Zag To The Zig #11 :: Lots of hands-on journalism, data markets, ants and more
Hello, hello! Warm greetings. This week ZTTZ starts with what are normally my final words: one thing I’ll be doing this week. That is writing/editing an article on Blockchain and IoT. My curiosity box is ticked this week, for sure.
As always, feel free to let me know what’s keeping you on your intellectual toes. 🧠🧠
In the ethics corridor
A few pieces of hands-on journalism this week. London has one of the highest densities of CCTV cameras. So this journalist tracked his journey to his office and then exercised his right to get access to his (video) data and get it deleted. Pragmatism vs legal theory!
In a similar approach, a journalist from the NYT spent some time experiencing what it was like to do small, crowdsourced, cheap tasks on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. Small as in: review this commercial. Cheap as in: we’ll pay you 5 dollar cent (!) for it. Still, some people make (sort of) a living out of it.
In the Economy room
Decentralised Finance is becoming more and more popular amongst the blockchain crowd. But how does reality line up with the theory? This former Forex trader is experimenting (as in, quite heavily) with going totally bankless and relying on crypto and decentralised finance. I like these hands-on approaches. 🏋️♀️🏋️
Years ago, I explained blockchain to an entrepreneur and his immediate reaction was: ‘but then governments will just buy it all, to shut it down, no’? While that might be difficult, newer Bitcoin trading opportunities like futures and shorts could allow for governments to do just that.
No way, says bitcoin evangelist Andreas Antonopoulos, in his own inimitable style.
“If we measure the wrong thing, we will do the wrong thing.”
Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz makes the point that we should stop measuring GDP, as it doesn’t reflect the 3 main crisises: a climate crisis, an inequality crisis and a crisis in democracy.Talking about challenging times: this report from the World Economic Forum says that 30-somethings in the UK have lower incomes than those born just a decade before. That hasn't been the case since the 1930s.
In the Tech Room
Poetic Quote of The week: Cars are the browsers of the physical world.
The data economy is under-used and would benefit from decentralisation. This piece from Ocean Protocol CEO Bruce Pon explains why and how in a non-technical way.
(disclaimer: I’m an OCEAN token holder - only a small amount but transparency FTW)When a Professor of Computer Science publishes a report ‘How To Recognise AI Snake Oil’, ZTTZ takes notice, reads and bookmarks.
Paying 0,66$ for sending 20.000 messages? Encrypted? This engineer is one step closer to get that done on blockchain and - surprise surprise - it’s on that old, sluggish bitcoin blockchain.
On the staircase of Innovation
Learning from Ants to get better at organisational structures. Not literally (we are not prepared to give up our individuality), but still some interesting thoughts in here.
One little fact: ant colonies keep a certain amount of ants lazying around. Not because they’re lazy, but because they realise they’ll need a fast back-up unit in case unexpected needs arise. 🚚 /insert your own Ant-Team joke here/ 🚚
Random ZTTZ
Those Nike ads with that sloganesk, motivational language. This creative taught an AI to study year’s worth of that terminology and then spit out its own commercials.