After activating Unplug Alarm on your Mac, as soon as someone unplugs your laptop from the charger or closes the lid, it sounds a loud alarm, even when muted, and sends a push notification to your mobile. It’s not exactly preventing theft, but it offers peace of mind whenever you briefly need to step away from your computer in a public space.

I rely heavily on Raindrop to organise the many links that eventually make it into DD. Guardo is a new-ish alternative that offers similarly powerful bookmark management with features like adding notes and tags to bookmarks, organising them into (nested) collections and sharing collections publicly.

I’ve been following the work of Yancey Strickler, the co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter, for while now. I love his dedication to Bentoism, a movement he founded. What is Bentoism? “Bentoism (an acronym for BEyond Near Term Orientation) is a wider lens for what’s valuable and in our self-interest. This includes what I as an individual want and need right now (Now Me). But it also makes space for the considerations of our future selves (Future Me), the people we rely on and who rely on us (Now Us), and the next generation (Future Us).”

“The internet is not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.” How easy it is to forget that the internet is powered by a network of long, thick submarine cables that link continents and islands like a hidden plumbing system. What a fascinating look at how it all connects.

The Dawn of Everything →

A new understanding of human history

Released in early November, this new book by David Graeber (author of Bullshit Jobs) and archaeologist David Wengrow upends some major assumptions about the linear development of homo sapiens. The book “fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action”.

Phosphorescence →

New perspectives through awe and wonder

A reader recommendation: a book that makes us gain a new perspective on life by helping us grasp the mysterious beauty of the universe. “A beautiful, intimate and inspiring investigation into how we can find and nurture within ourselves that essential quality of internal happiness – the ‘light within’ that Julia Baird calls ‘phosphorescence’ – which will sustain us even through the darkest times.”

What does it take to rein in Facebook’s destructive power? Treating it like a nation state, or rather a hostile foreign power, may be the way. “Perhaps Americans have become so cynical that they have given up on defending their freedom from surveillance, manipulation, and exploitation. But if Russia or China were taking the exact same actions to undermine democracy, Americans would surely feel differently. Seeing Facebook as a hostile foreign power could force people to acknowledge what they’re participating in, and what they’re giving up, when they log in. In the end it doesn’t really matter what Facebook is; it matters what Facebook is doing.” (Possible soft paywall)

The rise of online shopping also led to a massive increase in returns. What happens to returned items is a grey area that many companies simply don’t want to talk about because it may affect ‘consumer confidence’. “Retailers of all kinds have always had to deal with returns, but processing this much miscellaneous, maybe-used, maybe-useless stuff is an invention of the past 15 years of American consumerism. In a race to acquire new customers and retain them at any cost, retailers have taught shoppers to behave in ways that are bad for virtually all involved.” (Possible soft paywall)

Every minute of this short graduation address by Hannah Gadsby (of Nanette fame) is worth it! “For now, ask yourself, ‘Who do you want to be?’ Don’t ask yourself what you want to achieve. Honestly, the world already decides so much of that for you. Only privileged few get to set goals and achieve them. It seems otherwise, but that’s only because successful people are the only ones who get to speak. And they prefer to think they did it on their own.”