Imagethief

Month: July 2025

  • The Life and Death of a Cool Phone

    That time we tried to make the Moto X in the U.S.A.

    I’d been working for Burson-Marsteller in China for nearly six years when I got poached away by our client, Motorola. Jumping from agencies to clients can be tricky, but my boss at Burson gave me her blessings. Maybe she thought it would be good to have an alum as the client. Or maybe she was just happy to be rid of me and my obnoxious blog.

    This was 2010 and the iPhone was popular, but not yet the Greatest Consumer Product of All Time. Smartphones hadn’t changed the world, but you could feel the change coming and everyone wanted in on the action.

    I’d been smitten the first time I handled an iPhone, in 2008, and I’d bought a first-generation model shortly thereafter, on a work trip to San Diego. At the time, all iPhones were U.S. only and locked to AT&T. I had to jailbreak mine when I got it back to China so I could use it on China Mobile. This was terrifying, like performing brain surgery on your child with kitchen implements. I was sure I was going to lobotomize my new $600 superphone.1

    Amazingly, the patient lived. I promptly abandoned both my Motorola Razr V3 flip phone and my Burson-issued China Mobile Blackberry, which looked like a prop from the old Adam West “Batman” TV show. This lasted until I got a nastygram from Burson’s IT department scolding me for using an “unauthorized client.” Reluctantly, I shifted my work email back to the Bat-Berry. But I used the iPhone for everything else.

    No regrets! As small and slow as early models were, touchscreen smartphones were obviously going to revolutionize mobile computing and change our experience of the world. I’d known that the moment I saw the New York Times home page microscopically rendered on a 3 1/2 inch display, and again the first time I saw the map application tracking our location in real time while in a car. The only thing I regretted was losing the tactile snap! of slamming the Razr shut. Hanging up on someone would never be as satisfying again.

    I was in love with smartphones and when Motorola came calling, I was ready. Motorola was still a behemoth in 2010, but activist investor Carl Icahn was cleaving the company in two. Motorola Mobility, the new smartphone-focused business, had lured Sanjay Jha away from Qualcomm to be CEO. Jha was all-in on Android, and Motorola had launched the first Android smartphone in China, the lozenge-shaped XT800. I shelved my iPhone for an Android-powered handset, a goony Motorola Milestone with a slide-out keyboard. The future was wide open and the smartphone market was there for anyone to seize!

    In theory.

    Read the rest on Substack

  • The Kiss-Cam of Annihilation

    The reputational risks of being a Coldplay fan

    Here is proof that the universe hates you:

    You go to a Coldplay show with your paramour thinking you will be safely anonymous in a darkened arena full of 50,000 people with similarly questionable music taste. Suddenly, like the eye of Sauron, the arena kiss-cam falls upon the two of you. Your canoodling mugs are now up there on the Jumbotron, illuminated and 10,000 times larger than life.

    If you’re at the concert with your date-who-is-definitely-not-your-spouse and with whom you have a professional relationship that absolutely precludes getting handsy at a Coldplay show, and the spotlight hits you, what is the move?

    Counterintuitively, the move is to kiss for the kiss cam, and maybe smile and wave. In short, do what you’re supposed to do in that situation, and, in so doing, be unremarkable so the camera moves on.

    The problem is that in this situation the human instinct to cower, hide and radiate high-energy shame particles is so lizard-brain reflexive, you’d have to be the genetic cross of Ethan Hunt and Mr. Spock to suppress it in the moment.

    Your lizard brain is telling you to subscribe to Imagethief!

    In this very real and not-theoretical situation, two people conspicuously did not suppress the instinct to cower and radiate shame particles. Instead, when the kiss-cam found them, they acted as guilty as a couple on a tryst could possibly act:

    View the video on TikTok

    It is physically impossible to act any more busted than that. The LeBron James of acting busted1 could not act more busted.

    Humans are social animals and naturally wired to recognize deep cringe. Coldplay singer Chris Martin and everyone else in the arena noticed this behavior. Within moments it was all over the Internet and the couple was promptly identified as the married CEO of software company Astronomer.io and his head of human resources who is definitively not his wife. It has since ascended into mainstream national media.2

    This is a crisis! A personal crisis. A corporate crisis. And definitely a music taste crisis. Let’s take them in order.

    Read the rest on Substack

  • Who Speaks for the Killer Shark?

    You’re gonna need a bigger PR plan

    I saw Jaws for the first time when it premiered on network television. This was in in November 1979, just after I’d turned 12 and more than four years after the movie had been in theaters.

    In those days, if you wanted to see a movie after its theatrical run, tough shit. If you didn’t catch it in a second-run theater, you’d have to wait for one of the big-three networks to broadcast it. I didn’t know anyone who had a VCR or cable TV until I was in high school. Network premieres of hit movies were big events, hyped for months.

    I was living with my dad in the top two floors of his ramshackle four-story Victorian in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood. He was a relaxed parent, and not hung up on the child-appropriateness of media. Earlier that year he’d taken me and my younger brother to see Ridley Scott’s Alien at the Geneva Drive-In, in Daly City. That movie fucked my head for years. I still love it.

    Jaws was ABC’s Movie of the Week, at 8:30PM on a Sunday night. I remember watching the first part in the living room with my dad. He’d recently upgraded his old black-and-white TV to a larger color set, a revelatory change.

    About halfway through the movie, my dad sent me to bed. Maybe he thought it was getting too gruesome, but it was also a school night. Fair enough.

    Old, serially remodeled Victorians have lots of eccentricities. In my dad’s house, one such eccentricity was a star-shaped cutout in one of the risers of the steep staircase up to the attic, where the bedrooms were. It was only four or five inches across, but it had oblique line-of-sight through the downstairs hallway, into the living room and to our new television. I watched the entire second half of the movie crouched on the stairs, eye glued to the star-shaped cutout.

    Read the rest on Substack