Virtual brand experiences and how computers broke the human body (Spam Mail #21)

💩 Cool Shit

Polygon’s tribute to Shrek - It’s been 20 years since Shrek came out.

Soundcities - Take an auditory trip with this database of sounds from cities around the world.

Lose the Very - Adjective + ‘very’ = output. That’s it.

212 Heroes Skate Game - A Temple Run-esque game where you can skateboard down the street to Forever Young.

Renew Labs - Explore a virtual barge to see Converse’s line of shoes that aim to remove plastic waste from the ocean.

SK-II City - Another brand rethinking online, with a virtual cityscape as a setting  for navigating through the brand experience.

Finely Crafted - Shoe Surgeon x Jack Daniel’s with another virtual environment - this time in a bar.

Vintage Map - A cool site to create and print your own vintage map. Choose a time period and generate a map based on what part of the world was discovered.

Shlinkedin - A satirical social network for all the thought leaders and disruptors. Generate your own LinkedIn-like posts too.

💎 Word gems

How the Personal Computer Broke the Human Body (Vice / Laine Nooney)

Nooney flips the history of computers by looking at the humans using them. The introduction of computers demanded more concentration and less decision making - ultimately leading to feelings of monotony and fatigue. As computers have come to be intertwined with our lives, so has the ergonomic industry of standing desks, expensive chairs and everything else you can imagine.

By turning away from the computer to the body, the assemblage of computer history changes. There is no grand narrative here, just fragments and scraps from a decentralized archive, but ones that might, through juxtaposition, elucidate something about how we learned to live with computers. This is not the history of killer apps, wild hacks, and the coding wizards who stayed up late, but something far quieter and harder to trace, histories as intimate as they are “unhistoric”: histories of habit, use, and making do. That pain in your neck, the numbness in your fingers, has a history far more widespread and impactful than any individual computer or computing innovator. No single computer changed the world, but computer pain has changed us all.

The Bullshit-Job Boom (The New Yorker / Nathan Heller)

Heller calls out out the cult of corporate culture and the growth of ‘useless jobs that no one wants to talk about’.

“Taskmasters,” divided into two subtypes: unnecessary superiors, who manage people who don’t need management, and bullshit generators, whose job is to create and assign more bullshit for others.

Is the Opposite of Your Choice Stupid on its Face? (Roger Martin)

Martin shares his take on strategy; specifically that it’s about making choices. His quote speaks for itself:

We have all seen countless strategic plans asserting that the organization’s strategy is to be ‘customer-centric’ or to be ‘operationally effective’ or to ‘invest in its talent.’ But these don’t meet my test for strategic choices — even though they may actually be the most frequently proffered choices in the world of strategic plans. My test for whether a stated choice is actually a strategic choice is whether or not the opposite of the choice is stupid on its face.

Share this email with a friend to "Make 5 times back in your investment in 3 months.!!!"