Inside

I don’t know about you guys, but, um, you know, I’ve been thinking recently that… that you know, maybe, um, allowing giant digital media corporations to exploit the neurochemical drama of our children for profit…

You know, maybe that was, uh… a bad call by us.

Maybe… maybe the… the flattening of the entire subjective human experience into a… lifeless exchange of value that benefits nobody, except for, um, you know, a handful of bug-eyed salamanders in Silicon Valley…

Maybe that as a… as a way of life forever… maybe that’s, um, not good.

– Inside, Bo Burnham

Foodbank

While pensioners lug around crates of food, stoic and mobilised, to feed desperate families – somewhere out there is a young person, preoccupied and hurt by the lack of retweets or likes on their post.

We crave what makes us ill, and neglect what our soul demands. And we always learn this too late.

Knowledge Work

The broad field of knowledge work is in a similar place today as the craft of cooking was in 1859.

Our labor is difficult, but undervalued. We spend way too much time thinking about how to get things done, versus doing them. We approach each new task and project as if it was a completely blank slate, requiring an entirely new approach.

Our careers as knowledge workers are starting to look a lot like chefs – non-linear, itinerant, based on gigs, demanding flexible collaboration with a constantly changing group of collaborators.

Open Source Insulin

Over my lifetime, the price of insulin in the US has risen ~15x, leading patients to ration doses to conserve it.

A group of dedicated biohackers believe that making insulin more accessible requires taking the monopoly away from the big three pharmaceutical companies that produce it. So they’ve started the Open Insulin Foundation, a non-profit with plans to develop the world’s first open-source insulin production model.

Phew!

Life is Short

Life is short, so remember to be super serious, take everything personally and be outraged on a daily basis. /s

Building Change

It definitely seems that when change is more threatening than promising, everyone collectively hits the brakes. I’m not sure if that’s a lack of imagination, or perhaps even a correct risk-adjusted calculation. People just have less faith in the promise of change.

Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building? What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building? If the work you’re doing isn’t either leading to something being built or taking care of people directly, we’ve failed you, and we need to get you into a position, an occupation, a career where you can contribute to building. There are always outstanding people in even the most broken systems — we need to get all the talent we can on the biggest problems we have, and on building the answers to those problems.

– Marc Andreessen in his essay, Time to Build

Larger Than Life

Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At the bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction – so easy to lapse into – that the world has been made for humans by humans.

Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia.

By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.

– Robert MacFarlane

Community Power

There’s much to think about for the future. When I think about energy production, I see it as community-based. Imagine households taking a weekly walk to drop off food waste.

In an anaerobic digester, bacteria breaks down the food waste and releases methane as a byproduct. The methane is then captured and used as a renewable source of energy. After the digestion process, the leftover material can be composted and used as a natural fertiliser.

Benefits

  • Locally-created energy equals less transmission loss, since it’s not travelling far
  • Energy can be sold back to the grid, allowing communities to generate funding beyond the council tax and central government funding
  • Social cohesion as there’s a common goal, where interests and incentives are aligned
  • A job creator, attracting new talent and up-skilling local talent

Things to think about

  • Initial investment
  • It still generates Co2 and N2o and methane as an output
  • How much power could a square mile of waste generate?

Misbehaving

We experience life in terms of changes, we feel diminishing sensitivity to both gains and losses, but losses sting more than equivalently sized gains feel good.