James Stevens

a bunch of everything apps vying for customers feels less like a race for innovation and more like empires warring over territory. Tech companies are running the same data-hungry playbook with their everything apps as they did in the markets that made them so dominant in the first place. Even OpenAI, which has evolved from a little-known nonprofit ... 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

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 joy... See more