Happy Friday! ☀️
Hola from Valencia where I am spending a few days alone to reset and prepare for the work year ahead. January is usually a time when I switch off entirely from work and this year, it’s a shorter break and it’s ambivalent: I enjoy the time alone and miss my family at the same time. I am grateful to my wife for letting me travel alone for a few days.
What I’m reading 📖
This week I learned that The American Dialect Society selected enshittification as its 2023 Word of the Year. I had to look this up and turns out that Cory Doctorow coined the term in an essay in 2022 and relates to the term of platform decay:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
Read more about the word of the year.
What I’m listening to 🎧
Ian Rogers’ journey took him from skateboarding and punk rock to becoming the Chief Digital Officer at luxury conglomerate LVMH. In this wide-ranging and fascinating conversation, Rick Rubin and Ian Rogers review his journey and look at some of the mega trends of our current time.
What I’m watching 📺
The Curse is a show unlike any other out there right now and it caught me by surprise. It’s exquisitely cringe-worthy and unique at the same time. Starring Emma Stone and Nathan Fiedler (of The Rehearsal which was at the top of many lists for best shows last year), the show revolves around a couple developing eco-conscious housing in New Mexico and being protagonists of a reality tv show. The series is a perfect mirror for the current society and it makes for uncomfortable yet highly entertaining watching. Watch the trailer.
What I’m thinking about 🧠
“How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.”
― Yuval Noah Harari
What else?! 💯
As a reader of Friday’s Five, you know that I collect and share a Spotify playlist every month with music that I found that month. And every year, I share a combined playlist with all the songs of the year. This year, it accounts for 158 songs and 10+ hours of music. Here ya go:
Thanks for reading, have a great weekend!
David
Instagram | Website | 2021 Playlist | Company
Obsessed with the Curse! Emma Stone blows me away.