Category: Internet

  • The Hollywood Strikes, AI, Strategy, & Overfocusing

    The organization on the other side of the negotiating table from the striking writers and actors is the AMPTP, but how can one organization represent studios with such divergent interests? The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) is a mysterious Hollywood trade association. Its website contains no list of member organizations: just some technical documents,…

  • Digital Transformation: Three Stories

    The ingredients for Digital Transformation are institutional pain, inflection points, and tools lying around, but you also have to get the people part right. Usually, when we talk about Digital Transformation, we focus on the physical: paper and ink newspapers dissolve and go online; albums become cassettes then CDs then MP3s then streams; physical books…

  • Adventures in Self-Disruption

    Apple is preparing to cannibalize its most profitable product, the iPhone. It’s a pattern we’ve seen before. Remember the Newton? This week in The New York Times, we learned about uncharacteristic debate in the executive ranks at Apple around the long-awaited Augmented Reality (AR) glasses that the company will release in June. Some execs worry that there is…

  • Why Amazon Blew it Killing “Smile”

    The country’s largest ecommerce company ended a program that donated 0.5% of eligible purchases to charities customers selected. This might have surprising negative consequences for Amazon’s brand. This week, Amazon announced that it was ending its “AmazonSmile” program that enabled customers to support charities with most purchases. The program will end on February 20th. I…

  • My 2023 Prediction… or Prayer

    Many thinkers end each year with a cluster of predictions for the next year. I have just one—and it’s more of a prayer than a prediction—about trust. The pressing question of our age isn’t new. The Marx Brothers asked it in Duck Soup (1933): “who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” In a recent Los Angeles…

  • What Happens When Companies Become Partisan?

    Elon Musk’s right-wing posts on Twitter have plummeted the stock at Tesla, the public company where Musk is CEO. I discuss this with Lana McGilvray of Purpose and Peter Horan of Horan MediaTech. Background: On Tuesday, December 13, Peter shared this article from Inside EVs about recent research from YouGov and Morning Consult, each arguing that Tesla is now…

  • Scarier than Skynet: AI and Persuasion

    Most dystopian fantasies concern monsters we can see conquering us, but with new technologies will we even know if we’ve been conquered? You can tell a lot about a culture by its dystopias: its fantasies of fear. When you have dueling fantasies, you can tell even more by what they agree on and what they…

  • A New Scam: The “Middle of the Night” Call

    One of the most popular things I’ve ever written is “Beware the Words with Friends Scammers” about how predators were targeting lonely older women who played this online equivalent of Scrabble.  Here’s another scam to watch out for: the “Middle of the Night” call. We were having dinner with my parents when my Dad mentioned…

  • The End of Cheap Scale?

    More important than who owns Twitter is whether anybody can create a massive new social networking service. Also, what would a non-profit version of Twitter—let’s call it Quack—look like? As I wrote last time, I’m taking a break from the endless hand-wringing around Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. The more interesting question is whether anybody can do anything to…

  • Social Media and the Banality of Evil

    Max Fisher’s new book “The Chaos Machine” shows the downside of what happens when companies pursue growth at all costs. In her 1963 book about the trial of Adolph Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Nazi murder of six million Jews during the Second World War, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality…