Kickoff For June 14, 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:
Online Life
Why I Deleted my Social Media Accounts, wherein Daniel Milnor explains why he dumped most of his social media accounts and the effect that it had on him.
A Brief History of the Chinese Internet, wherein Graham Webster walks us through the development and growth of the internet in China, and how the country’s government gained so much control over it.
The small web is beautiful, wherein Ben Hoyt explains why creating smaller websites offers you more freedom, more flexibility, and can be better for visitors and the environment.
Work
Calculating Instruments, wherein Joshua Habgood-Coote muses about crowdsourcing and its long history, and how it has contributed to work’s devaluation and destabilization.
Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, wherein James Suzman outlines some of the myths and misconceptions around work, and reminds us of the folly of clinging to ideas about the necessity of work forged at the anvil of scarcity when we live in an era of unprecedented abundance.
Technology has turned back the clock on productivity, wherein we learn that modern technology isn’t making workers more productive but instead is tempting highly skilled, highly paid people to noodle around making bad slides.
Science
This Tenet Shows Time Travel May Be Possible, wherein we learn about a theory that posits time travel could become a reality but that it won’t be easy.
The Quest to Tell Science from Pseudoscience, wherein Michael D. Gordin explains that philosopher Karl Popper’s concept of falsifiability isn’t enough to counter pseudoscience.
How Radio Astronomy Reveals the Universe, wherein we get a glimpse of the history of the science and learn why radio telescopes are an invaluable tool of astronomy.
And that’s it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.