[Excerpts from a talk I recently gave. There’s a lot of change washing over media companies. Here I highlight a couple fundamentals: web giants colonizing the living room, and the value and risk of data-driven business.] The media landscape continues to undergo dramatic shifts driven by digital transformation. Those that…

“Chaos is a ladder.” - Lord Petyr Baelish In a world fundamentally shaped and held together by digital networks, programmable media is a very potent weapon. Vladislav Surkov is a fascinating figure credited with staffing and directing Ukraine’s separatists and architecting the annexation of Crimea. …

[A modified version of this article has been published on Foreign Policy.] Following an earlier 2017 survey, Foreign Policy has opened another poll to assess the likelihood of a second US Civil War. However, framing it as a second civil war embeds numerous assumptions about warfare on US soil that…

Cities and companies are increasingly deploying networks, sensors, and data systems with hopes of greater optimization, security, and economic growth. …

The Smart Home is still a young category but it reflects deep currents of digitization, connectivity, efficiency, & security. It’s also a long game for platform leaders to further colonize the home. More interestingly, it may be a necessary response to our emerging climate crises. Yet, as the category matures there are large challenges in establishing trust and value. — Although we seem to be moving towards a future of intelligent structures that are aware of their inhabitants and actively model and manage their needs and the physical needs of the house, the comprehensive promise of the smart home is yet to be realized and will likely take a decade…

[Putting on my corporate analyst hat…] Logistics leaders are beginning to capitalize on the immense amounts of data generated by their cyber-physical systems. With artificial intelligence they’re finding greater efficiencies, higher performance, more sophisticated network orchestration, and more accurate demand forecasts. Logistics is an enormous industry that has wrapped a…

The world heaved under the sudden weight of its own nervous system. Lit up and lashed to the planet in only a few decades, we lost our bearings in the paradox of connectivity: minute detail of every moment yet removed from any tangible presence, our animal bandwidth compressed to sound…

Human labor may decouple from global supply chains but it won’t abandon regional and local productivity. “You’re thinking of this as you’ll take an existing product and add some AI to it. That’s not what we’re seeing. What we’re seeing is an entirely new kind of product that wasn’t possible before.” — Marc Andreessen “Just as mechanical muscles made human labor less in demand, so are…

When it’s busy like this the viz sometimes shifts like the color bleed you used to see on those old Sunday comics, way back in the day. Ubiquitous fiber pipes & wide-band wireless still can’t give enough bandwidth to the teeming multitudes downtown. The viz starts to lag, gets offset…