a citizen. “Even as the Consumer Story collapses and threatens to take us down with it, the Citizen Story is rising, across the world and in every sector of society. It is rooted in the insight that our agency is collective, not just individual; that we are defined by our fundamental interdependence, not our independence.”

David Cain points out the infinite details of almost everything in our daily lives. If we dare to zoom in and explore them at a higher resolution, we gain a much better, deeper understanding. When it comes to making conclusions and forming worldviews, however, we often rely only on very low resolution information. “The Information Age is clearly pushing us towards low-res conclusions on questions that warrant deep, long, high-res consideration. Consider our poor hominid brains, trying to form a coherent worldview out of monetized feeds made of low-resolution takes on the most complex topics imaginable – economic systems, climate, disease, race, sex and gender. Unsurprisingly, amidst the incredible volume of information coming at us, there’s been a surge in low-res, ideologically-driven views: the world is like this, those people are like that, X is good, Y is bad, A causes B. Not complicated, bro.”