Algorithms; Financial competition; Digital disconnectivity

I was in Madrid early this week for an actual in-person, real, not on Zoom half day workshop. Let me repeat…in person!

It was a bit of a test for us all, with people forgetting that traffic was a thing, me having a realisation that I’m so used to looking in one direction when presenting online, that panning around a room of people is weirdly unnatural, and the whole thing running over by an hour.

The biggest impact though was the dent in efficiency. Even just one day without checking Slack and emails every 5 minutes set me back until probably Friday before I felt like I’d “caught up”.

This is pretty weird, and maybe an indication of me being just too interested in everything that’s going on, but was a bit of a wow moment to realise how hyper-focused / efficient we are when it’s just us and a laptop.

There are some cracking quotes in this article, my favourite being “when everything is short-term, life loses all stability”. It’s a point about the fragmented and addictive nature of our online lives now. Everything becomes faster, shorter, and more disjointed, to the point where we struggle to gain any sort of consistency in our lives. Eeeeesh.

They don’t mess around when they call this a deep dive. It’s part history lesson, and part future lesson (is that a thing?) explaining what we now know as money, its origins, and what we’re looking at in the near future. What they mean by “competition” here is who owns our cash. Well, our digital dollars. For a start, it looks like we’re entering a frontier where money across international borders is going to get easier 🎊

This one is part education and part manifesto on what is both wrong and needs to be changed with algorithms to ensure our safety online. They jump into the minefield that is surveillance capitalism (when our data is the product), the fact that data mining through algorithms is hilariously unregulated. It’s so easy for someone to set up a business which is free but has hidden terms that state your data can be sold.

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The main reason I’m sharing this one is because of a quote which will stick with you, “most of us live like we have an infinite amount of time”. Isn’t that something? Sarah explains what brought her to this conclusion, after working more than she should’ve in a previous role and receiving some bad medical news, she re-prioritised everything and now actively spends less time on screens, and more time thinking up her solutions to problems on long walks; a woman after my own heart.

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