Reading - May 2018
Collections is an attempt at keeping a monthly record of the pieces of writing/art/media that I’ve found valuable and interesting. More about the series here.
// The Bill Gates Line (Tech)
“Windows was indeed the ultimate platform — the company used to brag about only capturing a minority of the total value of the Windows ecosystem — and the operating system’s clear successors are Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s own Azure Cloud Services. In all three cases there are strong and durable businesses to be built on top.”
On the difference between platforms and aggregators.
// Mary Meeker’s 2018 Internet Trends Report (World / Tech)
High growth in mobile usage, easier payments, China’s inevitable tech dominance – this is always a fun and insightful slide deck (attached at the end of the article).
// What Does It Mean to Look at This? (Art)
“Photographs of atrocity always confront us with questions of inequality. But these questions can no longer simply be reduced to ‘Why them and why not us?’ If, as Azoulay argues, photography deterritorializes citizenship, then these images accuse, they interrogate and they put us in the same boat with those we are looking at. ‘What have we done,’ they ask us, ’to create the conditions in which others, our fellow citizens, undergo these unspeakable experiences?’”