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

  • Am I B.L.U.E.? (Bored, Lonely, Uncomfortable…Ever)

    One reason there’s an obesity epidemic is that humans evolved in a world of caloric scarcity: getting enough food wasn’t easy for most of the population for most of human history. It still isn’t easy for many, many food-insecure people. However, the people who are food secure find themselves in an evolutionary conundrum: our instincts tell…

  • Does what we buy represent who we are?

    This week’s episode of the delightful NPR podcast “Hidden Brain,” “I Buy, Therefore I Am: How Brands Become Part Of Who We Are,” explores how the stories that companies tell about their products impact our lives and intertwine with our identities. In the podcast, host Shankar Vedantam interviews Wharton marketing professor Americus Reed about how branding…

  • The challenge of deepfakes

    The original Star Trek show from the 1960s has proved prescient again and again. Starfleet’s pocket communicators and slightly larger tricorders anticipated smartphones. Hospital beds today with their sensors and screens look a lot like the diagnostic beds in the Enterprise’s sickbay. We talk with Siri, Alexa, and other digital assistants the way the Enterprise crew…

  • Help this writer find examples…

    I’m muddling through a new idea about symbols that have lost their original context, but that hang around in our culture anyway. I have a few examples, but I need more. One example is the “save” icon that looks like a tiny little floppy diskette in most Microsoft programs… even though most people under 35…

  • A better streaming model

    On July 26th, “Veronica Mars” will return for a fourth season, twelve years after the end of the third and five years after a movie that had a slender theatrical release. Instead of UPN or the CW, which broadcast the first three seasons, the fourth will premiere on streaming service Hulu for a short, eight-episode…

  • When businesses ask the wrong question

    The question most businesses ask most frequently is “how am I doing compared to my direct competitor?” This is the wrong question, and it leaves businesses vulnerable rather than future-proof. Let’s use car ownership as a key example of a broader phenomenon. Car sales decline The transportation news making the biggest headlines over the last few…

  • Netflix’s only hope is to advertise

    A recent Wall Street Journal article, “Netflix Fights to Keep Its Most Watched Shows: ‘Friends’ and ‘The Office,” shared that only two of the top 10 shows on Netflix were original to the streaming service. Those shows were Ozark and Orange is the New Black, and they weren’t the most popular of the top 10. The three most-viewed shows…

  • Short Post: Poetry & the Anxiety of AI

    Earlier this week, Fast Company published a delightful short article by Katharine Schwab: “3 reasons why AI will never match human creativity.” It’s a quick read, so I won’t recapitulate it here beyond that neural networks “fail miserably to anticipate when a pattern will change, let alone connect one pattern to an unrelated pattern, a…

  • Ride-Hailing’s “iPod moment”

    As I write this sentence, Lyft’s stock is worth $56.02 per share, which means that the stock has lost 41% of its value since its March 29th debut on the Nasdaq. Likewise, Uber will make its Initial Public Offering in the coming weeks, and it can expect a similarly bumpy ride as its filing has shown,…

  • Ho Hum, Apple’s boring choices with TV+

    There’s a passage toward the end of Walter Isaacson’s majestic biography, Steve Jobs, about what was on the Apple founder’s mind as he was dying of cancer: He very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant. “I’d like to create an…