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

  • Retro Futures: “Redcrosse” and the view from 1997 and 2011 – Bonus

    Yesterday, April 27, 2023 was when the plot of my 2011 near future dystopian novel began… what a weird feeling. I’ve written before about Retro Futures, by which I mean looking at how the future looked to science fiction writers in previous eras, measuring what they got right and what they got wrong, and then thinking…

  • Why I Wish CNN Had Waited a Day to Fire Don Lemon: Bonus Post

    Here are some handy links for two stories that hit at almost precisely the same moment this morning. Media these days suffers from a weird paradox. On one hand, since Reagan got rid of the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980s news organizations have not had to present both sides of an issue, which has led to partisan…

  • Keyword: Eventness

    Watching the series finale of “Star Trek: Picard” was a lonely exercise because most of the value of experiences comes from sharing them. Regret seldom punctuates my day-to-day life, but if I had Prof. Peabody’s Wayback Machine handy I would jump back a few days and then schlep up to Seattle or down to L.A.…

  • Musk, Twitter, NPR

    When the Twitter owner and Tesla CEO wrongly labeled NPR as “state-affiliated media” NPR fought back in a powerful way, but it’s only a start. What needs to happen next? Money has no morals. Money erodes morals because it washes away context and specificity in favor of interchangeability. Think about the differences among giving a…

  • Why You Should Read “Chokepoint Capitalism”

    A new book explains how we got to our age of giant culture companies shaking down artists, why it matters to the rest of us, and what we can do about it. It baffles me that Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow’s book Chokepoint Capitalism isn’t on top of The New York Times bestseller list. It’s an important book…

  • 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…

  • Analog Icebergs, Digital Oceans

    Forget ChatGPT and Bard, if you want to experience a miraculous technology try a kitchen sink. I learned this the hard way a few nights ago when our sink backed up. No kitchen sink means no convenient place to clean the dinner dishes, nowhere to wash away the bits of food waste that we can’t…

  • Attention is Not a Currency

    “Paying attention,” a common metaphor, is misleading because there are different sorts of attention, and the relationship among them isn’t reducible to numbers. If you’re in the Attention Business—and whether you’re selling movies, cars, toothpaste, whoopee cushions, sex toys, health insurance, a ride hailing service, or a new ointment for that embarrassing rash, every business is in…

  • The Start of the English Major

    In the A.I. revolution, figuring out the contours of our human intelligence has never been more important. Who is best equipped to do this work? I give keynote addresses all over the planet about digital transformation and sharpest-edged technology trends. One of my themes is that anything that can be digital will be digital. The counterintuitive corollary to this is that…

  • Would Anyone Under 30 watch “Picard”?

    Like “The Mandalorian” or “Loki,” the Paramount+ series “Star Trek: Picard” is unlikely ever to attract new viewers. But is that a problem? Here’s a newsflash to no one who has met me. I’m a nerd. One piece of evidence from a vast jigsaw puzzle of nerdery: Friday night, I watched the third episode of…