onfocus

This is a nice collection of in-the-zone music. No mention of the Flow State newsletter?! Travesty! Flow State sends links to music like this to your inbox everyday.

Because there isn't much happening there? And maybe that's good?!

"Scaling job two – looking good at work – up to a social network creates a new sort of venue: a non–office office, with thousands of bosses, none of them yours, all of them potentially watching."

Interesting to consider the different social pressures at work on LinkedIn that aren't explicitly part of the service. (Sorry about the NYT paywall link—I'm trying to stop linking there.)

The spectacle is merciless but can the media change that fact with selective attention? I like Ezra Klein's thought here:

"Perhaps offense and bigotry should be understood as Trump’s baseline — newsworthy, just as the central projects of other leaders are newsworthy, but not worthy of blanket coverage upon every utterance."

I also think this is partly what Beto O'Rourke was challenging when he lost his cool with the media: ‘What the F*ck?’ Is Right. The media feigning suprise at every new racist comment has worn thin.

Sometimes you need to read a good rant about medieval history and this is one of those.

"In fact, medieval people loved a bath and can in many ways be considered a bathing culture, much in the way that say, Japan is now. Medieval people also very much valued being clean generally in an almost religious way."

Someone should tell Dennis.

I really enjoyed this essay about Conceptual Labor. Sometimes the work we need to do is understanding the work we need to do. It reminded me of a favorite saying of mine by Victor Frankl that if you have a why you can get through almost any how. (Paraphrased, it's from Man's Search for Meaning which I should reread.) I think I saw this link on Mastodon, but not finding links again is my theme today.

Most books published before 1964 are in the public domain even though copyright has been extended to cover things by default after 1923. This article explains things well. Here's another take with more background: Where to Download the Millions of Free eBooks that Secretly Entered the Public Domain.

Almost completely unrelated, I enjoyed Top 5 bits of advice for first-time readers of Moby-Dick which I found via Austin Kleon but now can't find a direct link to that mention. Moby Dick is not in copyright so it's easy to track down. har har.

I really enjoyed this conversation between Jeff Veen and Mike Monteiro discussing Ruined by Design. There's nothing like hearing from two Internet Olds™ who watched the Web appear and had their idealism about it crushed in many ways. (And I say that affectionately as an Internet Old who has had crushed idealism.) They also discussed Chris Wetherell's remorse about automating retweets. There has been a lot of regret floating around lately. Tim Carmody called it The Builder's Remorse:

"This is the builder’s remorse. Not that you invented a thing, not that the consequences were unforeseen. It’s that you gave the thing to a power structure where things were overwhelmingly likely to end in ruin."

Web development as punk rock was a lot of fun for certain segments of the population. Now it's time to nurse our hangovers, clean up the garbage, and turn it into a profession. Mike Monteiro says it much better than that though which is why you should get his book if you haven't yet.

This is a great idea: move grunt work from a checklist to an automation environment because you'll be more likely to automate any pieces as you can.

It’s heartening to hear these Ogilvy employees push back against their company’s work for CBP. Wayfair employees walked out last month to protest border contracts. And today Microsoft announced it would temporarily suspend its PAC giving because of internal pressure. I’m not sure if these are anomalies that businesses will adapt to or a more lasting movement that will get companies to act on their stated values.

Matt Levine has a good summary of the fine Facebook negotiated over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But his analysis of why legislation doesn’t happen in the wake of scandals feels right on to me:

"...Americans are biased toward thinking of bad things as being already illegal, always illegal, illegal by definition and by nature and in themselves. If the thing that Facebook did was so bad, then it must have been illegal, so there is no need for a new law against it."

Our laws are not equipped for our current media age and we’re biased against thinking laws could be out of date.