Erica Dhawan and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic have some good suggestions in their article How to Collaborate Effectively If Your Team Is Remote. I found this part particularly interesting:

First, consider that there are three kinds of distance in remote collaboration: physical (place and time), operational (team size, bandwidth and skill levels) and affinity (values, trust, and interdependency). The best way for managers to drive team performance is by focusing on reducing affinity distance. Try switching most remote communication to regular video calls, which are a much better vehicle for establishing rapport and creating empathy than either e-mails or voice calls. And design virtual team-building rituals that give people the opportunity to interact regularly and experience their collaboration skills in action.

Focusing on “affinity distance” rings true for me. You can survive a long time with physical and operational distance if your team trusts each other and share certain values.

At Wildbit we use Zoom for video calls because it’s the only video conferencing software we’ve been able to find that lets us see the whole team’s faces on the screen at the same time. It’s much better than using Google Hangouts or any of the other apps that prioritize only the person who’s speaking. There are lots of way to reduce “affinity distance”, but having everyone (whether they’re remote or in the office) take video calls from their desks — and looking each other in the eyes on those calls — has had a surprisingly large positive impact.

Two related articles about YouTube caught my eye over the past few days. The first, Zeynep Tufekci’s YouTube, the Great Radicalizer explains how YouTube’s algorithms almost always lead people to conspiracy theory videos:

It seems as if you are never “hard core” enough for YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. It promotes, recommends and disseminates videos in a manner that appears to constantly up the stakes. Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century. […]

What we are witnessing is the computational exploitation of a natural human desire: to look “behind the curtain,” to dig deeper into something that engages us. As we click and click, we are carried along by the exciting sensation of uncovering more secrets and deeper truths. YouTube leads viewers down a rabbit hole of extremism, while Google racks up the ad sales.

This is bad enough, but then there’s James Cook’s article YouTube suggested conspiracy videos to children using its Kids app, in which he explains how not even the YouTube Kids app is immune to this:

YouTube’s app specifically for children is meant to filter out adult content and provide a “world of learning and fun,” but Business Insider found that YouTube Kids featured many conspiracy theory videos which make claims that the world is flat, that the moon landing was faked, and that the planet is ruled by reptile-human hybrids.

I try not to be too quick to call technology evil, but this is definitely not a “all technology is neutral” situation. Product managers and developers have the power to stop this kind of escalation from happening.

Annalee Newitz wrote a really interesting essay on how economic anxieties are creeping into fantasy and science fiction stories. From The Rise of Dismal Science Fiction:

We’re used to science fiction providing us with commentary on technology, and vocabulary to discuss its more worrisome consequences. But underlying our fears of robots stealing our jobs or corporations turning us into consumer droids are more basic anxieties about money—and science fiction is increasingly reflecting that. For audiences grappling with the fear of poverty, or simply bewildered by postmodern economics, stories like Game of Thrones, Black Panther, and Malka Older’s critically acclaimed novel Infomocracy function like Aesop’s Fables for the 21st century.

My current favorite sci-fi series, The Expanse, is another great example of this. Yes, it’s a story about space and scary things, but it’s mostly a story about inequality and economic oppression.

In Airbnb and the Unintended Consequences of ‘Disruption’ Derek Thompson uses Airbnb as an example to explain how it’s not as easy to call tech innovation a good or a bad thing. It’s complicated…

Airbnb lowered prices for tourists, supplemented the income of renters, and simply made travel to major cities more fun. But upon inspection, it shares some things in common with more-controversial companies—albeit with less grave implications. Facebook and Twitter design for attention, but incidentally encourage mendacious outrage and trolling. eBay and Amazon design for open marketplaces, but incidentally encourage the frenzied resale of bulk-ordered toys around Christmas. Airbnb was supposed to challenge hotels by letting tourists pay renters. But its platform is unwittingly producing a subsidy of tourists, paid for by nonparticipating urban dwellers, who bear the cost of higher rental prices.

I really enjoyed Christopher Hawthorne’s essay called Los Angeles, Houston and the rise of the unreadable city:

This is going to be a column, instead, about something slightly different: about the legibility (and illegibility) of cities more generally. About how we react — as reporters and critics and simply as people — when we’re confronted with a city that doesn’t make sense to us right away.

I have never liked Los Angeles. I just couldn’t get over what I simply saw as a lot of dirt and too much traffic. But this viewpoint made me realize that, as with most cities, you can’t really love a city until you’ve lived there for a while.

If I had to put my finger on what unites Houston and Los Angeles, it is a certain elusiveness as urban object. Both cities are opaque and hard to read. What is Houston? Where does it begin and end? Does it have a center? Does it need one? It’s tough to say, even when you’re there — even when you’re looking directly at it.

I highly recommend reading this piece through the lens of a city you strongly dislike. Who knows, it might change your mind…

Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein has a gripping feature in Wired called Inside Facebook’s Two Years of Hell. It’s long, but very much worth reading. It takes us through a journey that starts with Facebook’s years of denial:

It appears that Facebook did not, however, carefully think through the implications of becoming the dominant force in the news industry. Everyone in management cared about quality and accuracy, and they had set up rules, for example, to eliminate pornography and protect copyright. But Facebook hired few journalists and spent little time discussing the big questions that bedevil the media industry. What is fair? What is a fact? How do you signal the difference between news, analysis, satire, and opinion? Facebook has long seemed to think it has immunity from those debates because it is just a technology company—one that has built a “platform for all ideas.”

And it ends at the point they are at now: starting to realize that they can’t hide behind the “we’re just a platform” excuse any more.

I’m a really big Mutemath fan. If you haven’t listened to their latest album, please do yourself a favor and get on that! In the Rolling Stone interview Mutemath’s Paul Meany on Near-Breakup, New LP ‘Play Dead’ they talk about their creative process on the album:

Mutemath assembled the track list in an unconventional way. Instead of arguing endlessly over what songs to pull from their massive pile of 30 demos, the musicians each hand-picked three and assembled the basic framework themselves before bringing the other back into the process.

”We just trusted each of us to go into our corners and materialize a vision for that particular song and bring it back to the band to finish the puzzle together,” Meany says. “And it was exciting to watch everyone in the band firing on all cylinders. The mantra was just ‘indulge,’ and we trusted each other to do that. And we wouldn’t have been able to do that a few albums ago. If you just get into ‘indulge’ mode, that’s usually the recipe for garbage. Every person in the band should always feel that – someone’s gotta to create some parameters at some point. But I think we’ve worked together long enough now and have developed the trust within that creative space to just say ‘go.’ This was the culmination of all that.”

I tend to think that’s a great way to collaborate on design as well. Go away and do your thing with no constraints, come up for air and get feedback and make changes, rinse and repeat.

I should start by stating the obvious: I like technology and phones, and I think it’s essential for kids to be exposed to it so that they can be prepared for the future ahead. That said, despite its click-bait title, Jean Twenge’s Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? really got to me. She studied how teens tend to spend their time, and how it affects their mental health, and came to some alarming conclusions:

More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.

Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.

I know that sounds a bit like fear-mongering—and maybe it’s not as bad as Jean makes it sound. But it’s still worth reading the article and making up your own mind based on the data presented.