Hope you’re having a light weather day, wherever you are. Two quick notes before we dive in: 

1. There’ll be two guest Polymathic Monthly’s over the next few weeks; one finance-themed and the other focused on Electric Vehicles/Autonomous Vehicles and Transportation.

2. I surveyed some PM readers and I’ll be starting a paid Polymathic Weekly newsletter. It’ll cover strategy, futurecasting, and technology. Think of it as your curated MBA for $9/month. More details in the next PM.

Enjoy.

• The internet is free, runs on ads and we are the product. But you already knew this. Because you read the history of this business model in Tim Wu’s Attention Merchants.   

• We’re up in arms about Facebook/Cambridge Analytica but what we miss is how pervasive this business model of personal data mining truly is. Even the NYT, mainly staying alive on ad revenue, needs you to be the product. What you read allows these sites to serve you better. With that said, what should we do about it? First thing is to realize that your data is yours and it is valuable. Not sure what the better model is yet but, as Douglas Laney suggests in Infonomics, users as the product cannot be the only way.

• It’s all about Coachella this weekend. But not the one you know about (25min read). 

• This article is political, despite the ’Why America Slept’ title, and is by Tim O’Reilly (whom I’d genuinely like to grab a hot choc and have a good chat with).

• Is our collective imagination currently limiting the advances we can make with our energy system? Turns out that the narratives we get from science fiction books play a big part in the future we create. We need more authors and more books ;)

• I thought the trolley problem would be the issue with self-driving cars. Turns out that it’s the more mundane decisions that autonomous vehicles need to make that are the real conundrum.

• The Edelman Trust Barometer points out that distrust is the real issue with media. But when we cannot trust what we see, and reality is distorted, what can we trust? And who should we blame?

• Tim Wu shows up again. Here he talks about doing the hard work to escape the tyranny of convenience. Especially the convenience these companies sell us to gather our data.

• The tragic story of a chef and an inventor and how our quirks are infused into the work we do/our output. 

• We are here to create. That’s what will save us from the (inevitable) erosion of tasks by Artificial Intelligence.

• Some of you have asked about bringing back cool product recommendations. I haven’t been finding much to recommend. But if you were wondering where you were at any point in the recent past, gleaned from your browser history, Google timeline will show you. Scary and impressive at the same time. h/t to Recommendo.

• I dare you to read ’is your blood as red as this?, one of the short stories from ’What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours’ by Helen Oyeyemi, and not be speechless afterward.

Have a great week!

Seyi