Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #416

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (Solve for Interesting, Tilt the Windmill, HBS, chair of Strata, Startupfest, Pandemonio, and ResolveTO, Author of Lean Analytics and some other books), Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, LibriVox, iambik and co-author of Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see”.

Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another: 

• A Company Built on a Bluff – New York Magazine. “Since I’m picking on media properties today, here’s one closer to home. Vice Media is a Montreal-born wunderkünd, promising to bring millennials back to broadcast programming. But as the company’s financials unravel, their apparent immunity to the changes every media platform is undergoing has ended. Also, hijinks and shenanigans.” (Alistair for Hugh).
• The Stanford Prison Experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud – Vox. “People walking slowly when they think about the elderly. Delaying gratification and succeeding in life. All those clever, Kahneman-inspired anecdotes may be fun at parties, but they’re likely wrong. Phil Zimbardo might be a TED darling — along with Joachim de Posada and many others — but there’s no denying that psychology has a crisis of reproducibility. It’s fuelled by the same problem facing news and politics: What’s entertaining isn’t usually what’s true, on either side of the political aisle.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant – Strike Magazine. “Many interesting observations from this article, two of which are:  ‘If 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call ‘the market’ reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.’ And: ‘In our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.. Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.'” (Hugh for Alistair).
• Visualizing Dante’s Hell: See Maps & Drawings of Dante’s Inferno from the Renaissance Through Today – Open Culture. “In my other shared link, David Graber posits a version of hell: ‘Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at.’ Not sure where that fits in Dante’s Inferno, but here are some drawings to situate yourself.” (Hugh for Mitch).
• Apple’s Airpods Are an Omen – The Atlantic. “It used to be (like last week) that getting your brand anywhere required a core focus on images and videos. Now, audio seems to be creeping back up into what it takes to connect with consumers today. From smart speakers and voice assistants to the rise in podcasting. We’re listening… we’re really really listening. This article suggests that this may not be the best thing ever for us humans. ‘…by going wireless, and by doing it so well, AirPods also decouple that intimacy from the tether that generally has signaled it in social circumstances. And even though it seems like a small matter–just a wireless headset–the device could fundamentally alter the way people interact with machines, and with one another.’ Is it the hardware? Is it the content? Are humans just getting tired of interacting with one another in our protein forms? What strange people we have become…” (Mitch for Alistair). 
• Inside the Binge Factory – Vulture. “Maybe you don’t agree that bluetooth headsets are turning us into another type of human being. What about binge watching? What, exactly, does Netflix do so well that gets us so hooked on their content? Still, I’ll often bing-watch a series and wonder to myself: ‘was that worth it? I think I just watched a 15-hour movie about a comic book character!’ Maybe we humans really are changing beyond recognition! This is how Netflix gets us…” (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on Twitter, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.