How customer service and Starbucks are killing conversation

One of the defining activities of human beings is conversation. We like to talk to one another, and do it often. In our interactions with companies, our conversations have become increasingly, and insidiously, scripted. When we call “customer service”, we’re put in contact with someone who has been told how to talk to us, and [...]

Book Review: The Most Human Human (in short: read it!)

After seeing the an interview with author on The Daily Show, and reading a glowing notice in The New Yorker, I made a priority of finishing The Most Human Human before I ended family leave. It’s a delightful and discursive book, wending its way through cognitive science, philosophy, poetry, artificial intelligence, embodied experience, and more. [...]

The “Connected” Meme Flourishes

At the beginning of March, I gave a talk where I posit that we are in a “Connected Age” and that business must alter its practices accordingly. Shortly after, I find out that Dave Gray had recently written a blog post about the Connected Company, which then turned into its own blog, and Google Group. [...]

A Beneficial Reconsideration: The Original Ending of ELECTION

Over ten years ago, I blogged my thoughts about the film ELECTION (scroll down to July 30, 1999 — this was when I maintained the site by hand!), which was easily among my favorite films of the 1990s. I haven’t seen the movie since then, so I don’t know how it holds up. What I [...]

“Scientism”, rationality, and practicing design

Even though it was written by someone from frog, I have to give props to Ben McAlister’s “The Science of Good Design: A Dangerous Idea.”. At some point soon-ish I plan on writing about some of the follies of how design consulting is bought and sold, and Ben hits on a key aspect — the [...]

Thoughts on CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS

Thanks to paid family leave, Stacy and I were able to duck out to a matinee of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, in 3D… with an 8-week-old in tow! The subject matter of the film, the prehistoric art on the walls of the Chauvet Cave, is heartstoppingly powerful. Bearing witness to creative and communicative output that [...]

A billion dollar idea I’d have no idea how to make happen

While pursuing ideas related to the Connected Age, I’ve read some stuff on collaborative consumption and the sharing economy (think Zipcar, AirBNB, Freecycle). The Industrial Age was defined, in large part, by ownership. In Connected Age, we’re seeing a move to access. This lead me to think about “the cloud”, where our data is stored, [...]

Skype and Microsoft Could Work Very Well…. or not

I’ve read a fair bit of head-scratching over Microsoft’s US$8.5 billion acquisition of Skype, particularly after the challenges Skype had after it was acquired by, and then released from, eBay. Skype never made sense as part of eBay. eBay is about commerce. Skype is about communication. (Paypal, which is about money, fit with eBay perfectly, [...]

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Links, thoughts, and essays from Peter Merholz