Category: Culture

  • Keyword: Overfocusing

    The Hollywood strikes versus what makes experiences special in the first place. This is the third piece in my keywords thread, but you don’t need to read anything else to understand this one. Bad products can yield positive experiences, but we don’t have useful tools to describe the difference because we tend to focus more on products…

  • Economist, DeSantis, Trump, Shakespeare

    The May 27th issue of The Economist has an in-depth briefing entitled, “A bungled coup: Ron DeSantis has little chance of beating Donald Trump to his party’s nomination.” The Economist is always literate, but it isn’t often literary. This piece persistently conjures up Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar throughout. That includes the opening line: “Belatedly and nervously, the would-be assassins have been…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Retro Futures: AI and Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics

    Older sci fi can help us see the difference between where we are as a culture and where we thought we’d be. A look back at Isaac Asimov’s 1940s robot stories can help us make sense of AI today. Some science fiction is a potpourri of lasers and explosions and aliens popping out, but the better sort…

  • Microsoft’s New A.I.-Powered Bing and Shakespeare

    Pundits panicked last week when oddball chats with the new Bing pushed back the frontiers of weirdness, but were those conversations a fair test in the first place? Last week, columnists and analysts took to their fainting couches (limply dragging their laptops with them) and described surreal and disturbing conversations with Microsoft’s new chat-driven Bing…

  • Why People Believe Conspiracy Theories

    What makes people believe nonsense for which there is no evidence? As I first wrote a year ago, you can see the elements of persuasion in this simple quadrant: Mostly, people decide with their hearts and then justify with their heads. They’re also more keen to avoid loss than to pursue gain. Knowing where your argument…

  • Retro Futures: “Looker” (1981), Looking Back, Looking Forward

    42 years ago, a murder mystery predicted digital twins and deep fakes: what did this howlingly bad movie get right and wrong? Writing science fiction is a what if? exercise that tells us a lot about the moment when the writer first posed the question. Looking at where those predictions went awry can help us to understand…