Wakelet isn’t just a place to save your articles, videos, blogs, tweets, songs, etc. You can also share those collections in customisable layouts or collaborate with others to build a shared collection.

On offspring of popular design app Figma, FigJam is a snappy whiteboarding software that makes collaborating on ideas with others online easy and fun. I love the many interactive features, such as quick expression emojis, cursor chats and ‘stamps of approval’.

The marvel that is Google Earth has just been updated with a timelapse feature that allows you to observe planetary changes over decades – fascinating and unnerving in equal measures.

Take a drive through different cities around the world while listening to their local radio stations. (Makes we wonder if radio as a medium would change if we made cities less car-dependent.)

Essentialism →

Doing the right things, better

I’m naturally wary of dogmatic minimalist approaches or productivity worshipping. The idea behind Essentialism sounds appealing though: “The Way of the Essentialist isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s not about getting less done. It’s about getting only the right things done. It’s about challenging the core assumption of ‘we can have it all’ and ‘I have to do everything’ and replacing it with the pursuit of ‘the right thing, in the right way, at the right time’. It’s about regaining control of our own choices about where to spend our time and energies instead of giving others implicit permission to choose for us.”

Your Computer Is on Fire  →

The end of techno-utopianism

A new collection of essays that “interrogate how our human and computational infrastructures overlap, showing why technologies that centralise power tend to weaken democracy”. This book dives into a lot of the same issues we’re trying to highlight in Offscreen, especially in the upcoming issue 24. “After decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking up to the large-scale consequences of Silicon Valley–led technophilia.”

Some fascinating research results and insights into success as an addiction and why chasing it won’t make us any happier. “Unfortunately, success is Sisyphean (to mix my Greek myths). The goal can’t be satisfied; most people never feel ‘successful enough’. The high only lasts a day or two, and then it’s on to the next goal. Psychologists call this the hedonic treadmill, in which satisfaction wears off almost immediately and we must run on to the next reward to avoid the feeling of falling behind. This is why so many studies show that successful people are almost invariably jealous of people who are more successful.”

This is something I regularly experience in my work: anything worthwhile usually involves a huge amount of mundane, tedious ‘grind’ work that’s not part of the ‘success stories’ we keep telling each other. “I often have people newer to the tech industry ask me for secrets to success. There aren’t many, really, but this secret – being willing to do something so terrifically tedious that it appears to be magic – works in tech too.”

Most of us hate visiting recipe websites – even some of the authors who publish them. It’s an interesting sub-section of online publishing that is stuck in the world of SEO-dependent algorithmic advertising. “The classic industry in-joke – that a food blogger could confess to murder and not get caught because nobody reads the posts – feels a little more true every day. But you know who cares about the life story? Devoted readers, certainly; every food blog has followers who actually do care about the writer’s life and children and favorite musicals. But that’s not really why the life stories are there. They’re there because SEO, Pinterest and advertisers all demand it. They’re a business decision, plain and simple, just like practically everything else on a given food blog.”

We talk so much about electric cars. I get it, it’s a big deal and a massive undertaking. But a net-zero future of cities heavily relies on two wheels, and that means we need to talk more about rethinking our urban infrastructure, not just about replacing one type of car with another. “Tackling the climate and air pollution crises requires curbing all motorised transport, particularly private cars, as quickly as possible. Focusing solely on electric vehicles is slowing down the race to zero emissions.”