The gap between our goals and the goals technology has for us Is technology on our side? Maybe. But the business model that the digital world has created is putting our freedom of attention at risk. Big media industries compete with our desire to spend quality time with our loved ones. How can this model be sustainable, if Netflix’s and Snapchat’s big competitor is “sleep”?

This easy digestible video is an eye opener on how attention is becoming a scarce resource and why correcting the so-called attention economy is one of the challenges of our society.

Sabrina, editorial assistant Aeon: ‘A handful of executives control the "attention economy". Time for attentive resistance’ (viewing time: four minutes)
Lost people, and people we lose He helped coin the term "we are the 99%", as a driving force behind the Occupy Wall Street movement. He wrote about "bullshit jobs" in a quest for economic inequality, launched a union for debtors, and supported the idea of general assemblies in a dream of direct democracy. An anthropologist, an academic, an anarchist and an activist from the US, David Graeber was one of a kind, and I was saddened to hear he had passed suddenly at the age of 59.

We’ve lost another person who believes in global reconstruction, in mass action, in humanity. What appealed to me the most about him was how approachable he seemed, how available he was for discussions with anyone, how he was a traveller and a walker through the towns and cities of our world and with their people. There have been plenty of wonderful tributes to him, particularly from Jacobin and NY Books, but I’d recommend this profile about Graeber’s origins as an "Africanist".

Nabeelah, conversation editor Africa Is a Country: ‘David Graeber, Africanist’ (reading time: 12 minutes)
Why your phone camera can’t capture the apocalypse A friend in San Francisco sent me a picture of a real-life dystopia two weeks ago. Outside his house was thick with smoke from the wildfires burning across California as a city council van with a large LED screen on the back drove by with the flashing message ‘Stay indoors. Protect each other from the virus’.

In his photo, the sky looked grey. But he assured me the actual sky was ‘more of a Blade Runner orange’. It turns out, a lot of iPhone users had the same experience while trying to snap pictures of the San Francisco sky blotted out by wildfire smoke. As Ian Bogost explains in this interesting piece in the Atlantic, the software on our phones just wasn’t designed for a sky bathed in orange, so it autocorrects.

Shaun, copy editor The Atlantic: ‘Your phone wasn’t built for the apocalypse’ (reading time: 10 minutes)

The best of The Correspondent

A 3D animation of a black and white cow looking up to the right, standing in a pool of slightly moving bright blue background This is what climate change means if your country is below sea level Climate change can feel so overwhelming that it becomes abstract. If we want to understand and fight this global threat, every nation needs a national narrative. This is the Dutch story – where the climate crisis threatens the very existence of the country itself. Read Rutger Bregman’s article here Everybody was a child once. Remember that when they turn into your political foes (or worse) We need to talk more openly about how we grew up to be the adults we are today and how we want to raise our children. When we’re raising the next president, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Read Irene Caselli’s article here There’s no such thing as a self-made billionaire For all their talent or intelligence, a person stranded on a desert island with no technology, infrastructure or labour wouldn’t be able to amass extreme wealth. Understanding that no one can claim that they fully deserve what they earn is the first step to addressing wealth inequality. Read Ingrid Robeyns’ article here