What the self-help gurus and their critics reveal about our times.

“In a consumerist society, we are not meant to buy one pair of jeans and then be satisfied,” Cederström and Spicer write, and the same, they think, is true of self-improvement. We are being sold on the need to upgrade all parts of ourselves, all at once, including parts that we did not previously know needed upgrading. (This may explain Yoni eggs, stone vaginal inserts that purport to strengthen women’s pelvic-floor muscles and take away “negative energy.” Gwyneth Paltrow’s Web site, Goop, offers them in both jade and rose quartz.) There is a great deal of money to be made by those who diagnose and treat our fears of inadequacy; Cederström and Spicer estimate that the self-improvement industry takes in ten billion dollars a year.
Alexandra Schwartz

Almost one year later, someone pointed me to Improving Ourselves to Death ☞ . Well worth a read, my friend…

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suggested reads for October 7, 2018

• Good Pressure, Bad Pressure
• Below the surface, Amsterdam
• WTF is dark pattern design?
• How Smart TVs in Millions of U.S. Homes Track More Than What’s On Tonight
• Sorry, Power-Lunchers. This Restaurant Is a Co-Working Space Now.

about society

Society is not some grand abstraction, my friends. It‘s just us. It’s the words we use, which are the thoughts we have, which determine the actions we take.

Umair Haque

Suggested reads for April 8, 2018

• Apps aren’t dead, they’ve just evolved
• Silicon Valley should welcome the scrutiny
• Five Things Nobody Has Told You About The Apple iMac
• Zuckerberg and the Imaginary Cosmopolitan
• Diagnosing the Italian disease

 

suggested reads for April 2, 2018

OK, I know … today’s Easter Monday and the sun shines and the weather is fantastic (at least here). Perfect day for going out and have a wonderful offline time. But if you’re not in such position – or mood – and want to relax at home reading something, here are my ‘classic’ five link list of posts worth a mention…

• IBM’s Quest To Design The “New Helvetica”
• Why IBM Created Its Own Typeface After A Century Without One
• Researchers can determine what smartphone a photo was taken on by analyzing it
• Why millennials are facing the scariest financial future of any generation since the Great Depression.
• Firefox is on a slippery slope

Move Slowly and Fix Things

Designers and programmers are great at inventing software. We obsess over every aspect of that process: the tech we use, our methodology, the way it looks, and how it performs.
Unfortunately we’re not nearly as obsessed with what happens after that, when people integrate our products into the real world. They use our stuff and it takes on a life of its own. Then we move on to making the next thing. We’re builders, not sociologists.
This approach wasn’t a problem when apps were mostly isolated tools people used to manage spreadsheets or send emails. Small products with small impacts.
But now most software is so much more than that. It listens to us. It goes everywhere we go. It tracks everything we do. It has our fingerprints. Our heart rate. Our money. Our location. Our face. It’s the primary way we communicate our thoughts and feelings to our friends and family.
It’s deeply personal and ingrained into every aspect of our lives. It commands our gaze more and more every day.
Jonas Downey

Suggested reads for April 23, 2017

• Tim Berners-Lee: I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it
• Kai Brach’s Indie Magonomics – making a sustainable indie print magazine
• Does software performance still matter?
• In praise of cash
• Erin Books’ Getting Great iPhone7+ Portrait Mode Shots Guide

Not Knowing is Power

Our growth, both personally and as a society, is dependent on knowledge. And yet. Our brains are only so big, and our physical capabilities limited. Are we meant to know everything? Do we really need all this information just because it is available to us? Is this where we break?
Tobias van Schneider

Suggested reads for April 2, 2017

• A Map of Lexical Distances Between Europe’s Languages
• Apple’s iCloud is a multi-cloud beast
• The benefits of learning how to code layouts with CSS
• The “Other Side” Is Not Dumb
• Fix the internet by writing good stuff and being nice to people

The last two articles proposed are really dear to my heart and feelings on how the web has to grow to be a better version of ourselves… and the last one is one of the most intelligent and greatly written post on the topics I’ve ever read.

Fix the internet by writing good stuff and being nice to people

5. Engage in dialogue with people who are different from you.
One of the hardest things is to understand the other side. The rift between groups of people, conflict, and controversy is what clickbait thrives on. Squelch it. This is probably the hardest one to do, because we are hardwired to block out people we disagree with. Get off Facebook. Talk to people in good comment sections. Visit sites with comments. Encourage your favorite publication to moderate comments. Volunteer to be a moderator.

This does not mean subjecting yourself to pointless, toxic arguments with people who can’t be convinced. It does not mean ruining your mental health in comment sections that are not civil. It means, little by little working to change minds, and engaging with the internet around us.

We are a LONG, long ways away from the destruction of the internet as a giant billboard. It takes time to turn a huge skyscraper into an gutted shell of a building, and it will take just as much time to turn our current internet from a loud, obnoxious, toxic mall, back into a public forum.
Vicki Boykis, Fix the internet by writing good stuff and being nice to people