BradBerens.com
Thoughts about where our real and digital worlds collide.

  • Musk, Trump, Twitter, and New Media Math

    It’s a good thing for the commonwealth that Elon Musk was born in South Africa; that fact bars him from seeking the U.S. presidency. Otherwise, it’s a sure bet that he’d run as a third party candidate in 2024. He’d win, too. Musk understands the media better than all but one other person. That one…

  • Distraction Audits & Why to Do One

    It’s never been harder to pay attention to the things we care about. The world is bursting with information. The designers of the devices and applications that we use to get that information work hard to turn us into stimulation addicts, doom scrolling and clicking to get another dopamine hit of input regardless of its…

  • Apple, Alaska Airlines, Taco Bell & Sweetgreen: the Trouble with Subscriptions

    Two recent articles caught my eye about a new vogue for subscriptions for products that are typically transactional.  The first has a misleading title: “Apple Is Working on a Hardware Subscription Service for iPhones” (Bloomberg, March 24th) is misleading because the planned service actually covers all Apple hardware software.  In last Tuesday’s episode of The…

  • How Risk is Changing

    The world seems more dangerous today than it ever has before, but study after study shows that we’re safer now. Hans Rosling’s Factfulness, Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist, and Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature are three books that dig into this. In part, life feels more dangerous today because we have so much information about bad things that happen…

  • New Challenges for Facebook

    In junior high, I discovered that my school library had declined to carry a book. (I don’t remember the title.) Incensed, I went to the Headmaster (yes, I went to that kind of school) to confront him about censorship. To his credit, he didn’t respond, “get the hell out of my office!” Instead, he said, “Brad, if…

  • The Experience Gap

    One way or another, we’re all in the experience creation biz, so it’s bracing to realize how bad we are at talking about actual experiences rather than memories. Back when I taught English Lit at U.C. Berkeley, I’d bring three balls to class. “This one,” I’d say holding up a ball, “is the thing we’re…

  • Why Amazon Will Buy Starbucks

    I’m not usually one for predictions with due dates. I see the trends, where the dominos are falling, but spotting precisely when a trend will happen is harder. This time, though, I’ll go out on a limb because two events this week have combined to make me think that Amazon will buy Starbucks within the…

  • Why Facebook is Creepier than Google

    A 2/18 article in the Wall Street Journal by Suzanne Vranica, Patience Haggin, and Salvador Rodriguez—Inside Facebook’s $10 Billion Breakup With Advertisers—shows that when it comes to restraining Facebook from tracking us the real power doesn’t lie with the U.S. Federal Government, which is still spinning its wheels on any regulation of Big Tech. (Congressional…

  • NFTs, 5G, HUD: Colliding Trends and the Intermediate Future

    I’m an NFT skeptic. They seem like digital litter—cybernetic landfill that will clutter the e-commons like plastic bags blowing across a public park. This skepticism is unusual for me. I’m usually an early adopter, as the elephants graveyard in my garage of once exciting/now vanished tech will attest. Blockchain makes sense when it comes to…

  • Overfocusing and Immersion

    The point of optical illusions like “Duck-Rabbit” and “Young Woman or Old Woman” isn’t that one of the options is correct. Instead, the point is that both are right even if you have to toggle back and forth, taking turns, to see each separately.  I have yet to find a good term to describe this…