BradBerens.com
Thoughts about where our real and digital worlds collide.
-
Are There Unpersuadable People?
In this election season when we’re all getting hundreds of daily messages attempting to persuade us, most aren’t effective. I return to earlier work about persuasion with new thoughts. I’ve been writing about persuasion for years, long before the birth of The Dispatch. Back in August of 2023, I tried to decant a lot of my…
-
Retro Futures: War Games
Can a 1983 movie thriller about computers and the military tell us anything about drone warfare today? In 1984, my lifelong friend Juliet and I were watching a then-recent movie, War Games, at my parents’ house. This was in the early years of home video. The first Blockbuster store had yet to open, and Tim Berners-Lee…
-
Experience Stacks and Travel Back
Returning to places you’ve been can reactivate old contexts and relationships in a special way. A quick word about Experience Stacks before we move on to our top story. Experience Stacks are the different contexts that a customer, user, or audience brings to a product or story. People improvisationally shift from context to context during experiences, which…
-
My Ozempic Journey: Packing Up
Sometimes, when you know a change is coming, the anticipation itself can create other sorts of change. Regular Dispatch readers might remember a few issues back—in Will Ozempic Kill Movie Theaters?—when I explored how the possibility of 10% of the U.S. population going onto GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Ozempic might be the final nail in the collective coffin…
-
The Digital Cyrano
How realistic is the idea that an AI-driven “digital intimacy assistant” could help a shy man woo somebody he finds attractive? Last time, I shared a microfiction (1,000 words or less), a short science fiction story called Flyrt about Chris, a shy man, Roxy, the woman he finds attractive, and Cyr, a snarky, AI-powered “digital intimacy assistant”…
-
Flyrt, a Microfiction
Can an AI-powered digital intimacy assistant help a shy man finally talk with the woman of his dreams? CHRIS couldn’t tear his attention from Roxy. In the office complex cafeteria line, passing in the art-filled lobby, during the occasional shared elevator ride, he found the flash of her overheard wit, the sparkle of her eyes, the…
-
New Cracks in Reality
Deep fakes, voice cloning, and other technologies are making fraud more convincing and widespread than ever, but there’s another threat to our ability to answer “what is real?” An ongoing topic here is how answers to the question “what is real?” keep changing as new technologies (Generative AI in particular) make it easier to create…