BradBerens.com
Thoughts about where our real and digital worlds collide.

  • My 2022 in Books

    There’s a special magic in reading books versus magazines, websites, emails, or newspapers. Here’s my journey across the dozens of books I read in 2022. If you’re looking for a good read, dive in! Happy New Year! The magic of books is like the magic of kissing. The infinite variety of kisses include the first…

  • 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…

  • Experience Stacks, Competitive Advantage, and Netflix’s “Wednesday”

    The new Netflix series about the daughter from The Addams Family going to a Hogwarts-style high school doesn’t ignore the earlier versions of the story: it embraces them, which is part of why it succeeds. One difference between artificial intelligence and the human kind (at least for now) is that AI is amazing at pattern…

  • Frontiers of Scale

    As media continues to fragment in the face of changes in legislation and technology, where will new big audiences come from? A few issues back, I explored how changes in legislation and technology are signaling the end of cheap digital scale for media. (Don’t worry: you don’t have to read that issue to understand this one.) If…

  • 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…

  • On Strategy: the Power of WITDO

    It’s fine to look for answers, but often you don’t find them. Instead, if you’re lucky, you wind up with better questions. WITDO is one of them. One of my first corporate gigs was as the digital editor at EarthLink, an early dial-up Internet Service Provider (ISP). We scrutinized every move that AOL and Microsoft…

  • 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…