OLDaily

Kraken CEO defends his ‘back to dictatorship’ crackdown
Benjamin Pimentel, Protocol, 2022/07/05

I encourage you to read this interview and especially this document on Kraken culture. This is not because I endorse it - I don't - but because it's a clear expression of a world view that permeates much of tech culture generally. And while I skew away from many of the libertarian leanings (because I think it's not a dog-eat-dog world and there is room for compassion and caring) I still think there are some good points. Like this: "Diversity cannot exist if there is no 1) diversity of thought and 2) tolerance of diverse thoughts." Now you may think this contradicts the idea of a dictatorship. That's exactly the problem with this document. You can't enforce a monoculture and have diversity, But you can't have innovation and growth (let alone a global workforce) without diversity. Enforcement of the monoculture eventually becomes toxic. That's what we see in some societies, and that's what we see in some workplaces.

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2022/07/05

We are gaining " the ability to connect more quickly and cheaply with anyone or anything around the world," writes John Hagel, which leads to conflicting possibilities: "we might anticipate more and more centralization where activities are controlled and monitored by fewer and fewer large, centralized global entities," or, by contrast, "we're going to see more and more efforts to decentralize our activities – distributing or delegating activities, especially planning and decision-making, away from a central location or group." The argument is an age-old one: central authority cannot keep up with the page of change and local contexts. But to be clear: decentralization does not entail isolation from each other. "Connectivity and decentralization will unfold together" and "we need to evolve a profoundly different set of institutions that will embrace the twin gifts of connectivity and decentralization."

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What's next for online education?
Alexandra Mihai, The Educationalist, 2022/07/05

Alexandra Mihai sets up this article as a dichotomy between "the Higher Education community gains a deeper understanding of the value of online education" and "the pandemic experience serves as 'hard' evidence that this is a sub-optimal mode of education." But then we read that (big reveal) "our options for quality education in the future more like an ecosystem and not a series of mutually exclusive paths." Sigh. The real work in this article is done by the definition of 'online education' as "courses and programmes taught fully online, or with a large online component in case of a blended approach." Thus institutionally defined, online education turns out to need institutional acknowledgement, institutional structures, quality assurance, institutional support, and collaboration. Or, read another way, this article says 'online education will be successful (only) if (we) educational institutions make it so.'

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How the Internet Turned Us Into Content Machines
Kyle Chayka, New Yorker, 2022/07/05

I actually view Kyle Chayka's New Yorker article as a parody. While lamenting how advertising (rather than subscriptions) pays for the internet, Chayka points to the conversion of internet users into content producing machine as the failure of the networked self. All this while hopping from one meme to the next in a comic-book movie of an article without any real point except to say "the Instagram egg has yet to fully hatch." I feel that Chayka wants to be a content-producing machine, and that the real problem is the competition from everyone else. Only some people should get a mass audience, not everybody - or so the publisher and magazine writer's logic goes. Via Aaron Davis.

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Characteristics of an Unhealthy Culture
Dave Pollard, How to Save the World, 2022/07/05

As I scan through the list of traits of an unhealthy culture as assembled by Dave Pollard - stress, illness, privilege, absolutism, exceptionalism, etc. - it strikes me that while we could be easily led to attribute these flaws to a particular culture, they also resemble in many respects what Thomas Kuhn would describe as an outgoing paradigm. And it's important to understand, I think, that it's not the culture or the people who are lacking, it's just that what we have believed for so long is no longer appropriate to our new and changing understanding of the world. It might one day be worth enumerating this list - though concepts like 'worth' and 'enumerating' are among those obsolete ideas of the old order (so are things like wealth, popularity, fame, power and influence).

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