Festive media recommendation from NEXT Conference

Martin Recke, Monique van Dusseldorp and Adam Tinworth

Make the most of the festive period with some great reading and listening recommendations from the NEXT team

Books

Two books from recent NEXT speakers, that are well worth your time in the coming year:

From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech

Payal Arora was one of our speakers at NEXT24, giving us a whole new perspective by showing us emerging tech through the eyes of the global south. As the West is wracked by discord and scepticism, the global South is embracing new tech with a ruthless focus on improving their way of living.

There’s much we can learn from the deeper exploration of these issues in the book. You can get a taste of the topics she explores from our video of the session.

Citizens: Why the key to fixing everything is all of us

Another NEXT24 speaker, Jon Alexander, has a book out, exploring the theme of a truly citizen-focused society, where we participate as active citizens, rather than just as consumers.

You can get a taste of the subject from our liveblog of the session.

Long Reads

Some selections from the internet firehose for your festive reading:

Tim Cook wants Apple to Literally Save Your Life

Despite the headline, much of this interview is actually about Apple’s unusual approach to AI:

There’s so much extraordinary benefit for humanity. Are there some things you have to have guardrails on? Of course. We’re very deeply considerate about things that we do and don’t do. I hope that others are as well. AGI itself is a ways away, at a minimum. We’ll sort out along the way what the guardrails need to be in such an environment.

But he expects health to be his legacy:

It’s clear to me that if you zoom out way into the future, and you look back and ask what Apple’s biggest contribution was, it will be in the health area. That’s what I really believe. When we started pulling that string with the Apple Watch, it was a cascade of events. We started with something simple, like monitoring your heart rate, and then figured out we could pick up heart signals to get to an EKG and an AFib determination. Now we are monitoring sleep apnea. I’ve gotten so many notes over time from people who would have not survived had it not been for the alert on their wrist.

The State of the Culture 2024

Key quotes:

We’re witnessing the birth of a post-entertainment culture. And it won’t help the arts. In fact, it won’t help society at all.

And:

The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity.

We Need To Rewild The Internet

It’s time to wrest back control of our online spaces from the handful of tech companies that dominate our digital interactions:

Rewilding the internet is more than a metaphor. It’s a framework and plan. It gives us fresh eyes for the wicked problem of extraction and control, and new means and allies to fix it. It recognizes that ending internet monopolies isn’t just an intellectual problem. It’s an emotional one. It answers questions like: How do we keep going when the monopolies have more money and power? How do we act collectively when they suborn our community spaces, funding and networks? And how do we communicate to our allies what fixing it will look and feel like?

We explored these ideas ourselves a few weeks ago.

The American Way of Economic War

The fact that so much global business is conducted in dollars gives the US vast economic power — but for non-obvious reasons:

But there is another, lesser-known reason why the United States commands overwhelming economic power. Most of the world’s fiber-optic cables, which carry data and messages around the planet, travel through the United States. And where these cables make U.S. landfall, Washington can and does monitor their traffic—basically making a record of every data packet that allows the National Security Agency to see the data. The United States can therefore easily spy on what almost every business, and every other country, is doing. It can determine when its competitors are threatening its interests and issue meaningful sanctions in response.

Newsletters

Get great insights into your inbox next year.

Spyglass

MG Siegler used to be one of the most prominent voices in tech journalism at TechCrunch, before walking the well-trod path from tech journalism to VC. But he’s now writing a regular blog, with an accompanying newsletter, and his insights, after two decades deep in the tech innovation world, are always worth reading.

Crazy Stupid Tech

A new newsletter from veteran tech journalists Om Malik and Fred Vogelstein. While most tech reporting is obsessed with examining today’s tech and, to a lesser extent, its consequences, Om and Fred are trying to look ahead, to the seemingly mad ideas that might transform the world in a decade.

We approve.

Where’s your Ed at?

This intro from a recent newsletter gives you a perfect idea of what it’s about:

In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More regularly than not, I’ve found that the answer is fairly simple: the tech industry’s incentives no longer align with the user.

Exactly the sort of thing we care about, right?

Podcasts

Great listening for your holiday walks.

The Santiago Boys

The Santiago Boys is a podcast by Evgeny Morozow, telling a story about a time before the internet, when what would come was already in the imagination of the key players — but so was a whole lot more…

Dot Social

This podcast from Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard, explores the emerging Fediverse — the new wave of social media being built on open standards like ActivityPub. If you have no idea what this means, or why you should care, you’ve just found the perfect reason to listen.

More good reads