In my last post, I went on about how the ’sharing economy’ is a misnomer that distracts from what’s really going on. This time, I’m going to talk about the impact that distraction can have. Businesses that enable peer-to-peer commerce can have a huge positive impact, as I wrote last time. They enable people to ingeniously fill gaps in the …
Sharing, shmaring [part 1/2]
Happy New Year, people. I’ve got a backlog of partially-written pieces from 2015 that I plan to foist upon you in the coming months, on a somewhat more realistic schedule than the long-abandoned ‘100 posts in 100 days’. They’re likely to be mostly long reads, so settle in and make yourself comfortable. —— I’m generally not a big fan of …
Inadvertent dinosaurs [post 49/100]
[NB: The blogging hiaitus is still on – due to a few personal matters, I’ve needed to reduce my areas of focus. I plan to pick it up after the summer holidays and finish these 100 posts I so recklessly allowed myself to get muscled into all those months ago. In the meantime, this post demanded to be written, so …
False prophets [post 48/100]
Aaaaand we’re back. Please excuse the break – life very much got in the way and trust me, taking a break was way better than the schlock I would have been churning out if I’d forced myself to post every day. Then again, maybe this is schlock too. You’ll have to be the judge, dear reader. Anyway. Onward. A couple …
Little mysteries [post 47/100]
This morning I updated my iPhone to the latest version of iOS. About an hour later, I left for the airport. My phone was in my jacket pocket, as usual. My headphones were in and I was listening to music on Spotify, as usual. Only this time everything got a bit weird. First, the music started pausing, unpausing, jumping a …
The baby and the bathwater [post 46/100]
Another reader-suggested topic today… Here’s the question as it came in: “how is the art of ad making getting disrupted by the ‘skip this ad’ on YouTube – i.e. what message can you get across in 5 seconds to make people watch 30s?” I know I come down on advertising rather often and rather hard. But while it’s true that …
Conversing with ghosts [post 45/100]
Maybe I’m a little old-fashioned sometimes. A friend who’s got teenage daughters tells me that these days it’s considered ok (by some) to carry on a conversation while fiddling with one’s mobile. This still is definitely not ok in my circles, and no matter how much I apologise I always feel terrible when something comes up that I feel I …