Category: Internet

  • Face: The Final Frontier

    A decade after Google Glass, are smart glasses finally becoming a thing? Although we’ve all had our individual journeys with the internet, the journey of the internet itself has been one of increasing intimacy. At first, we had to go somewhere else to get online: to a lab somewhere at a business or university. Then…

  • The Precipitous Decline of Brands

    …and the rise of generics because of AI agents and other things. (Issue #173) In a recent issue of my newsletter, I mentioned a wide-ranging conversation about AI with my friend Louis Jones of the Brand Safety Institute. Louis and I spent a chunk of time talking about the rise of AI Agents, how they will impact…

  • Scammer Spotting: Little Tips and Big Worries

    Online scams are a $500B annual “industry.” Here are a few ways to protect yourself from being the next victim. There’s a thin line between paranoia and sensible precaution. When it comes to online scams, it’s hard to see the line because it’s squiggly, jagged, dotted, and looks like the EKG of somebody on a…

  • The Flip

    In today’s world of limitless information, stores, experts, and brands need to find new functions in order to avoid irrelevance. I’m traveling for business, so I hope you’ll indulge me and let me share a piece I wrote for The Center back in November of 2019 that I think holds up. I’ve updated links and fussily changed…

  • When Strategy Devours Culture

    When Strategy Devours Culture

    In 2004, I had an inside view of a company facing irrelevance and also making bad choices. Peter Drucker famously observed that in business “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” meaning that an organization can have a perfect strategic plan and still fail if the corporate culture doesn’t align around that strategy. The reverse is also…

  • B.L.U.E. revisited…

    In today’s issue of my newsletter, The Brad Berens Weekly Dispatch, I revisited a piece I wrote on this blog back in 2019: Am I B.L.U.E.? (Bored, Lonely, Uncomfortable… Ever). Here’s the context from The Dispatch: Last week, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes had a peculiar op-ed in The New York Times about the value of boredom that’s a…

  • Move Fast and Kill Kids

    Trigger Warning: If the title wasn’t enough of a hint, this piece gets into dark territory. In the December 5 episode of the podcast On with Kara Swisher, Swisher interviewed Megan Garcia and Meetali Jain. Garcia is the mother of Sewell Setzer III, a 14-year-old boy who killed himself in part because of an unhealthy, one-sided quasi-relationship with a chatbot…

  • Tempest on a Toy Box

    Mattel printed the wrong URL on the back of the boxes of toys for the new “Wicked” movie, which was not good, but just how bad was it? Lady Sneerwell in Sheridan’s School for Scandal observes, “There’s no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature: the malice of a good thing is the barb that makes…

  • Cheating at Wordle

    In which I confess to a weak moment that also has some interesting implications, or at least that’s what I’m telling myself. Bless me, Reader, for I have sinned. La Profesora and I aren’t competitive when the stakes are real, but this mutual support does not apply to vicious games of Gin Rummy or to…

  • The End of Filter Failure?

    How soon will technology start working for users rather than big tech companies when it comes to information overload? Last time, I shared a microfiction (1,000 words or less), a short science fiction story called “Fleeing the Emerald City,” about Calvin, a man who uses advanced filtering technology to lose weight but doesn’t much enjoy…