Zag To The Zig #28 :: Censorship meets Minecraft, sharing is earning & lots of collaboration this week.
Hello y’all. Hope you’re keeping well. In which phase or zone of acceptance are you these days? I’m quite liking the slower tempo, myself. Positivism FTW!
I thought I’d start this week’s issue again on a less serious note.
Random ZTTZ
Seriously, where are you on the Gartner Hype Cycle? I’ve done my taxes. But I did skip the tarot card reading.
This trend data app correlated some of our search trends to Covid-19. On the up: Online Church, Cigarette Delivery and Bidet. No hand moisturiser?
Speaking about bidets. The ever-surprising Quartz Daily dedicated an issue to the noble art of look-mum-no-hands. Did you know that the golden angle is 43 degrees? But yes, sales up by like 1000%. Positivism FTW.
In the Sick Room
What will be our post-Corona future? This tech writer interviewed her Chinese cousin, who’s a teacher in Beijing, where they're slowly getting used to more relaxed measures over there. Moving your work culture from 996 to 007? I hope not.
Now look at that mask. It didn’t exist a few weeks ago. This is a nice story of how this device, based on a snorkelling mask, saw the light of day, requiring a few key components.
Open knowledge sharing? Check. This started as an idea by an Italian doctor and was made possible by the fact that the retailer Decathlon shared the CAD-design for their snorkelling mask.
Creative design? Check. The design company drew a component to upgrade the standard snorkelling mask into a ventilation mask.
Distributed tech? Check. They published the technical designs (patented but free), so people can use 3D-printers around the world to produce the extra component.
I enjoyed this piece by Aisha Aimad, who has witnessed various crisis situations. She makes the case for ignoring all that productivity pressure. She is an academic, but all of us (assuming that there aren’t many scholars in the ZTTZ audience right now) could possible take something away from this.
🙏↗️ In the Favour Room
Talking about audience - I’m not against growing the ZTTZ crowd. If you know someone who may like these weekly collections of curiosity, do let them know. Every little helps.
Personal invitations are always good, but sharing on Twitter or LinkedIn also seems to work. ↗️🙏
In the Tech Basement
Talking about resource sharing: you can contribute to the Corona-struggle (and research into other diseases) by donating computer resources to the Folding at Home project, which aims to learn more about protein folding. Required: millions of computations, therefore lots of computer power.
Volunteering is great, but what if you could incentivise, possibly monetise, the sharing of idle computer resources. That’s what (friends of ZTTZ) Avado are working on. They just evaluated their collaboration with decentralised VPN provider Mysterium, (where you can earn crypto for sharing your resources). If you’re interested in an Avado Box, do me a favour and use/share this link (affiliate).
🦿 Complex stuff made simple. That’s what I love. And this VPRO Tegenlicht episode on the impact of AI and robotics does exactly that. (a few parts are in Dutch - HT @SJ)
Talking about the potential of AI. This (small) study managed to decode what a person is saying by looking at their brainwaves. 😵
In the Ethics Corridor
To promote the non-profit Reporters Without Borders, someone used the virtual building game Minecraft to set up an Uncensored Library. It is home to articles from 5 journalists, banned in their native countries. Now, when I say ’someone’, I mean ’their advertising agency’ DDB. It’s at this point that I realised I don’t know enough about Minecraft to figure out whether this is more than a (lovely) PR exercise.
The cynic in me knows that Minecraft is owned by Microsoft and that you need an email-address to make an account (which could make you visiting the library trackable). But I also understand people run their own Minecraft servers? Is that enough to make it more resistant to censorship? If you know anyone who can tell me more, do get in touch.🤝 A pet subject of mine is how blockchain, tokens and programmable money can be used to align incentives, for instance in the way people work together and create value together. In the world of Web3, they call this a DAO, a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation.
There are platforms like Aragon and Colony, but now the people behind the OpenLaw platform have also created a ‘Smart Agreement’ on the Ethereum blockchain to set up an ‘immutable company’ in half an hour. If you feel like getting your hands dirty have a go (some basic knowledge of Ethereum-wallet and a few euros worth of ETH required).
🏁 End note: 1 thing I’ll be doing this week
Tomorrow (Thursday) at 1400 CET I’m taking part in a Webinar on Sustainable Growth. It features some smart and interesting people like Dirk Verbruggen, the Dinobusters, Björn Prins, Frans Van Noort and Peter Rosseel. Nice to know: the latter is a crisis manager and in the prep meetings he always called in from the emergency rooms of a hospital. 😷
It’s free, so sign up here.