My Spider Senses Are Tingling

The voice of novel technological communication has been, almost from the beginning, a female voice, which is to say the voice of a helper, a perfect helper, pleasant, unflappable, immune to insults, come-ons and bossiness. It’s a short path from the telephone operator to Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, both forever placating, always even-keeled,... See more

Early prepubescence teaches you the unacceptability of

smelling like yourself in public. It’s an unsolvable problem

that will follow you to the grave. Your only options are

temporary, and rarely work.

The divide between performance anxiety and a feeling of

frictionless ease swings on the consumer’s response to

information. It sucks to be broke, but it sucks even more to

receive daily low balance notifications. We know our

preferences are being calculated and used to predict our

next moves, but we still don’t feel like we can take our hands

off the... See more

This shift came because of what Nintendo called its “blue ocean” strategy. The idea was that the increasing technological complexity of games was actually making them less appealing to many consumers. We’d come a long way from the simplicity of making Mario run and jump in the original Super Mario Bros . Just looking at a GameCube controller could... See more