Kickoff For April 12, 2021
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:
Technology
Don’t Hate the Phone Call, Hate the Phone, wherein we learn that making phone calls with a smartphone can be a chore because of the design of the phone and the underlying infrastructure than the intrusiveness of the call itself.
The tyranny of passwords – is it time for a rethink?, wherein Sirin Kale looks at the problems with passwords and some possible solutions to those problems.
The House That Bitcoin Built, wherein we learn about a so-called hacker haven in Buenos Aires and about the impact that what came out of it had on the cryptocurrency world.
Ideas
We live in a wake-centric world, losing touch with our dreams, wherein Rubin Naiman looks at the why and how of REM dreaming and the reasons it’s important to our physical and mental well being, and at why we’re becoming as dream deprived as we are sleep deprived.
How ‘15-minute cities’ will change the way we socialise, wherein we learn how COVID-19 lockdowns made people in Paris better appreciate their neighbourhoods and communities, and how that could be a template for interacting with cities in the future.
The Beijing Heidegger Reading Group, wherein Coby Goldberg discusses his first experience and struggles with the works of the German philosopher while an exchange student at Tsinghua University.
Online Life
Facebook is a Doomsday Machine, wherein Adrienne LaFrance argues that the social network is more than that, it’s more than a media company, that it can harm society just by existing.
Tim Berners-Lee’s plan to save the internet: give us back control of our data, wherein we learn about the efforts of the World Wide Web’s creator to shift control of data and how it’s used online back into our hands.
Digital Immortality, wherein Houman Barekat looks at the small but growing industries devoted to keeping our digital memories alive after we pass on.
And that’s it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.