Welcome to The New Brief
A newsletter about the big questions surrounding technology and society.
Over the past twenty years technology has advanced at a rate we haven’t seen since the industrial revolution. The advent of the internet, connected devices, and the ensuing removal of friction has dramatically changed our lives. It is easier than ever to communicate with your loved ones, to express yourself to the world, or to find our way. We live in a world with more health, freedom, and prosperity than ever before.
However, we are only now realizing that all this technological progress brings with it hidden costs and unexpected downsides. Our economies are struggling to come to terms with zero marginal cost goods, our political systems are in disarray over social networks, and our personal lives are fraught with confusion about our relationship with technology.
Lots os us are feeling angry, cheated, and confused about the role technology has to play in our modern society. And in our confusion we point fingers at the agents of this change, namely the big technology companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon, without.
But in all this pointing and arguing, we have started to loose sight of the positive aspects that can come from technological innovation, and of the possible futures those technologies can enable. We are all still playing catch up on trying to understand the new in order to shape it.
Introducing “The New Brief”
In order to help ourselves, and hopefully you, make sense of those changes and the big questions that come with them we started the The New Brief. A weekly newsletter about the big questions surrounding technology and society. It is delivered fresh to your inbox every Wednesday morning and breaks down one big question around technology and society.
Some topics we are looking forward to exploring:
How can we balance the positive aspects of social media with its downsides?
How should we strike a balance between privacy and convenience?
What should our personal everyday relationship with our devices be?
What does commerce look like in the age of Amazon?
How is the internet impacting the way businesses work?
What does the internet mean for democracy?
What you can expect
Five things we want to strive towards here at The New Brief:
1. Contextualize the news, not be driven by it. You shouldn’t expect a summary of the relevant news of the week. We believe there is too much news today. Our goal is to select only articles that will further your understanding of an issue.
2. Focus on personal impact and relevancy. Most of the topics we want to cover revolve around things that impact our lives. Why these discussions matter is something we will constantly be striving to explain.
3. Avoid scapegoats and easy answers. It is remarkably easy to blame all our problems on big tech. But with most things, a greyer bigger picture emerges when we take a step back.
4. Have a strong bias towards better futures. Technological progress isn’t inevitable. We hold a strong opinion that better futures can be created if we understand where we are and decide what we want to build.
5. Be reader-supported, and community-oriented. There will be no ads on The New Brief. We believe the best way to build a media business is to deliver things that our readers find valuable so we can be supported entirely by them.
Toward Better Futures
The uncertainties of progress will always be daunting. But instead of picking sides and casting blame, we believe that there is still time to productively rethink our relationship with technology and the world around us.
If we ground ourselves in what makes us human, our ingenuity, we can start to see technology neither as a problem nor a solution, but as a tool we can use to build better futures.
We hope you enjoy reading The New Brief as much as we enjoy making it. We will work hard to make it worthy of your attention. Subscribe here, follow on Twitter here.
See you next week,
The New Brief Editorial Team