Kickoff For October 11, 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
Data Relations, wherein Salomé Viljoen explains the negatives (for us, anyway) of the datafication of everything, and suggests ways to redress the balance.
How the IBM PC Won, Then Lost, the Personal Computer Market, wherein we learn how Big Blue took the nascent personal computer market by storm in the 1980s, and about the missteps that quickly sent all of that on a slide downhill.
This is how democracy dies, wherein Jamie Bartlett opines that the apocalypse will come at the weak hands of bureaucrats who refuse to question the algorithms that increasingly control everything in our lives.
Arts and Literature
The Man Who Made Black Panther Cool, wherein we learn about writer Christopher Priest, how be broke into the comics industry, bounced in and out of that industry over the decades, left an impression and is still unknown to many readers.
Remembering Harry O, The Seventies’ Second Best, Mostly Forgotten Private Eye Series, wherein we (re)learn about the dark but surprisingly appealing detective series starring David Janssen that ran for just two season in the early 70s.
The Rise of the Crypto Writer? On What Literary NFTs Might Mean for the Book World, wherein Walker Caplan tries to mak sense of the emerging space of writers trying to sell their works as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Odds and Ends
Penniless: why a Victoria man has gone two decades without money, wherein we learn how David Arthur Johnston came to renounce money and has survived since the early 2000s without it, and how his efforts help changed laws around homelessness in Victoria, BC.
The Nonmachinables, wherein we learn about the Bureau of Hards, the department of the USPS that deals with letters and parcels with addresses and other inforamtion on them that not even sophisticated scanning and recognition technology can decipher.
In defense of Scrabble, wherein Neda Marie Valcheva explains how the classic board game is an integral part of the fabric of her family.
And that’s it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.