Category: Media

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Emotional Truths that Aren’t True

    Jonathan Haidt’s bestseller “The Anxious Generation” is a terrible book on which nobody should waste their money or attention. Last week I had the privilege and pleasure of joining Joey Dumont on an episode of his True Thirty podcast in which we debated the merits of Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling nonfiction book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring…

  • Musk’s Latest Antics

    On August 6, Twitter/X owner Elon Musk filed a frivolous lawsuit against an obscure advertising trade group; the timing is suspicious. As longtime readers know, I’ve written an intermittent series about Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. You don’t have to read those older pieces, nor must you care about advertising or know anything about GARM (the Global…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Wendy’s, Google, and Instagram

    Three times the media missed important context in the last week. I read a lot of High Quality News and avoid the Low Quality variety (see the helpful way that Ad Fontes Media defines these categories). Even topflight news can be so focused on short term events that they forget to ask context questions, by which I…

  • A “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” Happy Meal?

    The giant luxury goods company LVMH is getting into the entertainment business. What are the opportunities and obstacles it faces? A few days ago, luxury conglomerate LVMH announced that it was getting into the entertainment business. In a joint venture with Superconnector Studios (a consultancy): LVMH will seek to bolster promotion of the group’s brands—which include fashion houses Louis…

  • Walmart, Vizio, Amazon, and Experience Stacks

    This week, WSJ reported that the grocery giant is in talks to acquire a TV manufacturer: why is this a good idea, and how does it help Walmart compete with Amazon? (Issue #106) Attentive readers will remember my earlier explorations of Experience Stacks, which are the idiosyncratic collection of prior experiences somebody brings to bear on…

  • Retro Futures: “Wag the Dog” and Deep Fakes

    A classic 1997 movie about technology-fueled misinformation shows how democratized deception has become in 2024, and why we shouldn’t call them “deep fakes” in the first place. Typically, when I write about retro futures I’m exploring what a classic work of science fiction got right and wrong about the future and what that says about life today.…