Alex Wittenberg

Take your topic, and then challenge yourself to pick a direction.

For instance, app teams that pursue community ownership first (starting with a wide token distribution) risk engendering a community of speculators, rather than real users. Without a working product, ownership is worthless, and the community won’t stick. Many teams that have done this are unable to back into product/market fit, and as a result have

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Disconnected employee data and workflows are a massive tax on productivity.Given employee data lives across dozens of systems, point solutions cannot solve remote employment holistically – they solve symptoms, not root causes. Companies must either pay the administrative tax to support a remote team, or miss out on top global talent.

We’re made so uneasy by the experience of allowing reality to unfold at its own speed that when we’re faced with a problem, it feels better to race toward a resolution—any resolution, really, so long as we can tell ourselves we’re “dealing with” the situation, thereby maintaining the feeling of being in control. So we snap at our partners, rather... See more

In a discussion that has nothing to do with technology, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote about a tendency to become “forgetful of our bodies.” Perhaps that’s a good way of putting this tendency to assume that digital culture is immaterial and disembodied. We never leave our bodies when we are immersed in digitally mediated experiences, but... See more

In this situation, making a choice—picking one item from the menu—far from representing some kind of defeat, becomes an affirmation. It’s a positive commitment to spend a given portion of time doing this instead of that—actually, instead of an infinite number of other “thats”—because this, you’ve decided, is what counts the most right now. In other... See more

Indeed, the power of the dream lies in its ordinarily immersive quality, and, while virtual reality is often touted as an immersive media experience, it remains still, as far as I can tell, a comparatively inelegant, awkward, and sometimes disorienting experience. Additionally, of course, you potentially encounter other people in virtual worlds,... See more

Chalmers explains that “a common way of thinking about virtual realities is that they’re somehow fake realities, that what you perceive in VR isn’t real. I think that’s wrong.” “The virtual worlds we’re interacting with,” he adds, “can be as real as our ordinary physical world. Virtual reality is genuine reality.”