Bennett’s Five Links #060
Discover more from Bennett’s Five Links
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A look so quick, a movement so slight ..
Most of you will have seen at least one OK Go video clip, and will know that they’re the main reason YouTube was invented. If you haven’t been through them all already you should absolutely carve 30 mins out of your day and watch them all.
But almost as good as the music videos themselves are the making-of videos that go with them.
Revisit their wall-of-printers and then learn about the Japanese team behind it.
Behind the scenes of OK Go’s obsession and also Yusuke Tanaka on making OK Go’s Obsession video
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Very bored, very disheartened agents ..
I got so revved up reading this one. Every line resonated with me and I felt myself highlighting paragraph after paragraph. It’s a great piece on how our traditional education system risks teaching the wrong habits, and how the learning institution leaves no space for students to learn through doing.
The short version is, we should all be out there doing things at least as much as we are out there ‘learning things’.
Agency is the capacity to act. More subtly: An individual’s life can continue, with a certain inertia, that will lead them on to the next year or decade.
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Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something differently from, or in addition to, the events that simply happen to you.
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We seem to have a political (public) imagination so shallow that it cannot conceive of what to even do with children, especially smart children. We fail to properly respect them all the way through adolescence, so we have engineered them to be useless in the interim. We do not need children to work, that is abundantly clear, but by ensuring there is nothing for them to do we are also sure to destroy more onramps towards making meaningful contributions to the world.
and even just one more -
Even for smart children, education endlessly ushers them towards an often far and always abstract future, so far and abstract that some children seem to apprise the opposite of agency, they take on a learned helplessness, and downplay that the future is a reality at all.
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Occupational health and safety doesn’t stop at the bathroom door ..
There’s some very clever physicist out there working overtime.
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Australian Breakfast News at it again ..
While I’m being low-brow, here’s a clip of some breakfast news presenters out-of-context. For humourous reasons.
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Asking whales politely for their payment details ..
This article is an excellent breakdown of the burgeoning ‘creator economy’.
Worth a read if you’re in the Substack / YouTube / OnlyFans / other sidehustle world.
I believe that creators need to amass only 100 True Fans—not 1,000—paying them $1,000 a year, not $100. Today, creators can effectively make more money off fewer fans.
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Here’s how it works: A creator can cultivate a large, free audience on horizontal social platforms or through an email list. He or she can then convert some of those users to patrons and subscribers. The creator can then leverage some of those buyers to higher-value purchases, such as extra content, exclusive access, or direct interaction with the creator.
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This represents a move away from the traditional donation model—in which users pay to benefit the creator—to a value model, in which users are willing to pay more for something that benefits themselves. What was traditionally dubbed “self-help” now exists under the umbrella of “wellness.” People are willing to pay more for exclusive, ROI-positive services that are constructive in their lives, whether it’s related to health, finances, education, or work. In the offline world, people are accustomed to hiring experts across verticals (think interior designers, organizational consultants, public speaking coaches, executive coaches, and SAT tutors) and are willing to pay premium prices for the promise of measurable improvement and results. Now that mindset is filtering into our digital lives, as well.
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Bennett