Category: Culture

  • 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…

  • Retro futures and how they can help us  to see what’s next (from 2018)

    Science fiction ranging from Disneyland’s Tomorrowland to Star Wars and Star Trek and beyond contains lessons for how we got here and where we’re going. [Note: this piece originally ran on the Center’s website of February 14, 2018, but I strangely neglected to cross-post it here at the time. I have updated the now-defunct links…

  • Retro Futures, ChatGPT, & More

     In this short post, I dig into why a podcast about a teacher using (rather than banning) OpenAI’s ChatGPT program seemed eerily familiar… If you have a stack of dishes to do or face a 30 minute drive, then don’t miss the January 13th episode of Hard Fork a podcast from The New York Times…

  • Artisanal Crap

    As generative AI makes first-pass creation faster and easier, an unintended consequence is that humans may become less able to make great things. Let me start by stipulating that generative AI (ChatGPT, DALL-E) will change how we do what we do, taking the heavy lifting off much human endeavor. This will be true whether it’s…

  • My 2023 Prediction… or Prayer

    Many thinkers end each year with a cluster of predictions for the next year. I have just one—and it’s more of a prayer than a prediction—about trust. The pressing question of our age isn’t new. The Marx Brothers asked it in Duck Soup (1933): “who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” In a recent Los Angeles…

  • What Happens When Companies Become Partisan?

    Elon Musk’s right-wing posts on Twitter have plummeted the stock at Tesla, the public company where Musk is CEO. I discuss this with Lana McGilvray of Purpose and Peter Horan of Horan MediaTech. Background: On Tuesday, December 13, Peter shared this article from Inside EVs about recent research from YouGov and Morning Consult, each arguing that Tesla is now…

  • Experience Stacks, Competitive Advantage, and Netflix’s “Wednesday”

    The new Netflix series about the daughter from The Addams Family going to a Hogwarts-style high school doesn’t ignore the earlier versions of the story: it embraces them, which is part of why it succeeds. One difference between artificial intelligence and the human kind (at least for now) is that AI is amazing at pattern…

  • Frontiers of Scale

    As media continues to fragment in the face of changes in legislation and technology, where will new big audiences come from? A few issues back, I explored how changes in legislation and technology are signaling the end of cheap digital scale for media. (Don’t worry: you don’t have to read that issue to understand this one.) If…

  • Industry Evolution by Meteor Strike

    Two recent developments in the world of comic books have lessons for all businesses in the age of digital transformation. From the “Big Story You Haven’t Noticed” department: this month, two things happened in the world of comic books that combine to make a huge inflection point. My friend Peter Horan calls this sort of thing…