My Spider Senses Are Tingling

The left has tended to lead the way in mastering new media, aided by its generally younger, tech-savvy supporters. Barack Obama harnessed Facebook in 2008, helping propel him into the White House. Today America’s right is ahead. Mr Trump has cultivated a following among the always-online, meme-sharing, crypto-trading tech community, which is more g... See more

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, i... 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

"Yet ideas never stand alone. They come woven in a web of auxiliary ideas, consequential notions, supporting concepts, foundational assumptions, side effects, and logical consequences and a cascade of subsequent possibilities. Ideas fly in flocks. To hold one idea in mind means to hold a cloud of them." (Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants)

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.

This is also only my perception but I felt like every time I opened up Instagram, brands were starting to push out way more content because they had all this shit to sell. Sure, there’s been a lot of content for years but this felt like a lot more than usual. We’ve just never been built like that, to be a content machine.

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 joy... See more