Hey Tiger! Sometimes you gotta be up to be down. Sometimes you gotta flip the narrative. How can you do more by doing less? Less scrolling negative social feeds, more nourishing the mind. Less procrastination, more creative inspiration. Take a quick prowl through our curated jungle of positive news bites to reconnect with optimism before the working week kicks back in!
Elon paid $44 billion for Twitter this week, an amount nearly equal to Biden’s proposed climate budget ($44.9 billion). So, as hybrid culture and virtual collaborations settle in as the new norm, why is the share price of FANGs falling? Is there still a clique beyond clickbait?
Think about the virtues of a virtual detox this weekend Tigers, after an easy swing around our mental jungle gym of course!
virtual /ˈvəːtʃʊ(ə)l,ˈvəːtjʊəl/
adjective
almost or nearly as described, but not completely or according to strict definition.
Read. Is our new hybrid norm making us more creative by virtue of technology? Or just more virtually removed from creative encounters? New research published in Nature this week shows how Brainstorming on Zoom Hampers Creativity and the hacks we can use to boost new ideas in the virtual realm.
Listen: how do tech creators develop hacks to avoid burnout in the hustle culture? Fast Company’s Creative Control podcast features Mayuko Inoue, a software engineer who's worked for Intuit, Patreon, and Netflix. When she left her stable career behind to become a full-time creator in 2020 she began working through the correlation between burnout and creativity in tech.
Read: we fell for the FANGs during COVID and now their stocks are falling as we watch. FANG stocks, shorthand for Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Google have seen the biggest percentage fall in two years, in the last five days. The issue is possibly one of unrealistic and unsustainable growth; Netflix, a great company produced great results, but very slightly less good than expected — and was punished for it. Revenue rose by 20% to $56.0 billion — but Wall Street had been expecting $56.1 billion. Where will Netflix and other tech companies look for the next round of growth? It’s all fun in games…
View: how are music festivals inspiring fans #IRL after so long online? Coachella has happened in the past week, and The Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber writes beautifully that somewhere, amidst the sweat and superficiality of the first Coachella since 2019, the most maligned concert format felt vital again. The pleasure that comes from open minds and open hearts gathering in person cannot be live-streamed without losing some of the ‘live’.
“The pleasure buzz in my head was growing. What I’d forgotten about festivals was the abundance of joyful collisions, and of performers doing their damndest everywhere you look… the 360-degree buffet of Coachella, and of many other fests, also cuts against other modern trends—such as the rarity of encountering songs that an algorithm didn’t pick out specifically for you.”
Watch: why the creative humans behind tech need to hold tech accountable to create a better world. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet discusses the importance of the employee voice, a culture of creativity, and protecting diversity, equity and inclusion within the tech industry. After two years of mostly remote work and months of changing plans about when to bring people back to the office, Google's hybrid work arrangement began this month. Find out what intentional flexibility looks like when it comes to balancing creativity and productivity.
Quiz: Am I an asshole according to AI? We have a quiz of a different (but relevant) nature today. The ‘Am I An Asshole’ project, funded by Digital Void, aims to illustrate how training data can bias the decision-making abilities of artificial intelligence models. Allow their bots to help you answer the age-old question: Are you the asshole?
Users can submit their own moral dilemmas–real or not–and get a positive, negative, and swing response that can go either way. The three AI models are trained on data derived from Reddit users passing judgment so what results is a funny microcosm of what it’s like to debate on the internet now. Any topic can inspire strong, contradictory reactions from total strangers. Go on, you know you want to!
Take it Easy Tiger, and thank you to everyone who’s joined our now 18,000+ strong community of Easy Tiger and Love Mondays readers. We appreciate your readership.
Last chance to join our ‘Be The Change’ Challenge!
In this defining decade for humanity, we need people to step up and lead the change they care about. To super-charge your change-making ability, our next epic challenge is kicking off in May and we would love you to come along for the ride! Our February challenge saw nearly 700 leaders working on personal growth and reflection, the May cohort will be all about honing collective impact.