Burnout and Yahoo! Answers (Spam Mail #16)

Hi there,

The news that Yahoo! Answers is getting shut down feels like the end of a quirky chapter of the early 2000s web. I am forever grateful for the gift that is how is prangent formed.

See you next time.

💩 Cool Shit

@ClickTheLight - If you like my Cool Shit section you’ll love this wonderful Instagram account by my friend and coworker. It shares moments of digital delight, like TwoMuch.Studio

Into the Storm - A truly immersive web experience putting you in control of a U.S. Air Force mission.

Trump or Biden Geography Quiz - Get dropped in a random American neighborhood. Can you guess whether they voted for Trump or Biden?

Blue HamHam - A site with so much whimsicalness in every interaction.

Louvre Collection - The Louvre now have their entire collection available online.

💎 Word gems

We Have All Hit a Wall (New York Times / Sarah Lyall)

We’ve all been feeling burnt out. The New York Times talk about us experiencing a collective, prolonged period of stress. I can’t help but notice we keep saying WFH gives us a good work-life balance, and yet we’re all feeling burnt out.

Call it a late-pandemic crisis of productivity, of will, of enthusiasm, of purpose. Call it a bout of existential work-related ennui provoked partly by the realization that sitting in the same chair in the same room staring at the same computer for 12 straight months (and counting!) has left many of us feeling like burned-out husks, dimwitted approximations of our once-productive selves.

The Exaggeration of “Burnout” in America (The New Republic / Jonathan Malesic)

In a challenge to the first article, this piece questions our masochist relationship with burnout.

We reach so often for the term burnout, then, because it perfectly reflects our ambivalence toward work. We complain that work is crushing our bodies and souls, but we also love it. The pain is how we validate our lives. On some level, we want to burn out.

There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble (NY Mag / Max Read)

Everybody’s talking crypto, bitcoin and NFCs. This article notes a real shift in how we think about money, sparked from the 2008 financial crisis.

What these widely diverging cults of money were responding to was a sense that money had come alive again — that, given the global financial crisis and the Fed’s “using a computer to mark up the size of the account,” money had been reanimated from the suspension of settled policy consensus. After 30 years of broad political and academic agreement on the correct path for monetary policy, the institutional crisis of banks and governments in 2008 (not to mention the collapse of a gatekeeping news media) had opened up space for a new theory of money — or a dozen.

"It's Not Cancel Culture — It's A Platform Failure." (Galaxy Brain / Charlie Warzel)

Charlie Warzel’s new newsletter kicks off with a great piece on context collapse - how communication breaks down on social media because of the seemingly infinite audiences available. His aim at Twitter’s Trending Topics highlights a useful point that it’s not necessarily the content itself but its amplification that drives conflict on social media.

The entire phenomenon of “Twitter’s Main Character” functions as a master class in context collapse. Many Very Online Users approach this daily ritual as something between high school cafeteria gossip time and one of those Rage Rooms where you pay money to break things with a hammer. But what’s really happening is thousands of strong individual online identities colliding against each other.

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