🎆 How 2023 will shape 2024
After seismic changes across business sectors, regions, and the world, these are my best wishes to you for what lies ahead.
I’ll keep this one short, but before anything else I just want to wish each of you a healthy, safe, and fruitful New Year ahead. 2023 was a tough one for a lot of people I know.
On a global level, the violent loss of life and suffering in Ukraine, Israel, and Gaza remains horrific and sobering. It’s hard to wish for too many things at this point in 2024 above peaceful and sustainable resolutions in those conflicts.
Meanwhile, my LinkedIn feed has had a steady flow of layoff announcements. Watching friends go through multiple layoffs within the past two years (in some cases within one year) has been difficult, and if you’re one of them, just know that you’re not alone. It’s a rough environment, even with national unemployment numbers as low as they are broadly. Also: Reach out on LinkedIn if I can ever be of any help. I’ve seen brilliant, seasoned professionals take three, six, and even nine months or more to find their next stops in various career paths — especially within media and marketing.
And speaking of new roles, you may already know that I joined the team at Digital Commerce 360 in November. It’s an exciting move for me, because it’s in B2B media, focusing on retail and ecommerce, which is an area I’ve covered before and is going through its own historic shifts. I’ll be working with a great team of journalists, data analysts, and researchers on some daily reporting, deeper industry reports, and other new projects I can’t wait to tackle in 2024.
You’ll even see my byline showing up each week on stories like this one about Zulily shutting down and recent holiday online shopping trends.
Like countless other areas of life and business in the world, retail and ecommerce are in the middle of a large-scale recalibration in the wake of COVID-, supply chain-, and inflation-related volatility. At my most optimistic, I see 2024 as a year where new norms have the potential to stabilize — or at least revert closer to a mean. There are so many unknowns in the geopolitical and national landscapes right now, however, making it hard to anticipate what the next shock waves will involve.
Here’s hoping things trend in a positive and improving direction for all of us.
Side work
Sarah’s and my final episode of "The AI Artifacts Podcast" for the year, a 2024 predictions episode
Our eighth episode, where we got into recent media/AI company deal talks and renewed controversy around facial recognition
Side reads and watches
"The Church on Ruby Road," which was the Doctor Who Christmas special this year featuring Ncuti Gatwa, who looks like he’ll be an electric new caretaker of the show’s title role
"The Age of AI" by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher, a book that is extremely strong on historical context, even if the rapid public advancements of 2022 leave some parts (published in 2021) already feeling dated
Side shoutouts and links to friends
Sean T. Collins, whose year-end roundup of top TV shows of 2023 at Decider is required reading
Sean Dove, whose Brobots books with J. Torres are favorites with my 7-year-old and is getting a new "Brobots: The Complete Collection" edition published in January
Duane Swierczynski, whose new novel "California Bear" is coming out in January and has both my Californian attention and interest