Not unlike Callin (see DD191), Podyssey is a social network all about podcasts. Podyssey describes itself as an “online community where podcast lovers discover and discuss their favourite podcasts with each other and creators regardless of what podcast players they use”.

If you’re looking for a smaller, indie alternative to the Amazon-owned Goodreads, StoryGraph may be for you: a book tracker and personalised reading recommendation engine. I love what Nadia Odunayo (who participated in our Worthy Five section back in DD107) has built with her small team! Friends of DD enjoy a 10% discount on the Pro account. Become a Friend to access specials like this.

Another attempt at making managing one’s calendar in a team setting easier: with Nook you can view your team members’ schedule, share your availability, easily book time with others, and manage all your calendars (private, work, shared) in one place.

A great list of principles more tech companies should embrace – with a print-ready poster freely available. “The Feminist Tech principles are a set of guidelines for tech policy-making and technology creation. They are intended as responsive work-in-progress that reflect the evolving nature of our digital world... [to] advocate for digital rights and the rights of marginalized groups.”

Ways of Being →

In search for a planetary intelligence

Artist, technologist, and philosopher James Bridle (whom we interviewed for Offscreen 21) with a fascinating new book that interrogates our current understanding of intelligence – plant, animal, human, artificial – and what it means for human’s place in the cosmos. “The animals, plants, and natural systems that surround us are slowly revealing their complexity, agency, and knowledge, just as the technologies we’ve built to sustain ourselves are threatening to cause their extinction, and ours. What can we learn from them, and how can we change ourselves, our technologies, our societies, and our politics, to live better and more equitably with one another and the non-human world?”

Normal Sucks →

Against societally enforced normalcy

Jonathan Mooney didn’t learn to read until he was twelve years old. He was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD when he realised that he is outside of what society deems ‘normal’. In this book, he explores “the toll that ‘being normal’ takes on kids and adults when they are trapped in an environment that labels them, shames them and tells them, even in the subtle ways, that they are the problem”.

Oh wow, this is just wonderful. It’s one of several essays in the collection Letters to a Young Technologist in which Jasmine Wang questions the instrumentialisation of our lives through technology and explores the ethical responsibilites technologists ought to recognise. It’s equally thought-provoking and useful. “Trying on different moral systems is a useful step in achieving post-conventional morality. For example, what if we applied deontology to technologist work? Kant’s first formulation of the categorical imperative says that you should only act in a certain way if it is possible and desirable for everyone in the world to act in that way. ... I propose, then, a revision of Kant’s imperative for technologists: do not work on something if you yourself do not want to live in the world where you are massively successful. With this reframe, we turn the question of unicorn status on its head, and interrogate the ends instead of the means.” I look forward to reading the other essays in the collection.

We all have at least one worrier in our life – perhaps we even are one: the kind of person that needs something to worry about or else life seems unbalanced. I certainly have a few of those in my family and therefore have inherited similar tendencies. It’s nice to have the source of this behaviour acknowledged: “Our feeling of dread is a symptom of an ancient sorrow that hasn’t found its target in the here and now; and our ongoing quest and alarm is a sign that we keep not finding anything in the outer world that answers to the horror of the inner one.”

On the internet, the trend towards anti-intellectualism is often expressed as ‘DYOR’ – which stands for ‘Do Your Own Research’ – and is used by anti-vaxxers and crypto investors alike to signal not just a rejection of authority but often trust in another kind. “DYOR is an attitude, if not quite a practice, that has been adopted by some athletes, musicians, pundits and even politicians to build a sort of outsider credibility. ‘Do your own research’ is an idea central to Joe Rogan’s interview podcast, the most listened to program on Spotify, where external claims of expertise are synonymous with admissions of malice. In its current usage, DYOR is often an appeal to join in, rendered in the language of opting out.” (Possible soft paywall)