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Month: February 2019

The Fine Line Between Culture and Cult

The Fine Line Between Culture and Cult

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Erin Griffin recently wrote an excellent piece in The New York Times entitled Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work? “Never once at the start of my workweek…have I paused, looked to the heavens and whispered: #ThankGodIt’sMonday,” writes Griffin. Yet that is the culture that’s being bred, most explicitly at WeWork (now the We Company), where “Neon signs demand they “Hustle harder,” and murals spread the gospel of T.G.I.M. Even the cucumbers in WeWork’s water coolers have an agenda. “Don’t stop when you’re tired…

“It’s not difficult to view hustle culture as a swindle. After all, convincing a generation of workers to beaver away is convenient for those at the top.” Read More...

Amazon to NYC: Drop Dead!

Amazon to NYC: Drop Dead!

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What happens when business and politics meet

The big announcement recently was that Amazon is pulling out of its deal to have New York City become HQ2. A huge loss to the city, in terms of job creation and the benefits that come with a tech giant coming in with its huge and high profile footprint. Of course, NY offered some $3B in incentives to the behemoth. The downside of Amazon’s withdrawal is that New York will lose the taxes that Amazon would eventually pay, and for those of us who have been following the math, Amazon Will Pay a Whopping $0 in Federal Taxes on $11.2 Billion Profits, according to Yahoo Finance. Read More...

Invaluable Lessons Startups Can Learn from Trader Joe’s, a Food Retailer Who Created a Whole New Category

Invaluable Lessons Startups Can Learn from Trader Joe’s, a Food Retailer Who Created a Whole New Category

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Ah, Trader Joe’s!

Ever notice the lines at TJ’s? We’re not talking about the ones at check-out. We’re talking about the ones that often spiral around the block, just to get into the store. You’d think that there was a celebrity inside perusing the avocados. Read More...

Surveillance Capitalism: We Are Definitely the Product

Surveillance Capitalism: We Are Definitely the Product

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The tech cartel has been labeled many things. “Attention Merchants” being one of them. In her new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff has designated a new category for them: Surveillance Capitalists. “Surveillance capitalism,” she writes, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data.

The Business of the Internet

“When the security expert Bruce Schneier wrote that “surveillance is the business model of the internet,” The Guardian reports, “he was really only hinting at the reality that Zuboff has now illuminated. The combination of state surveillance and its capitalist counterpart means that digital technology is separating the citizens in all societies into two groups: the watchers (invisible, unknown and unaccountable) and the watched. This has profound consequences for democracy because asymmetry of knowledge translates into asymmetries of power. But whereas most democratic societies have at least some degree of oversight of state surveillance, we currently have almost no regulatory oversight of its privatised counterpart. This is intolerable.” Read More...