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

  • 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…

  • The Experience Gap

    One way or another, we’re all in the experience creation biz, so it’s bracing to realize how bad we are at talking about actual experiences rather than memories. Back when I taught English Lit at U.C. Berkeley, I’d bring three balls to class. “This one,” I’d say holding up a ball, “is the thing we’re…

  • Why Amazon Will Buy Starbucks

    I’m not usually one for predictions with due dates. I see the trends, where the dominos are falling, but spotting precisely when a trend will happen is harder. This time, though, I’ll go out on a limb because two events this week have combined to make me think that Amazon will buy Starbucks within the…

  • Why Facebook is Creepier than Google

    A 2/18 article in the Wall Street Journal by Suzanne Vranica, Patience Haggin, and Salvador Rodriguez—Inside Facebook’s $10 Billion Breakup With Advertisers—shows that when it comes to restraining Facebook from tracking us the real power doesn’t lie with the U.S. Federal Government, which is still spinning its wheels on any regulation of Big Tech. (Congressional…

  • NFTs, 5G, HUD: Colliding Trends and the Intermediate Future

    I’m an NFT skeptic. They seem like digital litter—cybernetic landfill that will clutter the e-commons like plastic bags blowing across a public park. This skepticism is unusual for me. I’m usually an early adopter, as the elephants graveyard in my garage of once exciting/now vanished tech will attest. Blockchain makes sense when it comes to…

  • Overfocusing and Immersion

    The point of optical illusions like “Duck-Rabbit” and “Young Woman or Old Woman” isn’t that one of the options is correct. Instead, the point is that both are right even if you have to toggle back and forth, taking turns, to see each separately.  I have yet to find a good term to describe this…

  • Anti-Vaxxers and the Arts of Persuasion

    People decide with their hearts and then later justify those decisions with their heads.  Once you accept this, then how you approach communications changes because all communication is about persuasion in one way or another. Learning simply to ask the question, “where is the heart in this?” can be powerful, although it can also be…

  • Secret Stories: Microsoft, Activision, Spotify, Joe Rogan, Neil Young, Facebook

    When a big business story hits I try to ask myself, “what else is going on?”  When Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017, for example, the obvious story was that the ecommerce giant wanted to tap into the nearly $800B annual U.S. grocery business. Less obvious was that by buying Whole Foods Amazon also acquired…