Is there one link, story or idea that stopped you this week… and made you think, “someone else needs to see this”?
My friends: Alistair Croll (Just Evil Enough, Solve for Interesting, Tilt the Windmill, Interesting Bits, HBS, chair of Strata, Startupfest, FWD50, and Scaletechconf; author of Lean Analytics and some other books), Hugh McGuire (Rebus Foundation, PressBooks, LibriVox) and I made a simple pact years ago. Once a week, each of us would share one link with the others… something we genuinely believed the other two had to see. No trend-hunting… no performance. Just six ideas exchanged with intent. What started as a small ritual between curious friends became Six Links That Make You Think.
These are the six links we passed to one another this week… take your time with them…
- The 3 Ways Stupidity Spreads Throughout A Society – Jonny Thomson – Big Think – YouTube. “I am a firm believer that stupidity, not evil, is the real enemy. But I’d never seen it broken down as well as in this video from Big Think. Turns out there’s a taxonomy of stupidity – and unlike evil, which we can call out and punish stupidity is something we tolerate in others, to our great peril. It reminds me of the old line that there’s no such thing as a tolerant society, because any tolerant society must be intolerant of intolerance. Similarly, any smart society must not tolerate stupidity in its members. Or maybe I’m just old and grumpy now.” (Alistair for Hugh).
- Is An AI Company Buying Up All The Used Books? (I Don’t Think So, Not This Time) – Charlie Becker – Substack. “The idea that our legal system somehow makes it less wrong to steal a book if you destroy it afterwards is, to me, an indictment of a legal system that has lost a sense of what’s right in the world. And as an author, news of books being destroyed to train models makes me furious. Here’s a perspective from an actual bookseller.” (Alistair for Mitch).
- How Art Invented Humanity – JF Martel – Aeon. “Technology is scary, but I always come back to this: that whatever AI or technology does, it won’t remove the desire to make, share art, and talk about art. Even if AI makes great music, or movies on par with Police Academy II, it won’t (I hope) extinguish the human drive to create and experience. All of us need to remember this, and shape our lives and our work in consequence.” (Hugh for Alistair).
- The Lost Civic Life of Movie Rental Stores – Joshua M. Greenberg – The MIT Press Reader. “I have lamented, for a while, the impact of streaming apps (Netflix and Spotify etc) on kids: that we used to spend our money on art (OK some very suspect, say Police Academy II, but still). The allowance money I got as a kid/teen was spent on albums, cassettes and CDs, renting movies and going to movies. That was about it, as far as I can remember (until we found the depanneur that would sell us beer, but never mind that). My kids, of course, don’t need to pay for music or renting videos. And so they spend their money on, God help me, fake nails and other nonsense. This article reminds me though that not only is that how we spent money, but it is a lot of what we did: much of my free time as a tween/teen was spent with a group of friends at Avenue Video, trying to agree on a movie to rent. So a social interaction was built into how we consumed much of our art – and that’s largely gone. I love the term ‘third space’ – not private and not strictly commercial, and a place where people talk. They are hard to find these days, we’ve sold our art to the algorithm.” (Hugh for Mitch).
- You Cannot Use One Bullshit Machine To Catch Another Bullshit Machine – Chuck Wendig – Terrible Minds. “Another classic Chuck Wendig rant (come from the expletives… stay for the wisdom) that you might think is anti-AI… but it’s not. It’s about creativity… and how we (those who stil believe in it) can get ’there’. He’s a brilliant (and brilliantly funny) writer, so that opening paragraph did make me both laugh and forward it to my close inner circle of fellow scribes and creators. His AI hate comes from how these LLMs are stealing and copying human writing… which only creates confusion and a sense of distrust. ‘I’m not changing shit about how I write. I like the way I write. Maybe you do, too. Maybe you don’t! Plenty of people think I write like shit, and that’s fine — that’s life in the big city, man. Hell, the fact I just wrote ‘life in the big city,’ which is a cliche, could be used as proof that I used AI to generate this post, even though I haven’t used AI to generate a goddamn thing and wouldn’t know how to do it even if you asked me to. Point is, I’m keeping the emdashes, I’m keeping my weird metaphors, I’m keeping the words I like to sometimes overuse because I like to sometimes overuse them. It’s not a strategy. It’s a style. A style you love, or hate, or don’t care about. But it’s mine, AI. Get your robot hands the fuck off it**’. Gold” (Mitch for Alistair).
- Umyazu – Mandy Brown – A Working Library. “It’s really an essay about reclaiming attention from the ‘attention economy’. The author argues that we’ve misunderstood the problem. It’s not that we’ve suddenly become incapable of paying attention… it’s that many modern technologies are deliberately designed because distracted people are easier to monetize and easier to govern. The essay imagines a different kind of economy where people pay directly for stories… ideas… wisdom, and receive immediate value in return. With today’s platforms, we think we’re getting free services but we actually pay twice: once with money and again with our diminished capacity to think. Maybe we forgot that reading isn’t just consuming words. It’s an act of genuine attention, curiosity, and world-building. This one is a hopeful argument that reading isn’t an escape from the world… it’s one of the ways we learn to see it clearly enough to change it. As usual, hat-tip to Patrick Tanguay from Sentiers for this find.” (Mitch for Hugh).
If one of these sticks with you, pass it on… and let us know what earned your attention this week…
Before you go… ThinkersOne is a new way for organizations to buy bite-sized and personalized thought leadership video content (live and recorded) from the best Thinkers in the world. If you’re looking to add excitement and big smarts to your meetings, corporate events, company off-sites, “lunch & learns” and beyond, check it out.
Mitch Joel Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.