There are so many interesting things about this, which I think I covered when it first came into the news, but it's so central and basic that the family owners of Patagonia found it so hard to create a legal way to hand over their own company in the way they wanted. Nick Asbury has a good piece on the Patagonia vs the Paul Newman approach (and on a Newman tangent, I highly recommend the extraordinary HBO docuseries on Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, made by Ethan Hawke).
Any employee-owned stories are of continuing interest to us at ustwo since our own move in this direction.
🚦 🍔 👣 Carbon transparency & food rationing?!
As we see individual restaurants move towards carbon transparency, how long before we see carbon footprint labelling on every packaged product? - and more widely, how long before we see carbon footprint labelling on every packaged product?
In an odd (and paywalled) piece, The Telegraph wrote about why being hungry can be good for you, which had a whiff to me of readying readers for a wartime-style cost-of-living apocalypse?!
🤫 ⌨️ 👼 The words & ideology of work
No thanks!, was my response to religion expert Carolyn Chen’s examination of the role spirituality plays in productivity in Silicon Valley: When work becomes your religion, nothing else matters.
‘Quiet quitting’ has been an interesting phrase to track as it entered pretty mainstream lexicon in a very short time, coming up in conversation and Twitter jokes on a daily basis now. The memes and the backlash take some of the sting from the original idea, which struck me as pernicious in the way that ‘cancel culture’ can be - a rightwing-serving notion that riles everyone else up, but is… catchy. Underneath the thought, the links with productivity obsession, and labour crises and inequities post-Covid are clear.
🎧 🕳 🚄 Sound & vision
This is fun: you can now play your own Scotrail tannoy announcements on the platform while you wait for a train that might not arrive due to, well, everything happening these days. And Interrail has created ‘unique SoundTracks for every single train traveller’.
And, if it was missing from your life, NASA picked up actual sound from the gases of a black hole! (About as terrifying as you might imagine?)
🔘 📲 🚗 When buttons beat touchscreens
Buttons beat touchscreens in cars, and now there’s data to prove it - Swedish publication Vi Bilägare quantified the problem with new tests.
“BMW's rotary iDrive controller falls naturally to hand, and there are permanent controls arrayed around it under a sliver of wood that both looks and feels interesting. It's an early implementation of what the company calls shy tech, and it's a design trend I am very much looking forward to seeing evolve in the future.”
🙂 😊 Ravers
This year at Russell’s Interesting conference, Helen Fuchs and I spoke about Why we need ravers today. The talk wasn’t videoed so if you weren’t there, the key thing to do is imagine a really good, inspiring and ravey talk, thx.
It was a great day: the collective spirit, some radical protest and temporary autonomous zones feel like exactly what this moment requires.
