Destruction, Terror and Mayhem
Commentary and curation on our technology-driven society. Did your amazing friend send you this email? You can sign up at boxofamazing.com - it's free!
Editor's Note
Hello from London!
I feel like the run in to the end of the year is a long sprint. And there are hurdles along the way. In technology, there are currently multiple firefights. I mentioned "the pause" last week - but it's worth highlighting two other fires. That crypto one (I've linked two great overview pieces below) and our friend Mr Musk.
Vox summed it up with their headline: Billionaires are a dual-use technology. With all that has happened this week at Twitter, it seems we are at a knife edge on whether Twitter will remain a viable company. That would be $44bn blown into smithereens in a matter of weeks. That might be small fry compared to both Amazon and Microsoft losing circa a trillion dollars in value.
What seems to be happening behind the scenes is a massive pivot - business models, operations, people - everything. It seems destructive. It seems like mayhem - but we should note Musk's previous impact.
in the early months of Covid-19, billionaire-funded Fast Grants got money quickly to promising research into treatments and vaccines, even as the expedited NIH approval process for funding still left many talented researchers with no way to get the money they needed for crucial Covid research.
There's much good that Musk aims to do, but with the good comes the flip.
To start a ludicrously successful company in the US these days, and not sell it to Google or whoever and retire quietly with a sizable fortune, you need to be an unusual sort of person. Elon Musk’s greatest fans and greatest critics would presumably agree on this much: He is a particularly vivid example of just that. He’s clearly great at some of the fundamentals of running a business — most people, after all, could not leverage the investor capital he received into multiple successful businesses in tough industries. He also makes costly, terrible decisions all the time. It’s quite possible these tendencies go hand in hand — the precise traits that made him decide he could do spaceflight better than anyone else are also the ones that made him decide he could tweet out a harebrained solution to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
What is it with these billionaires?
What's happening at Twitter is a fast escalation on what we discussed a few weeks ago - social media is dead - and I urge you to read my first recommended piece below.
Stay Curious,
Onward! - Rahim
PS. You know you're coming to Christmas when
Classifieds
Classifieds support the running of Box of Amazing. Book your spot.
Now
The Age of Social Media Is Ending — www.theatlantic.com It never should have begun.
Amazon ads are everywhere. It’s only the beginning. Inside the under-the-radar business that makes more money than Amazon Prime.
Unfollow? Block? And who gets custody of the WhatsApp groups? How to break up in the digital age
Social media has made finding love easier, but ending relationships even messier. Here’s how to finish things online without losing your mind
Why Everything Looks the Same — medium.com Do you ever get the feeling that everything around you looks the same? Across every consumer category, variety and originality have given way to monotony and conformity.
How Cambodia’s scam mills reel in new “cyber slave” workers — restofworld.org
Casual trafficking, calls to parents, misleading ads: even with global pressure, recruitment is rife.
‘I don’t want this kind of life’: graduate students question career options — www.nature.com
As interest in academia fades, scholars in PhD and master’s programmes are dubious about the value of their degree in advancing their professional lives.
Near
Amazon enters the age of robots. What does that mean for its workers? People have predicted robots will destroy the labour market, but Amazon believes investment in robotics could create jobs
Matter is here, but it’s still a long road to the simple smart home — www.theverge.com
At the official launch event for Matter this week, we saw a lot of exciting things: a Google Nest Hub controlling an Eve Energy smart plug; a Wiz light bulb working with Apple Home; a Yale smart lock talking to a SmartThings hub over Thread. None of these things were possible before Matter.
You Can Forget About Crypto Now — www.theatlantic.com
The industry’s latest meltdown is not like all the rest. When I spoke with Sam Bankman-Fried three weeks ago, he was crypto’s golden boy. Worth about $15 billion, this quirky 30-year-old led one of the industry’s largest empires. Also see Crypto World Is Rocked as World’s Largest Exchange Rescues Rival
Lab-grown blood given to people in world-first clinical trial — www.bbc.com Blood that has been grown in a laboratory has been put into people in a world-first clinical trial, UK researchers say. Tiny amounts - equivalent to a couple of spoonfuls - are being tested to see how it performs inside the body.
How Genes Can Leap From Snakes to Frogs in Madagascar — www.quantamagazine.org
The discovery of a hot spot for horizontal gene transfer draws attention to the possible roles of parasites and ecology in such changes.
End Note
Box of Amazing is made possible by some amazing advertisers. For more information and to secure a slot, fill in this form.
If you enjoyed this briefing, would you share this on LinkedIn, Whatsapp or email with your colleagues and friends?