Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
Happy Labor Day to everyone who celebrates the organized labor movement today in the US. This is my monthly roundup of the books, articles, and streaming media I found interesting. Here's my list for August, 2022. A note: it’s taken me a while to hit publish on
It’s late in the evening and we’re in the hospital while our son slowly makes his way to birth. I’m a sea of emotions, but one of the biggest is the feeling of uselessness: just as I couldn’t carry the baby, I can’t help take
“American Indian and Alaskan Native people have experienced a particularly precipitous drop in life expectancy since 2019, going from 71.8 to 65.2 years. This kind of loss is similar to the plunge seen for all Americans after the Spanish Flu.” #Health [Link]
“Multiple Republican midterm candidates have removed from their campaign sites references to particularly strict anti-abortion stances, a shift from primary campaigning to the approaching general election and an indication of growing concern in the Republican Party over how to handle abortion policy post-Roe v. Wade.” # [Link]
“I like to think of myself as an independent contractor who threw out his nine-to-five job for about five to nine different jobs over the course of a year, a contractor with significantly less of the legal protections established in the past hundred years or so by Congress and the
“It is simply impossible for students to work their way through college in the way previous generations could. And at the same time, states have reduced funding to their public colleges that historically allowed schools to charge low tuition prices.” #Democracy [Link]
My opinions on web business models have changed over time. I agree that advertising was one of the web’s original sins, although at this point in its cultural life I’m not sure I’m prepared to say that it was the only original sin. At the same time,
“Participants trusted articles that used person-centered terms for their group more than articles that used stigmatizing terms.” Understandably. #Media [Link]
Open, collaborative protocols > centralized services. Impact on people > impact on capital. Impact on communities > impact on individuals. Human rights > capital rights. Distributed equity > limited ownership. Distributing equity > adding value to exclusionary systems. Sustainability > get-rich-quick. Building value > building wealth. Serving underlying human needs
“I’ve never felt so conflicted using an emerging technology as DALL-E 2, which feels like borderline magic in what it’s capable of conjuring, but raises so many ethical questions, it’s hard to keep track of them all.” #Technology [Link]
“More than half of all reported trading volume is likely to be fake or non-economic. Forbes estimates the global daily bitcoin volume for the industry was $128 billion on June 14. That is 51% less than the $262 billion one would get by taking the sum of self-reported volume from
What’s Odeo is new again. #Technology [Link]