A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
The vast majority of the documents people use to do business are really quite poor. Presentations that make your eyes glaze over, memos that are inscrutable or unclear, and all kinds of artifacts that say more about how they were created than whatever message they were ostensibly trying to communicate. It's been one of my great frustrations for years, and a big part of why I wrote Make Better…
One aspect of strategy that’s been largely lost in the tech industry in recent years is how to compete against platforms, since the major tech companies have gotten so big that markets are no longer competitive. However, the AI market is still early enough, and users and society are still angry enough, that the Big AI companies can lose. But for them to lose, everybody else in the ecosystem has to…
“[T]here can be alternatives. What we can imagine is, rather than the ChatGPT killer, a lot of different little AIs from little responsible players.” That’s me, in The Guardian a few days ago, trying to distill a message that I’ve been trying to get out as broadly as possible for quite a while now. It's sort of like hoping a comet will take out the major AI players and a bunch of smaller new…
If you followed along with the recent joyful celebrations of the Artemis cruise around the moon, and took a moment to dive into the photographic archives of the mission, you might have noticed that all of the original images were shared by NASA on the venerable photo sharing service Flickr . What you might not know is… why? Here’s the TL;DR: Flickr comes from (and helped start!) the Web 2.0 era,…
The cultural battles over AI have broken down over predictable lines in the past few years, with critics rightfully calling out the big AI platforms for training on content without consent, recklessly building without considering environmental impact, and designing platforms that are unaccountable because their code and weights (the parameters that describe how an AI model works) aren’t open for…
It's been a decade since we lost Prince, and I wanted to take a moment to offer a look back at some of the pieces I've written over the years, and share some of the work I've done, and hopefully it will give you a chance to explore some aspect of his artistry or legacy that you haven't yet had a chance to discover! Perhaps a good place to start: It's time to discover Prince — a set of starting…
It’s rare that you get to see work that directly helps those who most deserve it, but I want to tell you about the opportunity we so seldom get to actually contribute in a way that we know will have real impact. I’ve been on the board of the Lower Eastside Girls Club for about a decade, getting a front row seat to seeing what a truly community-focused and effective organization can do for those in…
In just the last few weeks, we’ve seen a series of software security vulnerabilities that, until recently, would each have been the biggest exploit of the year in which they were discovered. Now, they’ve become nearly routine. There’s a new one almost every day. The reason for this rising wave of massively-impactful software vulnerabilities is that LLMs are rapidly increasing in their ability to…
These days, we’re all living in a constant state of crisis, foisted upon us by a world where those who are meant to keep things stable are the least stable factors in our lives. The chaos and stress of that reality makes it difficult to make any plans, let alone to make decisions if you have responsibilities for a team or organization that you’re meant to be leading. It’s easy to imagine there’s…
One of the most infuriating tropes that I see repeated in media is executives (usually from boring old companies) insisting that their employees don’t want to work hard. Media outlets dutifully repeat this pernicious lie, despite there being no evidence to back it up, and then cultural commentators either credulously amplify it, or actively take part in advancing the narrative as part of their…
I finally got the chance to drop by one of my favorite podcasts, The Vergecast, where David Pierce had me on to talk about the recent conversation about Apple's moves around video podcasts , as well as the much broader big-picture considerations around keeping podcasts open. We started with grounding the conversation in the idea that "Wherever you get your podcasts" is a radical statement . The…
Yesterday, I had the chance to witness someone who's one of the most dedicated, competent advocates for privacy and digital rights bring that message to a whole new platform. It turns out, it's pretty delightful, especially in a moment when our civil liberties and rights online couldn't matter more! Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation , has been a tireless…