Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 34

Should Prisoners Be Allowed to Use Social Media? Inside the #JailTok Movement and Debate

There is legislation under consideration in the UK that would have “harmful content filmed inside prisons removed from social media platforms more quickly.” It stems from a disturbing case where a woman saw a video of her son’s killer rapping from prison and mocking the justice system. There are plenty of other videos on the #jailtok hashtag that show prisoners doing shots, inciting violence and revealing the private identities of prison guards.

Some of these accounts also include prisone...

Aruba Becomes First Nation to Use the Internet Archive to Back up Their Entire History

The Indigenous population of Aruba was first colonized by the Spanish, and then the Dutch – which has given the Caribbean island a diverse history. As archivist Stacy Argondizzo also explains, “they were one disaster away, basically, from losing everything.” Back in 2018, the Internet Archive first began discussions with the country about helping them preserve all of their artifacts in the vast data stores of the San Francisco-based nonprofit.

Given that the nonprofit frequently faces law...

The App That Recreates Social Media’s Dopamine Hits Without Actually Letting You Post Anything

One of the irresistible allures of social media has always been the dopamine hit from people engaging with the things that you post. Getting likes feels good. What if you could create that same feeling without the toxic repercussions that come from just posting to chase this engagement? A new app called Palmsy offers an interesting solution – letting you post anything you like without uploading it anywhere. 

On Palmsy, your posts remain privately on your phone and the app generates randomized “li...

AXA’s New Foresight Report Offers 100 Reasons to Love the Future

There are plenty of futurists who will offer you a list of all the ways the world can go wrong, and things could be worse. Against that backdrop, this timely report from AXA Insurance’s foresight team offers 100 Reasons to Love the Future (PDF Download Link). The beautifully designed report covers everything from growing youth involvement in social issues to innovations looking to protect the oceans. Future music playlists, the impact of female entrepreneurs, transforming food systems and AI-aug...

Harper Collins Identifies Eco-Friendly Fonts to Save Thousands of Trees and Reduce Paper Usage

Every few months there are new sustainability stories of the world’s largest brands trying to create less wasteful packaging. Coca-Cola announced a new lighter bottle design this week and a few months ago began a trial shipping label-free bottles of Sprite. These types of initiatives are common in the packaged food industry, but what if other industries could greenlight similar initiatives to create sustainability solutions of their own?

Harper Collins has been doing something similar in ...

The Disturbing Truth About How Trader Joe’s Sources New Products

Trader Joe’s doesn’t seem like an evil brand. Their personality-driven backstory offers an irresistible underdog mentality that drives rabid brand fans who celebrate every new product arrival. Unfortunately, a story released this week reveals that many of their ethnic private label products may be blatantly stolen knock-offs of product ideas from small brands who had been negotiating with TJs before being abruptly ghosted.

While the  (called “dupes”) has...

How AI Is Making April Fool’s Day Easier … and Harder

This week my Future Normal co-author Henry and I announced a bold new partnership with LEGO to create a series of limited edition future-thinking sets inspired by trends from our book. The idea was that people could imagine a better future through play. The idea, as my post shared, was just one element of our “bold two decade-long series of Non-Obvious partnerships with brands that have four letters in their name. Based on a decade of intense research, we have determined that four is the optimal...

What The “Bridesmaid Burnout” Tells Us About the Future of Friendship

Back in early Fall of 2023, Glamour magazine launched a series of articles on the topic of “bridesmaid burnout.” Inspired by the spiraling demands of time, money and emotional labor heaped upon bridesmaids, the series collected advice on everything from asking about financial expectations to how to decline being a bridesmaid without killing your friendship.

Are modern bridesmaids unwilling to just show up and be good friends anymore? Or have the expectations really become more unreasonable? As th...

How To Post on LinkedIn (Or Social Media) Without Feeling Embarrassed

LinkedIn can be a cringey place. As a “jobs board with a social network layered on top of it,” the platform has a consistent stream of people posting about their professional lives in moments of transition, desperation or elation. 

As a result, we all consistently end up on the receiving end of everything from self-congratulatory posts where people unnecessarily declare themselves “humbled” by their own achievements to thinly disguised calls for help from people facing a daunting moment of career...

What’s Wrong with God Chatbots? Inside the AI Future of Religion

Nearly every faith now has several chatbots trained on religious texts and designed by technologists with the ambitious belief that these could make religion more approachable and accessible for a new generation.

An article from this month’s Scientific American magazine notes that in addition to allowing anyone to seek spiritual guidance from bots that promise to offer “faithful translations of the scriptures,” academics are also using these tools to compare “linguistic variations” among translat...