Words and more (Spam Mail #8)

Hi there,

Following yesterday’s inauguration and the Great Deplatforming earlier this month it feels like a combined sigh of relief. At the very least, it’s great just to hear less from Trump.

Substack continue to have a hands-off take on content moderation though. They explained this in a blog post last month, but one statement stood out:

Of course, there are limits. We do not allow porn on Substack, for example, or spam. We do not allow doxxing or harassment.

So, in plain English they reject this very newsletter. That won’t stop me. If you’re receiving this I’ve found a loophole and will keep posting. See you again next week.

💩 Cool shit

Blabrecs - It’s like scrabble but you have to guess fake words.

This Word Does Not Exist - Having trouble with the first link? Use this to generate some perfectly cromulent words.

DALL·E - This has nothing to do with WALL-E. Instead, neural networks uses natural language processing to generate images based words.

The History of Microsoft Flight Simulator - Words are cool and all but this is amazing. Don't read about the history of flight simulators, play them.

MailChimp Annual Report 2020 - MailChimp show you can make an annual report more than just a slab of text in this fun side-scrolling adventure.

💎 Word gems

Garbage Language: Why do corporations speak the way they do? (Vulture / Molly Young)

Following my theme on words, a look at corporate speak and how strange yet powerfully framing language is. Net-Net: Let's not circle back on this.

Megan’s syncs were filled with discussions of cadences and connectivity and upleveling as well as the necessity to refine and iterate moving forward. The primary unit of meaning was the abstract metaphor. I don’t think anyone knew what anyone was saying, but I also think we were all convinced that we were the only ones who didn’t know while everyone else was on the same page. (A common reference, this elusive page.)

You Can Handle the Post-Truth: A Pocket Guide to the Surreal Internet (AZL.Blog)

Written in 2019, this is surprisingly prescient. There’s some great perspectives into the role of narrative - looking at meta topics across the news, and how our fragmentation of reality has shifted our thinking from one universal narrative to many.

Both the “I believe in Science” Left and the conspiracy theorizing Right claim to be heirs of the Enlightenment. What’s different about the far-right is that they stopped trusting institutions and took matters into their own hands. This approach feels less patronizing and more empowering than listening to experts who seem so distant and out of touch. In a sense, the media literacy movement backfired.

The World Needs a Tech Diet; Here is How Designers Can Help (UX Collective / Fabricio Teixeira, Caio Braga)

Another 2019 essay (yes, I’m a little behind on my reading) with sharp foresight. With Apple recently introducing privacy ‘nutrition labels’ for apps, this essay resonates even more.

But in some cases, we are simply defining metrics out of apathy. We forget to question the real business value behind each of those KPIs. After all, more page views per visit to an e-commerce website do not necessarily mean more sales. Likewise, the number of opens per week for a mobile banking app tells us little about customer loyalty and satisfaction — when it comes to their financial life, aren’t people looking for peace of mind instead?

An Engineering Argument for Basic Income (Scott Santens)

If the previous article is a design take on a problem, this is an engineering one. One thing I love about engineering is that it designs with fault tolerances - the acknowledgement that things go wrong so you plan for them. It’s something tech doesn’t do very well right now, and as this article claims, neither does our income system. This is a really compelling take on basic income, and more broadly, for designing with fault tolerances.

We know that our primary income distribution system fails. It fails all the time. It's called losing your job. We have a "safety net" designed to catch people when it fails, but that system is really poorly designed, and it also fails all the time, at which point, people can and do die as a result.

We have engineered a life support system without fault tolerance, and we did it because engineers didn't design the system. Politicians did. Special interests did. And it's built on antiquated job-centric moralism instead of contemporary life-centric realism.

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