Adam Rogers’ Post

Lots of folks, from journalistic outlets to political campaigns to people trying to sell stuff, would like to better understand how teenagers and young adults think about what they see online. Turns out that a Google subsidiary called Jigsaw has been doing its own research into the information-consumption habits of Generation Z ... and as I write in Business Insider today, they're pretty interesting! As concerned with the social context of information as they are with its veracity, more interested in passing time online with friends than whether what they're reading is true or useful, Gen Z has a whole new approach to news and knowledge. And it isn't necessarily bad! They check the comments first to see if a headline is "fake news" or AI-generated slop, sure, but then again science-minded folks always check citation numbers. Same kind of social contextualizing. Whomst is to say? (Though I'll grant that a whole generation that prefers to get news filtered through aggregating, like-minded Influencers on TikTok is not great for the economics of my chosen profession.) https://lnkd.in/gxjd2DAA

Talked to the Dynamist podcast about my Business Insider work on anticompetitive tactics in Silicon Valley, from venture capital to mergers-'n'-acquisitions: https://lnkd.in/gu3hZNC6

OK so maybe I’m being a little frowny-face-emoji about hyperrealistic generative AI tools here on Good Morning America this morning (!). Just, you know, are we sure we want this stuff? (That is indeed my childhood Mego Captain America on the shelf in back, though I’ve made some upgrades over the years.) https://lnkd.in/gJad2-3h

Just three companies—Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—own 65 percent of all the data center capacity in the world. And they're building more. Quite a lot more, actually, in the form of "hyperscaled" data centers all over the world, power- and water-hungry, aimed at sating smaller companies' demand for AI and other cloud computation capacity. Why get into this business? Well, as I write in Business Insider today, some economists and regulators fear it's to build out further domination of the market, and of the potentially innovative and disruptive startups trying to build their own products. #datacenters #artificialintelligence #competition #economics https://lnkd.in/gFhAczpW

New York's about to start charging commercial buildings for their greenhouse gas emissions, and other cities are likely to follow. What's a building owner to do? Retrofits for solar, heat pumps, insulation and fancy glass, etc. are pricy, too. But some older US cities have an ace up their sleeves—under their streets, actually. It's old networks of steam pipes that used to heat tons of buildings downtown. They fell out of use over the 20th century, but if you tune up how they make the steam—like, switch from dirty old sources to electrical cogeneration, or even excess heat from data centers or heat pumps, you've got carbon-free steam ready-made to heat the buildings of the cities of the future. At least that's the idea...and if private equity infrastructure firms like it, well, it must be...good? Anyway, I'm usually not a fan of steampunk, I wrote about this idea for Business Insider today, and it seems pretty cool. Hot. Anyway, you get it. https://lnkd.in/gFCH_RKa #sustainability #energy #cities #climate #infrastructure

I've been making a practice of posting my sources for stories, and you can find my bibliography for this one here: https://lnkd.in/gjTTdwZT

Got the extra treat of working with Hugh Langley on this deep dive into California Forever….

If it seems like every time you buy something or interact with a profession of any kind, you get a survey asking how things went...well, you're not wrong. The idea of a customer survey is at least a century old, but in the last 20 years the ubiquity of cheap-and-easy email combined with new ideas on how to measure customer "satisfaction." Result: well, on a scale of one to 10, how would you rate this LinkedIn post so far? This is what I'm writing about today on Business Insider — the overwhelming tide of companies attempting to extract data from our experiences with them. It's not always clear what they're going to *do* with that data, mind you. Sometimes it's to see if some new product meets with our approval; sometimes it's to better understand the customer experience journey into order to increase value and enhance the shareholder connection to ... wait, sorry, dozed off for a second there. Giving this paragraph a one. Very dissatisfied, would not recommend. Obviously, companies want to know if their products are good—and sales aren't the only way to determine that. Now, I do wonder if the constant stream of surveys emerging from places like doctors' offices, restaurants, websites, and gyms aren't an example of sales and marketing departments being very good at selling and marketing the services of sales and marketing departments. We all of KPIs, right? I guess I'd say, I understand that since the 1980s or so people who build or make things have also been taught that the quality of the product isn't enough—that people buy stuff based on experience, not on some inherent aspect of the widget. And that means everyone wants to know how our experience is going. Whether they're doing it right, or doing it so often that we're all a lot less likely to answer, is a whole other question. And whether we're all going to be happy when hordes of AI chatbots are listening in on all our social media and customer-service calls, extracting some digital version of our emotional state regarding the lateness of a package or the difficulty of getting an appointment...well. Data isn't always knowledge, you know? (As usual, I'm also posting a bibliography of the published sources I relied on, in part, in writing this story. You can find that at https://lnkd.in/gpY5U5Kp.) #customerexperience #commerce #surveys #data #bigdata #netpromoterscore

More of me talking about city bike lanes and their benefits for nearby businesses — the research says they help the local economy quite a lot, it turns out. https://lnkd.in/gKg_5umr #economics #cities #bicycles #transit #retail

You have probably heard of "acqui-hires," when a big company buys a little one to get access to the people or tech. And maybe you've heard of "killer acquisitions," when a big company buys a little one just to kill its competing product. (One estimate says somewhere around 5 percent of all M&A in pharmaceuticals are killers.) But now a couple of big-deal antitrust scholars are arguing that another, more pernicious kind of anticompetitive behavior happens well before the acquisition or IPO stage. They call it "co-opting disruption," and it's when a big company uses venture investment, data access, or directed lobbying to encourage potential, baby competitors to stay in lanes that won't someday threaten the big guy. This, the writers say, is what's killing innovation and disruption in the tech world, and I write about it today for Business Insider. It's an interesting notion—the idea is that the Big Five tech companies have held sway for decades not just because they buy any nascent competitor, but because they use other means to persuade, cajole, and pressure anyone who might someday maybe possibly be a threat to instead work on less threatening projects. The argument goes that a dominant incumbent company has no choice but to engage in these kind of shenanigans, because *any* potential competition poses a threat proportionally as big as their dominance in a sector. It'd be terribly hard to police; as active as FTC and the Department of Justice have gotten on antitrust in the Biden era, the legality of these stealthier, less-reportable behaviors is murkier. But it may also be holding back truly innovative science and technology. (Also, I'm experimentally posting the sources I use for my stories on my personal web site. If you'd like to take a look, that's here: https://lnkd.in/gNUmCicH) #innovation #tech #competition #antitrust https://lnkd.in/gtUpefsJ