Kickoff for August 15, 2022
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Monday Kickoff, a collection of what I’ve found interesting, informative, and insightful on the web over the last seven days.
Let’s get this Monday started with these links:
The Dark Side of Technology
Roving Eyes, wherein Tracy Valcourt surveys the growing landscape of vehicle-mounted citizen surveillance tools and how those tools feed off of, and into, a lot of unjustified paranoia.
Was You’ve Got Mail Trying to Warn Us About the Internet? (Or Telling Us to Give Up?), wherein Olivia Rutigliano examines the popular 90s rom-com and its messages (intentional or not) about big tech and the threat online businesses pose to their bricks-and-mortar counterparts.
Digital Technology Demands A New Political Philosophy, wherein Jamie Susskind ponders the threat that Big Tech can pose to democracy and how it can be regulated.
Business and Economics
Who owns Einstein? The battle for the world’s most famous face, wherein we learn about the publicity rights to images of the legendary physicist, and how by leveraging (and enforcing) those rights the holder has raked in millions.
Something We Can All Agree On? Corporate Buzzwords Are the Worst, where we reach into the Gobbledygook on Olympus files and dig up some more egregious examples of jargon and buzzwords used in the corporate world.
The Rise and Fall of Wall Street’s Most Controversial Investor, wherein we learn how maverick fund manager Cathie Wood’s controversial, and very risky, market bets finally caught up with her.
Odds and Ends
The accidental invention of the Illuminati conspiracy, wherein we learn about the conjecture that swirls around a long-dead Bavarian secret society, and about conspiracy theories in general.
‘Pickleball Is the Wild, Wild West’: Inside the Fight Over the Fastest-Growing Sport in America, wherein we get a look into the politics, infighting, backbiting, and rivalries around an unlikely sport whose popularity was soared in recent years.
Gilbert Highet, the First Celebrity Classicist, wherein we learn how a scholar, toiling in an often-maligned field, became a household name in the pre-internet era, and how he paved the way for Classicists to enjoy greater visibility than he did.
And that’s it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.