Alex Wittenberg

Or if you like: people become the new platforms. 

There is something freeing about removing your face from your online persona. It paradoxically makes you feel like you can be more authentic. This is a stretch of an analogy but just as psychedelics that facilitate ego death allow for a truer glimpse at your underlying psychology, untying your digital persona from your smiling LinkedIn photo allows... See more

On a work trip to Sweden a few years back, I experienced a micro-level version of the same idea in the form of the fika, the daily moment when everyone in a given workplace gets up from their desks to gather for coffee and cake. The event resembles a well-attended coffee break, except that Swedes are liable to become mildly offended—which is the... See more

**Note:** Scarcity mindsetThis structural imperative is coupled with the cultural assumption that “our life will be better if we manage to bring more world within our reach: this is the mantra of modern life, unspoken but relentlessly reiterated and reified in our actions and behavior.” According to Rosa the “categorical imperative of late... See more

Not surprisingly, Rosa rightly notes that “technologies and processes associated with digitalization have fundamentally transformed our lives by making nearly the entire world, as it is represented in our consciousness, accessible and controllable in historically unprecedented ways.” Digital technology has especially abetted the parameterization of... See more

Before we dive in, let’s revisit the cold start problem — a well-known challenge for products with network effects (or “networks”), including Snapchat or Airbnb. On these products, the addition of a user makes the product more useful for all users. But on day 0, they have no users and, therefore, no utility to offer new users. This forces them to... See more

We can now measure and analyze dimensions of personal and social life that we wouldn’t even have thought to measure a decade or two ago. It was always theoretically possible for us to count our steps, but altogether impractical. Now we can have it done for us passively. Indeed, as most of us know all too well, all manner of information about us and... See more

And yet precisely because I was being forced to confront reality in this way—to see that I was always neglecting most tasks, in order to work on anything at all, and that working on everything at once simply wasn’t an option—the result was a powerful sense of undistracted calm, and a lot more productivity than in my days as a productivity... See more