#49: Tech isn't changing how we live

💎 Word gems

Same Old (Real Life Mag / Sun-Ha Hong)

This is a fantastic essay arguing that for all the new technology we talk about, the fundamental societal issues, like healthcare, cost of living, etc., remain. And for all the hype of metaverses, that vision is similarly an unimaginative copy of real life.

[W]hat The Jetsons really has in common with today’s technofutures is an unchanging, uncritical view of society itself. For decades, popular imaginings of the future have promised difference, but delivered more of the same: not only by recycling technical functions (the self-driving car, the robot housemaid) but, more perniciously, their underlying social relations. These technofutures regurgitate essentially the same office or kitchen as in decades past, and the same kinds of users and workers to inhabit them.

Is Old Music Killing New Music? (The Atlantic / Ted Gioia)

I’ve always thought of the music industry as changing faster than other entertainment ones. Music streaming came before video streaming, the pace of new formats (remember CDs and mp3 players?), and now TikTok changed how we consume music. So, it’s fascinating to read how unlike just about every other industry, the creation of actual music is going in the opposite direction.

In fact, nothing is less interesting to music executives than a completely radical new kind of music. Who can blame them for feeling this way? The radio stations will play only songs that fit the dominant formulas, which haven’t changed much in decades. The algorithms curating so much of our new music are even worse. Music algorithms are designed to be feedback loops, ensuring that the promoted new songs are virtually identical to your favorite old songs. Anything that genuinely breaks the mold is excluded from consideration almost as a rule. That’s actually how the current system has been designed to work.

The inside story of iBeer, the underdog beer app that made millions (MEL Magazine / Quinn Myers)

Remember iBeer? As well as being a fun nostalgia trip the article points to what made it so successful - it was a fun and accessible way of demoing new tech. The Nintendo Wii similarly had Wii Sports. What’s the equivalent for web3?

Sheraton then programmed the looped videos and image sequence to interact with the iPhone’s accelerometer. “The accelerometer is constantly measuring the phone’s angle versus the horizon, so by tethering the line between the liquid and the foam to the horizon, you can move your phone in any direction and it looks like it’s filled with liquid,” he tells me. “From there, the rest is just a series of ‘if statements,’ so ‘if the tilt of the phone goes beyond X,’ then the program should switch to different loops of foam and liquid that make it look like the phone is emptying.”

💩 Cool shit

Cheezam - Like Shazam, but for cheese. And image recognition, not sound.

Weird Old Book Finder - It’s a bit like Google Books; search in old, obscure books.

Findxkcd - Another search engine, this time for xkcd, because there’s always a relevant xkcd.

NFT Scratch Off - I have several disclaimers with this link. I don’t like gambling, I’m not sure this is real, and yes I do buy scratchies occasionally. All that said, this feels like a somewhat novel way of using NFTs.

Hey, look at us. - This site tells you how many people are also there at the same time. That’s it.

Don’t you lecture me with your 30 dollar website - If you need an explainer read this article.

What is the title of this wikiHow article? - It’s as simple as that. Guess the article based on the image.

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