“Look at gender. We used to think of it as a binary, male or female, and now we understand it's a spectrum. It is high time to ditch the old-young binary, too.”

Ashton Applewhite

Says it all really. Ageism is alive and well. In fact the same day, Paul Krugman wrote a piece on the job market that I totally disagreed with - so of course I had to write something.

You can read the whole of Issue Number 7 here.

Startups are now offering people “passive income” for their personal data. These companies claim to empower consumers to profit from personal data. But actually, they entrench an attention economy where cash-strapped consumers trade personal privacy for quick cash — much like the plasma-for-cash biz. Data exchanges broker the sale of personal data between the people who generate it and the large companies hungry for it. One, Streamr, connects real-time personal data with companies via subscription. Another, UBDI (Universal Basic Data Income), buys personal data and sells “insights” to companies. At first glance, it’s tempting … If my toaster and my watch are already collecting data, I might as well get paid for it, right?

The Hustle

My Take

Wrong. And they know it. Read more here. No most discussion needed, but if you want to - I'm ready.

What is Data anyway?

"No one ever conceived of a more sophisticated and dynamic philosophical history than Hegel. His system is built around three fundamental ideas."

Sam Haselby

In summary ...

First, the key to human agency is self-consciousness. For people to be doing anything in any real human sense is to know what we are doing as we do it.

Secondly, self-consciousness is always a matter of locating ourselves in a kind of social space of ‘I’ and ‘we’.

Third, there are ways in which things can go better or worse and we can make it possible to become new, different and better versions of ourselves. But what we can make of ourselves depends on where we are in history.

... but what we can make of ourselves depends on where we are in history.

Hegel’s search for the universal patterns of history revealed a paradox: freedom is coming into being, but is never guaranteed

Read the whole thing at Aeon : What is history? Nobody gave a deeper answer than Hegel

Thinking Allowed

• More about People First
• Other People First Posts
  (not just from the ‘other domain’ … all of them.)

More of a record to self than something to overly concern you, but nonetheless potentially useful. As People First continues to further establish itself, we are 'upping the ante' on our online presence.

First, we are moving the site away from the blog centric feel it has had for a while now to more of a functional site. Most content not in place, yet, but there are plenty of pointers and 'eye candy' in the galleries.

There has been a Google Groups in place for years, but it fell into disuse, so it is being killed and replaced with a new group on Groups.io Emails have gone out to the old membership to test the appetite before I spend too much time building it all up. I can say that I have good experience of it, since a 'sister' organization - Me2B - is using Groups.io very effectively.

We have agreed to our first Sponsorship, more details about it in the not too distant future.

Tomorrow being Tuesday, will see our seventh newsletter hitting the streets (if you'll pardon the mixed metaphor), really wanting to grow that readership.

The Instagram and Twitter accounts are in full flow and a presence on a few third-party publishers is beginning to happen, with plans for more. Any of the links below will allow you to engage with People First in your way and on your terms.

Our sixth newsletter explores the value of a person to a corporation.

In understanding how organizations search for ‘talent’ these days, candidates know that their first two or three hurdles will have nothing to do with people and everything to do with machines and as a result valuable time is spent in tuning their resume and cover letter with SEO like terms, so that they bubble to the top.

Do you find that as sad, bad and depressing as I do?

• It’s like outsourcing your customer support team to a call center, full of untrained people … oh wait!
• I mean it’s like putting junior people into sales training on their inside sales team … oh wait!
• I mean it’s like putting a temp on your front desk, so that anyone who comes into your offices is greeted by someone who knows nothing about your organization …

Read the whole of the 6th issue here.