Hi! 'Twas a rich music week, frendz: Perera Elsewhere - All of this is the bomb, some Rone + Frànçois and the Atlas Mountains, the mind-blowing shrieking/opera faces of a same coin by Lingua Ignota, and 🌞 adolescent summer pop with Hot Flash Heat Wave. Enjooooooy 🙂.

On the news this week,

• Two articles I enjoyed on using social networks and feeling empty. Wildly different takes, but interestingly reaching similar language to describe the physical attitudes emerging: "absent-minded swiping", "impulse", "reward", "gratification", " all we want from our apps is to see new stuff scroll up from the bottom of the screen". The first highlights the emptiness through parody, the second offers a more introspective angle. 👍👍👍.
  • Ian Bogost: The app that does nothing. Via waxy.

    Standard smartphone fare inspires users to create content whose publication accrues value for the tech titans that operate walled-garden services. Those businesses transform that aggregated attention into revenue and stock value in turn. Meanwhile, the pleasure and benefit of those services dwindles by the day, as conflict and exhaustion suffocate delight and utility.

    Binky offers a way to see and tolerate that new normalcy. What if the problem with smartphones isn’t the compulsion to keep up with the new ideas they deliver, but believing that the meaning of those ideas matters in the first place? Binky offers all the pleasure of tapping, scrolling, liking, and commenting without any of the burden of meaning.

  • David Cain: Want more time? Get rid of the easiest way to spend it.

    Social media was serving, at least for me, as a sponge that wicks up any stray attention —and with it, time— and then keeps drawing more of both until you consciously break away from it. And of course it does —unlike reading, working, physical activity, or real-life socializing, social media is an activity that takes no effort. It doesn’t require any confidence, resolve, or intention, and doesn’t entail any risk.

  • Johnny also links to How technology is hijacking your mind  —  from a magician and Google design ethicist.
• The jobs that artificial intelligence will create, no numbers analysis of the volume of creation vs. destruction, though. Via HN.
• [fr/qc] IRIS : Arrêtons de payer pour la F1.
• SMBC: Listening tells the truth about Google Home / Amazon Echo.
• Man uses a 3D model of his face to get a national ID card.