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You can build any future you want in this world, but it seems many metaverse builders just want to create a digital version of the garbage parts of adult life that grind us down. –Charlie Warzel in Galaxy Brain

Charlie makes the point that many people are interested in a new internet (Web3, metaverse) because of the way the current iteration has worn us down during the pandemic. Everything happens through a screen, nothing is physically real. And the gatekeepers (yep, they’re still there!) of the metaverse just want to make it into a shitty version of real life. (Side note: ownership—like mortgages for digital real estate—is painted as an ideal so that companies can make money. We consumers need to own pixels like we need a hole in the head.)

Welcome back. I’ve moved my newsletter to Revue and decided to restart the issue numbering since that’s what Revue clearly wants me to do. So enjoy Issue One. Again.

Over at my blog (I have a blog!*) I wrote about Flex Fridays, my favorite employee benefit that’s now gone away.

It seems I’m often in the position of fighting for better employee benefits. Once I addressed the entire company on a retreat (with the CEO sitting beside me) about the poor health insurance it provided. As a staunch introvert, I hate making waves—especially audibly. But it feels like many employees just accept that what they have is what they get and don’t understand the power they have to improve things.

You can tell a lot about a company’s leadership (and therefore the company’s culture) by how they respond to criticism of the policies they implemented. In the case of the poor health insurance, the company improved it drastically the next cycle—and the CEO sent me a message to make sure I knew about it. From then on in interviews with potential new hires, I praised the leadership for listening to their employees.