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A close friend of mine who worked at one of Australia’s biggest tech companies has recently quit the tech world and is opening a local woodworking shop. His journey is less unusual than it might seem. He is part of a wave of ex-techies who are searching for meaning beyond the screen, yearning for a more tangible challenge.
Working in technology means one thing above all else: chasing scale. There is a reason why much of the tech world is obsessed with growth. Free from physical constraints, digital systems can scale to an incomprehensible size. The appeal of conquering the engineering, design and business challenges of mega-scale is strong, the rewards immense. But ultimately, when our work consists mostly of reconfiguring abstract systems and optimising data flows, we thirst for impact that feels more real and relatable.
Anu Atluru puts it perfectly in this short essay: “I have a theory that chasing things that scale makes you need therapy, and the therapy is pursuing things that can’t scale. I once wrote that every entrepreneur’s dream is to succeed at building an impossibly hard business and then finally open a local coffee shop to be happy.”
Atluru believes that there is something inherently unnatural about operating at the scale of large systems, which ultimately leads us back to human-scale endeavours. “Chasing scale strips you of some humanity. It puts your head too high up in the clouds. It removes you from what happens in the real world with real people. Pursuing something that can’t scale does the exact opposite: it grounds you. It’s a comforting and healing next act.”
I’m reminded of a ten-year-old Offscreen essay in which Michael Honey called for keeping things at human scale:
“How many things which are good when small get better by becoming bigger? That local restaurant you love can’t scale to millions of users. Do you really want your favourite indie band to aspire to stadium-level fame? People get cheaper books, and an independent bookseller closes its doors to make way for a giant warehouse full of underpaid people working ten-hour shifts. You order your groceries online, but you’ll never bump into your neighbours at the local shop. Is this progress?”
– Kai
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Elisava, Barcelona School of Design and Engineering, offers 15 scholarships covering 50 percent of the total cost of the master’s programme of your choice. You can select from over 55 master’s programmes in areas such as graphic design, communication, product design, technology, space design, and executive education, including the Master in Design for Responsible AI.
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Apps & Sites
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At first sight, Tana looks a lot like Notion, but it offers some interesting and powerful differences. I like the idea of a ‘Today’ page where you see due tasks but can also quickly dump notes and ideas. So-called ‘supertags’ make categorising and linking content and workflows quick and easy. The native AI helper assists with filling missing info or creating text outlines, for example. Friends of DD can jump the waitlist and get access to unreleased new features.
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Social network for music lovers
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Musicboard is a fresh take on what Last.fm used to be. Synced with Spotify (other platforms to come), users can rate and review songs and albums and share their opinions with followers. Think Letterboxd, but for music.
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If you’re the journalling type, Penzu offers a free tier to log unlimited entries in your diary or reflective journal. Mobile apps are available and each journal can be customised. Pro tiers offer additional features, such as added security and even more customisation. Friends of DD enjoy a 15% discount on yearly subscriptions.
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Social network for LEGO fans
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Another niche social platform (free on Android and iOS): on Brickd, fans of LEGO can create collections (what they have and what they want), share their current builds, join challenges and earn awards for things like total piece count or building sets from specific categories.
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Favourite Books: Mike a.k.a. Books on GIF
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Six book recommendations by book reviewer, Mike a.k.a. Books on GIF
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by Katya Apekina
Sisters Edith and Mae take divergent paths to connect with their perilous parents in a darkly humorous yet strangely beautiful novel. It’s a gem as great as its title.
by Eva Baltasar
A cook on a Chilean ship abandons her seafaring ways to follow her girlfriend to Iceland. The women’s relationship turns tedious and predictable until parenthood becomes a threatening possibility. This sharp, punchy and fascinating book explores the interplay of love and power. Amazing cover art, too.
by Hernan Diaz
Håkan leaves Sweden to join his brother in New York, but the ship lands in California instead. It’s the Gold Rush, and as Håkan heads east, he encounters wagon trains of settlers, displaced indigenous people and bandits. His journey is dangerous yet transformative, making for a riveting read.
by Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston recounts the biblical story of Moses with the familiar plot points, but also incorporates folklore from Africa, Haiti and elsewhere. It’s a powerful story about the dangers and problems that befall leaders and people on the long march to liberation.
by Iris Murdoch
Famed thespian Charles Arrowby retires from London to the English coast seeking peace and quiet, but finds drama instead. He interprets a chance reunion with his teenage crush as the work of fate, setting him on a chaotic and tragic course. A brilliant and surprising book I couldn’t put down.
by John Elizabeth Stintzi
A volcano emerges in New York City and is the least strange thing in this ambitious, fascinating and surreal book. Also: a Mexican boy time travels to meet the Aztecs, a trans man has two selves who talk on the phone, and a woman falls asleep and wakes up in other peoples’ bodies. Trust me, it all works.
(Did you know? Friends of DD can respond to and engage with guest contributors like Mike a.k.a. Books on GIF in one click.)
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Books & Accessories
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Making sense of technology in a complex world
Author Georgina Voss unpacks the hidden complexities in the many interconnected systems that dominate contemporary life. “In a series of scenarios, Georgina Voss shows us how to parse our complex world, looking at it through five themes – scale, legacy, matter, deviance, and breakage – via contemporary industrial settings of ports, air traffic control, architecture and construction, payment systems in adult entertainment, and car crash testing.”
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How nature, science, and spirituality connect
A personal memoir about reconnecting and deepening our relationship with nature in new ways, reminding us that hope lies at the crossroads of science, nature, and spirit. Eco-philosopher Lyanda Lynn Haupt invites us “to live with the earth in both simple and profound ways – from walking barefoot in the woods and reimagining our relationship with animals and trees, to examining the very language we use to describe and think about nature. She invokes rootedness as a way of being in concert with the wilderness – and wildness – that sustains humans and all of life.”
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Overheard on Twitter
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My job has this cool thing, where if you do your job very well you get to do other peoples jobs too.
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Food for Thought
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I’m sure you too have a friend who’s worked at a large tech company in the past and is now gravitating towards non-scalable activities, be it woodworking or baking sourdough. Anu Atluru has come up with a theory that rings so very true: “Society tends to paint a picture that the final act of every big dreamer’s journey is in scaling up to unimaginable heights, but I think it’s the opposite – it’s actually in scaling back down after trying to reach the proverbial top. Make time to pursue things that can’t scale. I’d bet it does you as much good as ‘real’ therapy ever could.”
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A slightly too long and potentially demoralising, yet fascinating read about how our minds are both victims of climate impacts and barriers to adequate climate action, highlighting the complex relationship between mental health and environmental issues. “Climate change-related uncertainty creates anxiety, which we commonly deal with through avoidance that only further increases anxiety and unsustainable coping mechanisms. This anxiety creates a feedback loop that becomes self-reinforcing. In addition, stress and fight-flight-freeze responses to perceived threats reduce empathy and compassion and foster in-group bias and polarization, impeding social cohesion and the collective action needed to address climate change, while fostering unsustainable coping and habits that spur it.”
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‘Rest of World equipped gig riders across South Asia with pollution monitors. The readings were off the charts.’ A well researched and well presented in-depth piece on the toxic air gig workers in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh are exposed to every day. You learn a lot of about the importance of air quality and the inherent inequity in exposure to air pollution. “Gig platforms operating in these cities are aware of the pollution their workers face. In a November social post, Indian food delivery giant Zomato even joked about the conditions, telling customers that their chat support ‘can’t help if your chicken gets delivered as smoked chicken.’”
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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Absolutely loving these acrylic paintings by Australian artist Dale Cox showing “a finite, isolated ‘tract’ of landscape in peril, summarizing and accentuating the extant pressures we have applied to our environment and highlighting the environmental concept of the ‘tipping point’.”
(via)
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Nicholas Hernandez makes giant textured art – 3D relief paintings inspired by organic movements and bold colours.
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This suburban home in Perth is one of very few in Australia that could be considered ‘true net zero’. Almost all materials were chosen for their sustainable qualities, aiming for maximum reduction of the building’s long term carbon footprint. There are various definitions for ‘true net zero’; one of them: carbon emissions from embodied and operational energy will amount to net zero over the building’s project lifespan.
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Designer and Offscreen alumnus Jason Santa Maria has created (his first?) font and it’s a chonky boi: “Chonk is a heavy display sans that likes to take up space. It’s best used in moderation, when you want to be LOUD.”
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Notable Numbers
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A 2020 report found that the dust generated by vehicle tyres was the biggest single source of microplastics found in ocean waters, contributing 78% of the total mass.
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Chinese online megastore Temu was Meta’s top advertiser in 2023, reportedly spending $2 billion on advertisements at Meta. Temu also ranked among Google’s top five advertisers.
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The 2022 US Agricultural Census showed a decline in farm operations of every size category from the smallest to the largest. The number of US farms fell below 2 million for the first time, down to 1.9 million farms, showing a loss nearly 142,000 farms and 20.1 million agricultural acres from 2017 to 2022.
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Classifieds
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The Week in a GIF
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Reply with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
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