Is A.I. the Death of I.P.? - The New Yorker | Energy, and How to Get It - The New Yorker | Solving the Productivity Paradox - The New Yorker

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Is A.I. the Death of I.P.? - The New Yorker (Full Access)

Intellectual property accounts for some or all of the wealth of at least half of the world’s fifty richest people, and it has been estimated to account for fifty-two per cent of the value of U.S. merchandise exports. I.P. is the new oil. Nations sitting on a lot of it are making money selling it to nations that have relatively little. It’s therefore in a country’s interest to protect the intellectual property of its businesses.

But every right is also a prohibition. My right of ownership of some piece of intellectual property bars everyone else from using that property without my consent. I.P. rights have an economic value but a social cost. Is that cost too high?

I.P. ownership comes in several legal varieties: copyrights, patents, design rights, publicity rights, and trademarks. And it’s everywhere you look. United Parcel Service has a trademark on the shade of brown it paints its delivery trucks. If you paint your delivery trucks the same color, UPS can get a court to make you repaint them. Coca-Cola owns the design rights to the Coke bottle: same deal. Some models of the Apple Watch were taken off the market this past Christmas after the United States International Trade Commission determined that Apple had violated the patent rights of a medical-device firm called Masimo. (A court subsequently paused the ban.)

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Energy, and How to Get It - The New Yorker (Full Access)

For months, during the main pandemic stretch, I’d get inexplicably tired in the afternoon, as though vital organs and muscles had turned to Styrofoam. Just sitting in front of a computer screen, in sweatpants and socks, left me drained. It seemed ridiculous to be grumbling about fatigue when so many people were suffering through so much more. But we feel how we feel.

It was just a question of energy. The endurance athlete, running perilously low on fuel, is said to hit the wall, or bonk. Cyclists call this feeling “the man with the hammer.” Applying the parlance to the Sitzfleisch life, I told myself that I was bonking. At hour five in the desk chair, the document onscreen looked like a winding road toward a mountain pass. The man in the sweatpants had met the man with the mattress.

All of us, except for the superheroes and the ultra-sloths, know people who have more energy than we do, and plenty who have less. We may admire or envy or even pity the tireless project jugglers, the ravenous multidisciplinarians, the serial circulators of rooms, the conference hoppers, the calendar maximizers, the predawn cross-trainers and kickboxers. How does she do it? On the flip side, there are the oversleepers, the homebodies, the spurners of invitations and opportunities, the dispensers of excuses. Come on, man! It’s hard to measure success, if you want to avoid making it about money or power or credentials, but, as one stumbles through the landscape of careers and outputs and reputations, one sees, again and again, that the standouts tend to be the people who possess seemingly boundless reserves of mental and physical fuel. Entrepreneurs, athletes, artists, politicians: it can seem that energy, more than talent or luck, results in extraordinary outcomes. Why do some people have it and others not? What does one have to do to get more?

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Solving the Productivity Paradox - The New Yorker (Full Access)

A few years ago, advertisements for a software service named Monday.com seemed to be suddenly everywhere online. This ubiquity didn’t come cheap. An S.E.C. filing revealed that the product’s developers had spent close to a hundred and thirty million dollars on advertising in 2020 alone, which amounted to roughly eighty per cent of the company’s annual revenue. The resulting blitz generated more than seven hundred and twenty-two million views on Monday.com’s YouTube channel—an audience larger than the preceding four Super Bowls combined.

This outsized investment makes sense when you consider the changes that have taken place in the productivity-software market. Monday.com claims to help knowledge workers collaborate better: “Boost your team’s alignment, efficiency, and productivity by customizing any workflow to fit your needs.” This objective might sound dry in our current moment of flashy social apps and eerie artificial intelligence, but helping organizations manage their workflows has proved to be surprisingly lucrative. Trello, one of the early success stories from this category, was launched in 2011 as a side project by an independent software developer. In 2017, it was purchased by Atlassian for four hundred and twenty-five million in cash and stock. Another workflow-management service, named Wrike, subsequently sold for $2.25 billion. For its part, Monday.com went on to leverage the user growth generated by its advertising push to support a successful I.P.O. that valued the company at over seven billion dollars.

What’s striking about this new generation of productivity software is not so much what it does, but what it doesn’t do. Until recently, most business applications focussed on providing faster and more powerful versions of the tools that knowledge workers were already using to accomplish their daily tasks—electronic spreadsheets were better than paper accounting ledgers, e-mail is better than fax machines. The new productivity services, by contrast, can’t be used to directly execute work. Their purpose is instead to help better organize these efforts. Monday.com allows you to arrange “items,” described by various properties such as “status” or “percentage complete,” onto “boards.” You can then visualize the work described by these boards in various useful formats. Trello offers something similar, capturing items on virtual cards that can be dragged around into different vertical stacks. One stack might contain the tasks a team still needs to handle, while another might contain those already accomplished.

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Can Slowness Save Us? - The New Yorker (Full Access)

In recent years, in the realms of self-improvement literature, Instagram influencers, and wellness gurus, an idea has taken hold: that in a non-stop world, the act of slowing down offers a path to better living. In this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz trace the rise of “slowness culture”—from Carl Honoré’s 2004 manifesto to pandemic-era trends of mass resignations and so-called quiet quitting. The hosts discuss the work of Jenny Odell, whose books “How to Do Nothing” and “Saving Time” frame reclaiming one’s time as a life-style choice with radical roots and revolutionary political potential. But how much does an individual’s commitment to leisure pay off on the level of the collective? Is too much being laid at the feet of slowness? “For me, it’s about reclaiming an aspect of humanness, just the experience of not having to make the most with everything we have all the time,” Schwartz says. “There can be a degree of self-defeating critique where you say, ‘Oh, well, this is only accessible to the privileged few.’ And I think the better framing is, how can more people access that kind of sitting with humanness?”

“How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” by Anne Helen Petersen (BuzzFeed)“How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” by Jenny Odell“Improving Ourselves to Death,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)“In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed,” by Carl Honoré“The Sabbath,” by Abraham Joshua Heschel“Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture,” by Jenny Odell“Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto,” by Kohei SaitoNew episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

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