Category: Culture

  • 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…

  • Mediapocalypse 2025

    Peak TV is here, but it’s not going to last because there isn’t enough audience to go around. The collapse and consolidation is just a bit more than two years away. Here are my predictions. What happens after you reach a peak, any peak? You descend from the height… whether it’s summiting Everest, climbing that hill near…

  • Nostalgia and Pseudo-Nostalgia in TV

    “Happy Days” portrayed the 1950s when the 1950s weren’t even 20 years in the past. Last week saw the premieres of two new series, “Quantum Leap” and “Reboot,” that explore similar territory. For kids in the 1970s the biggest star in the world was Henry Winkler, who played The Fonz on Happy Days. The show was…

  • The New York Times’ Moral Lapse

    The Gray Lady blew it when it decided to review Jared Kushner’s new memoir, no matter how scathing the review. Your correspondent also blew it by posting about the review.  When people learn that I’m an atheist often the first thing they say is, “oh, so you don’t believe in God?” “No,” I push back…

  • Experience Stacks, Movie Stars, and the Problem with Facebook

    How we experience the work of movies stars is different than how we experience the work of actors, and that difference also helps to understand what we lose when we spend a lot of time on Facebook. The job of an actor and the job of a movie star are similar—they overlap—but they are not…

  • Experience Stacks: Top Gun, Star Trek, Spider-Man

    What are Experience Stacks? And why is it important for businesses and customers for a wide range of industries to understand them? Many companies refer to their selection and arrangement of software and hardware as a “Tech Stack” that focuses on the creation, management, production, and tracking of business activities.  On the reception side, we…

  • What Twitter should do next (after Musk)

    Now that the Tesla CEO is riding off into the sunset, the social media company needs to skip the protracted court battle and focus on what’s important. On Friday, Elon Musk made official his desire to wiggle out of his Twitter acquisition. Many Dispatch readers kindly and gratifyingly reached out or posted saying “Brad, you called this one!”…

  • The world in April, 2023

    In 2011, my near-future science fiction novel Redcrosse came out. The action was set in 2023, which is just a few short months from now. How clear was my vision? Last week at a film festival, I was trapped in an endless concessions queue that (bonus!) doubled as an internet dead zone. After I had…