Modest Operations | Newsletter Volume 9

My links are a bit all over the place this week. I've recently gotten back on Twitter and have been catching up with what's going on over there, despite my love/hate relationship with it.

I still think that it's among the best places to stay up-to-date with what's going on, but I'm not sure that that's always a good thing. I can definitely spot a correlation between increased twitter consumption and increased feelings of anxiety, so I'm trying to figure out how to stay engaged and educated, while not getting sucked into the fake gamesmanship of it all.

This isn't meant to be a Politics or Current Events-focused newsletter, so I'll leave more of the analysis to the professionals. 

This Week's Links A list of things I've been reading & thinking about.* "Emphasis is one problem. Associating with genuinely bad people is another. Go a click in one direction and the group is enhanced by intellectuals with tony affiliations like Steven Pinker at Harvard. But go a click in another and you’ll find alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneux and Milo Yiannopoulos and conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich (the #PizzaGate huckster) and Alex Jones (the Sandy Hook shooting denier)." - Opinion | Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web * "Seniority is becoming less about years of experience on your resume and more about your mindset, your behaviors, and your ability to influence change in the organization, whether that’s through state-of-art interfaces or pure thought leadership and articulation...Our KPIs will start to shift from engagement-centered metrics to affinity-related ones. Ultimately, our metric will become making sure users themselves are achieving their own personal KPIs. Not because we are benevolent gods, but because it’s part of our job. And because users will demand so." - The State of UX in 2019 (Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga for UX Collective) * "…I guess I’m kind of a professional hermit?" - Why I ignore the design industry on purpose (Jonas Downey for Signal vs. Noise)