Category: Media

  • Apple’s Vision Pro: What Will it Take to Go Big?

    The newest product from the world’s most valuable company will transform the world, but not for quite some time. I’ve been hesitant to write about Apple’s new “spatial computing” device: the thing that the world’s most valuable company doesn’t want to call an Augmented Reality (AR) headset. However, since there are things that I haven’t seen…

  • Why I Wish CNN Had Waited a Day to Fire Don Lemon: Bonus Post

    Here are some handy links for two stories that hit at almost precisely the same moment this morning. Media these days suffers from a weird paradox. On one hand, since Reagan got rid of the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980s news organizations have not had to present both sides of an issue, which has led to partisan…

  • 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…

  • Adventures in Self-Disruption

    Apple is preparing to cannibalize its most profitable product, the iPhone. It’s a pattern we’ve seen before. Remember the Newton? This week in The New York Times, we learned about uncharacteristic debate in the executive ranks at Apple around the long-awaited Augmented Reality (AR) glasses that the company will release in June. Some execs worry that there is…

  • Would Anyone Under 30 watch “Picard”?

    Like “The Mandalorian” or “Loki,” the Paramount+ series “Star Trek: Picard” is unlikely ever to attract new viewers. But is that a problem? Here’s a newsflash to no one who has met me. I’m a nerd. One piece of evidence from a vast jigsaw puzzle of nerdery: Friday night, I watched the third episode of…

  • 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…

  • What’s Curious about Microsoft and OpenAI

    It’s more than a flurry: we’re seeing a monsoon of articles about OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s proposed $10B investment in OpenAI, and how Microsoft would recoup that investment by getting 75% of OpenAI’s profits—of which there are currently none. (Nina Schick has a nice summary.) Even without that 75% of profits provision, this is a great…

  • 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…

  • Scarier than Skynet: AI and Persuasion

    Most dystopian fantasies concern monsters we can see conquering us, but with new technologies will we even know if we’ve been conquered? You can tell a lot about a culture by its dystopias: its fantasies of fear. When you have dueling fantasies, you can tell even more by what they agree on and what they…