Synthesis #8: 💯 interesting stuff on leading, learning, and living better

As the time and effort required to produce commentary drops, it will be possible to produce vast quantities of AI-generated content on any topic imaginable. Indeed, it’s possible that we’ll soon have algorithms reading the web, forming “opinions,” and then publishing their own responses. This boundless corpus of new content and comments, largely manufactured by machines, might then be processed by other machines, leading to a feedback loop that would significantly alter our information ecosystem.

One of the things that a lot of us have really been thinking hard about is equity, and equity when people are in uneven circumstances doesn’t mean sameness. And so I think ungrading makes a lot of sense in these particular circumstances. Most of my students have Wi-Fi, and most of them have the tools they need at least on campus. But when they went home in March, there were people who were very crammed into housing, and they were sharing Wi-Fi, [or had] no Wi-Fi. They didn’t have good computers with them. And so if I had been a stickler for uniformity and precision—grading and points and attendance and participation in synchronous meetings—it would basically have measured people’s economic comfort. And that doesn’t seem to me what we’re after. [emphasis added]

Moreover, while Slack concluded its advertisement by talking about how difficult it would be for Microsoft to convince Slack users to “switch” to Teams, switching was never the goal: just as Facebook created Instagram Stories to remove the impetus for new users to even try Snapchat, Teams is particularly effective as a way to prevent a Microsoft customer from even trying Slack. And, in that case, it doesn’t matter how much “love” Slack put into its product: said love was not simply unrequited, but unexperienced.

I try not to grumble about having to pay for online content, because I run a magazine and I know how difficult it is to pay writers what they deserve. 

But let us also notice something: the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, New York, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and the London Times all have paywalls. Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free! 

The city is a lie that we tell ourselves. The crux of this lie is that we can separate human life from the environment, using concrete, glass, steel, maps, planning and infrastructure to forge a space apart. Disease, dirt, wild animals, wilderness, farmland and countryside are all imagined to be essentially outside, forbidden and excluded. This idea is maintained through the hiding of infrastructure, the zoning of space, the burying of rivers, the visualisation of new urban possibilities, even the stories we tell about cities. Whenever the outside pierces the city, the lie is exposed. When we see the environment reassert itself, the scales fall from our eyes.