AirPods are notoriously badly designed. Once the batteries die, the entire product becomes useless and is often discarded. Podswap (US-only for now) gives AirPods a second life: you order a second-hand, cleaned and sanitised pair of AirPods with fresh batteries through their website, then send in your old ones for them to restore for another customer.

The UI preview of Typedream reminds me of Notion but the feature set is closer to that of a tool like Webflow: a simple page builder that doesn’t require any coding skills.

There is a growing sentiment that we need fewer pledges and more action. And while that’s true, I think public pledges can help raise awareness. Big creative agencies like Ogilvy and BCW take money from the likes of BP and Shell to help them greenwash their polluting products. The Clean Creatives movement wants individual creatives and creative agencies to pledge never to accept work from the fossil fuel (and related) industries.

The kind of social network I can get behind. Yoni is an app that creates ‘storytelling circles’ which are “hour-long, live, moderated video chat experiences (capped at 6 women) that leave members feeling lighter and more connected to themselves and the world around them. Think a slumber party meets a mindfulness class.”

Less is More →

A vision of a post-growth future

For many, it still seems controversial to talk about a world after capitalism. Jason Hickel draws a possible map of this ‘uncharted territory’: “If we want to have a shot at halting the crisis, we need to slow down and restore the balance. We need to change how we see nature and our place in it, shifting from a philosophy of domination and extraction to one that’s rooted in reciprocity and regeneration. We need to evolve beyond the dogmas of capitalism to a new system that’s fit for the twenty-first century.”

An Ugly Truth →

The insiders’ acccount of Facebook’s fall from grace

Using ‘unrivalled’ internal sources, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang shine a light on the inner workings of the world’s biggest data-mining machine using outrage and misinformation to sustain its growth. “The missteps of the last five years were not an anomaly but an inevitability – this is how Facebook was built to perform. In a period of great upheaval, growth has remained the one constant under the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Both have been held up as archetypes of uniquely 21st century executives – he the tech ‘boy genius’ turned billionaire, she the ultimate woman in business, an inspiration to millions through her books and speeches.”

In which Ben Jenkins perfectly describes the feeling a lot of us are experiencing right now, deep down in our guts. “The most uncomfortable sequence in Jaws isn’t the bit where the shark finally attacks, it’s Martin Brody sitting on the beach, watching the water. That sequence seems to go for hours. By the time the disaster actually arrives and we get the dolly zoom right up on Brody’s terrified face, we feel less afraid than we did moments before. And that’s where we’re stuck. We’re stuck on the beach waiting for the other shoe to drop, knowing, like Brody does, that when it comes, we and whatever systems we’ve put our faith in until this moment, will be powerless to stop it.”

90% of the ads Instagram throws at me are for useless gadgets aimed at people with too much disposable income. It really has become the new SkyMall. “It’s pretty clear that Instagram ads are a breeding-ground for the legions of dropshippers who are trying to find some sort of tech thingmabob that they can sell four million of a week so they can ‘put their income on autopilot’, as per The Four Hour Workweek. It’s also clear that many of these merchants are itchily desperate for attention. Many of the products have ‘like’ counts so risibly high they practically need scientific notation, almost certainly juked into the ionosphere by roboclicks.” [Possible soft paywall]

An honest, emotional ‘brain dump’ by writer Sarah Miller who gets asked to write ‘something about climate change’ after her piece on the paradox of Miami’s thriving real estate world amidst rising sea levels attracted a fair amount of attention. “I probably talked for 11 minutes straight. I told her I didn’t have anything to say about climate change anymore, other than that I was not doing well, that I was miserable. ‘I am so unhappy right now.’ I said those words. So unhappy. Fire season was not only already here, I said, but it was going to go on for at least four more months, and I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself. I didn’t know how I would stand the anxiety. I told her I felt like all I did every day was try to act normal while watching the world end, watching the lake recede from the shore, and the river film over, under the sun, an enormous and steady weight.”