1. American Idle by Eugene Wei. From a product perspective, no app is currently as interesting as TikTok. Wei describes the elements and features that drive the success of the app. “TikTok enables, for video and audio, the type of combinatorial evolution that Brian Arthur describes as the underlying mechanism of the tech industry’s innovation.”
  2. I Helped Build ByteDance’s Censorship Machine by Shen Lu at Protocol. No one can dismiss the success of Bytedance – particularly of its apps Douyin and TikTok. But this success means particular scrutiny is required in regard to their content moderation practices. This article provides first-hand insights.
  3. The Web’s Missing Interoperability by Ben Thompson at Stratechery. GDPR and IDAF aim to protect consumer privacy. However, they lend even more power to incumbent platforms — when you can’t acquire users in one place and convert them in another, merge all steps into one.
  4. That Is Not How Your Brain Works by Lisa Feldman Barrett at Nautilus. As we learn more about the brain we can correct false assumptions — but some are so popular that they stick around, like the idea of a “reptilian brain”, single-purpose brain areas, or Cartesian dualism.
  5. Study: Employment Rose Among Those In Free Money Experiment by Adam Beam at AP News. A globally connected economy places people in extreme competition. While competition breeds creativity and innovation, it puts people under a lot of pressure. UBI could provide a viable solution, and this new study shows that while UBI (predictably) increases well-being, it can also lead to higher employment rates.
  6. A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed For Human Children by Michelle Starr at Science Alert. Barely a month goes by without a new study demonstrating the intelligence of cephalopods. The latest:  The classic Stanford Marshmallow Experiment (tweaked to a shrimp experiment) shows that cephalopods, too, are able to delay gratification.
  7. Interview: Patrick Collison, Co-Founder and CEO of Stripe by Noah Smith at Noahpinion. A look into the polymath brain of one of the most successful founders. What stood out to me was how such a busy person is able to educate himself and think about such a large range of complex topics.
  8. Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality by Scott Siskind at Astral Codex Ten. It’s a thin line between Bayesian reasoning and confirmation bias. When a strong emotional response is triggered, people are particularly likely to stick with prior beliefs rather than assess new evidence.
  9. NFTs and a Thousand True Fans by Chris Dixon at Andressen Horowitz. Kevin Kelly’s  2008 essay “A Thousand True Fans” postulates that — with the help of the internet — creators only need a small-ish crowd of dedicated fans to be successful. Centralized platforms held this idea back by controlling money flows. Dixon argues that crypto and NFTs lend new power to Kelly’s idea.
  10. The Value Chain Of The Open Metaverse by Packy McCormick at NotBoring. NFTs might seem like a bizarre scheme to replicate the monetization of physical art for digital art, even though they don’t operate under the same constraints (think scarcity). But there’s likely value beyond speculation and status — particularly in the context of the multiverse.