🍹Eureka

I hope you never have to get brain surgery, but if you do, here’s something you should know:

If the surgeon needs to extract a chunk of your skull temporarily, they’ll make an incision in your abdomen, place that skull chunk in there, and then sew it back up, awaiting retrieval. 🙂 Turns out the most sterile body part cupboard is another body part. Reduce, reuse, recycle, amirite?

WIRED hosted a neurosurgeon who revealed some mildly terrifying neurosurgery facts for your viewing pleasure.

As a child of the ‘90s, there were a couple of things my uber(🙃)-careful parents always cautioned me against:

1. Getting into strangers’ cars.

2. Talking to strangers.

3. Accepting food and drinks from strangers.

4. Inviting strangers into the house and getting into theirs.

I mentioned the ‘90s because the years immediately before them were the golden age of North American serial killing.

I doubt this truth was evident to my parents then. Nonetheless, it remained critical not to interact with people I didn’t know, particularly as a gullible kid. I want to think this African predisposition goes toward explaining why we weren’t suffering a similar mass murder pandemic here, but I digress.

The most convenient way to move around the world today is to trust people you’ve never met with matters as sensitive as food, housing, companionship, and transportation. That advice we got about avoiding strangers is obsolete in our current sharing economy.

Those pitching Uber, bnbs, dating apps, and their numerous iterations must’ve sounded like the creepy middle-aged dudes in windowless white vans (what makes windowless white vans so creepy, lol). But today, their insanity is being rewarded beyond their wildest dreams.

It’s always crazy until someone does it. Light bulbs, shoes, handheld devices that hold our lives in them... all these items were once just story za jaba.

What does this mean for you? Breathe some life into your most outlandish ideas, even if the current landscape doesn’t have room for them.

Once in a blue moon, I read or watch (mostly the latter, but that’s a story for another Kessentials) something so profound I feel my now-big brain pressing against my skull (skull chunk removal, anyone?). Cory Doctorow’s article on Pluralistic was one such read.

It’s titled “TikTok’s enshittification,“ but its scope extends to all the products that started as the answer to particular problems customers had but ended up being the answer to what the products’ inventors wanted.

Once a platform has enough sellers and buyers to achieve its dark overlord goals, every manipulation and breach of the initial contract is on the table.

• Wondering why our obsessions with Signal and BeReal fizzled out? Enshittification.

• Search results guiding you less to an answer and more to promoted yet unhelpful interpretations? Enshittification.

• Google opting to buy YouTube and Meta Instagrinstead of competing with them? Enshittification.

This business model would be awe-inspiring if it wasn’t completely ruining our chances at a safe, organic internet. I don’t want to water down any more of what he expressed in that essay, but I will spoil the end for you because it’s a happy one:

Pitisha hiyo lighter,

Kessentials.