Organise is a gathering place and a campaign management tool for people who want to instigate change at their workplace. Among other things, it provides templates for petitions, open letters and surveys that can be launched and distributed anonymously within an organisation.

A lightweight, GDPR-compliant analytics tool with some basic conversion optimisation features built right in. Indie software created by two brothers in Vienna.

I like the simplicity behind this to-do list approach: one list for things that need doing this week, and another list for things that need doing some time in the future. Move tasks from one side to the other as needed.

As a German speaker I know quite a few untranslatable words (a favourite is fremdschämen – to feel embarrassed by something somebody else did). This website has over 500 of them in more than 70 languages. So much fun to browse...

The Anthropocene Reviewed →

Essays on modern life & the human experience

There is a podcast by the same name that describes itself like so: “John Green reviews facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale.” A friend of mine really enjoyed this collection of deep-felt essays (or reviews, rather), so it’s on my looong reading list now, too.

Silicon Values →

Free speech under surveillance capitalism

While we touch on many of the topics in Jillian’s new book in the latest issue of Offscreen, only her book will give you all the context required to make sense of the complex issues around free speech and content moderation. “The internet once promised to be a place of extraordinary freedom beyond the control of money or politics, but today corporations and platforms exercise more control over our ability to access information and share knowledge to a greater extent than any state.”

Even for people who don’t have kids, this is a great read with a lot of thought-provoking observations on the type of role models adults can/should be. “Today, parents and teachers are rightly investing more time and energy in nurturing confidence and leadership in girls. Unfortunately, there isn’t the same momentum around developing generosity and helpfulness in boys. The result is less attention to caring across the board. Kids, with their sensitive antennae, pick up on all this. They see their peers being celebrated primarily for the grades they get and the goals they score, not for the generosity they show. They see adults marking their achievements without paying as much attention to their character.”

More excellent reporting by Rest of World: a first-person experience piece about working in a Filipino call centre. “During my four years in the industry, I could not count the number of new call center employees who broke down when they were called names and shouted at by Westerners on the phone. Veterans consoled them by telling them to pull themselves together, to not take it personally. The queue was too long; there was no time for drama. Some stuck around and grew immune to verbal abuse over time. Others just quit before their second shift.”

These days we hear a lot about ‘systems thinking’ because a complex world requires complex solutions. This post is a great starting point that briefly explains some of the easier-to-grasp concepts: “So, when we say ‘everything is interconnected’ from a systems thinking perspective, we are defining a fundamental principle of life. From this, we can shift the way we see the world, from a linear, structured ‘mechanical worldview’ to a dynamic, chaotic, interconnected array of relationships and feedback loops.”

A well-written, well-visualised longread on the seven most critical climate tipping points. “The particular danger, according to the Nature paper’s authors, is that even though change in a tipping element may happen slowly on a human timescale, once a certain threshold in the system is crossed, it can become unstoppable. This means that even if the planet’s temperature is stabilized, the transition of certain Earth systems from one state to another could pick up speed, like a rollercoaster car that’s already gone over the apex of a track.”