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

  • 2007 Post about a new “Artistic Middle Class” plus Web3 in 2022 and beyond…

    My first blog was called “Mediavorous,” and it’s long gone and therefore hard to find but for the noble work of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Lately, with the rise of Web3, I’ve been thinking about an old post from 2007, “Yes, box office is up this summer, but don’t get comfy“, which I’ve re-published…

  • The Fragile Glory of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” plus… Why Apple is the right acquirer for Twitter

    Editor’s Notes: Two smaller stories this week If you like these posts, please subscribe to the newsletter version, which has lots of extra goodies and comes direct to your inbox. From the “I was right” department: Was anybody surprised when Elon Musk put his Twitter acquisition on hold? He has already gotten all of the value out…

  • “Change Your Life” Productivity Apps & How to Use Them!

    Recently, in Distraction Audits & Why to Do One, I discussed how information and attention are inversely proportional. Or, as the great 20th Century polymath Herbert Simon put it, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” The earlier issue was about throttling back distractions. This week’s issue is about managing the super-soaker of…

  • Elon Musk Still Doesn’t Want Twitter

    Two weeks ago in Musk, Trump, Twitter, and New Media Math I argued that Elon Musk doesn’t really want to buy Twitter: he just wants to use the earned media to help him sell more Teslas. Then, on Monday, to my surprise the Twitter board accepted Musk’s $44 Billion offer, for which Musk had arranged the financing. I thought,…

  • Amazon’s New Pay-With-Your-Palm Tech and its Implications

    If you live in Austin and love experiencing the sharpest edge of technology, then head to the Whole Foods at Arbor Trails. There you can use a new service called Amazon One to pay for your groceries simply by putting your palm on a scanner. Here’s an excerpt from a fascinating piece in last week’s…

  • Musk, Trump, Twitter, and New Media Math

    It’s a good thing for the commonwealth that Elon Musk was born in South Africa; that fact bars him from seeking the U.S. presidency. Otherwise, it’s a sure bet that he’d run as a third party candidate in 2024. He’d win, too. Musk understands the media better than all but one other person. That one…

  • Distraction Audits & Why to Do One

    It’s never been harder to pay attention to the things we care about. The world is bursting with information. The designers of the devices and applications that we use to get that information work hard to turn us into stimulation addicts, doom scrolling and clicking to get another dopamine hit of input regardless of its…

  • Apple, Alaska Airlines, Taco Bell & Sweetgreen: the Trouble with Subscriptions

    Two recent articles caught my eye about a new vogue for subscriptions for products that are typically transactional.  The first has a misleading title: “Apple Is Working on a Hardware Subscription Service for iPhones” (Bloomberg, March 24th) is misleading because the planned service actually covers all Apple hardware software.  In last Tuesday’s episode of The…

  • How Risk is Changing

    The world seems more dangerous today than it ever has before, but study after study shows that we’re safer now. Hans Rosling’s Factfulness, Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist, and Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature are three books that dig into this. In part, life feels more dangerous today because we have so much information about bad things that happen…

  • New Challenges for Facebook

    In junior high, I discovered that my school library had declined to carry a book. (I don’t remember the title.) Incensed, I went to the Headmaster (yes, I went to that kind of school) to confront him about censorship. To his credit, he didn’t respond, “get the hell out of my office!” Instead, he said, “Brad, if…