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Alex Rainert

Alex Rainert

Product & design person, introvert, Liverpool fan, easy laugh. VP Traveler Products @ Tripadvisor Past: nytimes, foursquare, google itp@nyu. This is my home on online and a place to capture my thoughts.

The Finite Scroll 002: Rediscovering the social internet, the future of everything and seeing history rhyme.

The Finite Scroll 002: Rediscovering the social internet, the future of everything and seeing history rhyme.

For people coming of age after 2010, it’s easy to assume Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are just what being social on the internet looks like. It’s a reasonable assumption as those products (especially Facebook and later everything else they picked up along the way) have become so ubiquitous, and their businesses massive. People treat them like water or electricity - a necessary utility to maintain social connections - to friends, schoolmates, local parents, and others. While many companies ha

The Finite Scroll 001: New media habits, Pixar nails emotions again and using silence as a tool.

The Finite Scroll 001: New media habits, Pixar nails emotions again and using silence as a tool.

Like many, I came into this year with the wholly unoriginal goal of majorly resetting my relationship to “content.” Last May I came off 7 years working at the New York Times, where most of my waking life was intertwined with what was and continues to be an overwhelming period of news. That professional reality was paired with a deeply entrenched addiction to the pull-to-refresh slot machine of new information honed through 16+ years of heavy Twitter usage. It was clear these habits weren’t playi

Can't wait for this Questlove doc on 50 years of SNL music

This mashup trailer for the doc is 💯 It premieres tonight on NBC at 8 p.m. ET on Monday, Jan. 27.

Reality is broken. Maybe if we understand how we got here we’ll have a chance to fix it.

Reality is broken. Maybe if we understand how we got here we’ll have a chance to fix it.

Consensus reality—our broad, shared understanding of what is real and true—has shattered, and we’re experiencing a Cambrian explosion of subjective, bespoke realities. A deluge of content, sorted by incentivized algorithms and shared instantaneously between aligned believers, has enabled us to immerse ourselves in environments tailored to our own beliefs and populated with our own preferred facts. On the eve of the second Trump administration, I just finished reading Renée DiResta’s Invisible R

Thank you to 99% Invisible for The Power Broker Breakdown.

Thank you to 99% Invisible for The Power Broker Breakdown.

One of my favorite 2024 listens is 99% Invisible’s Power Broker Breakdown - a podcast series that functions as a distributed book club celebrating the book’s 50th anniversary. Hosts Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan break the 1200+ page book into 12 episodes that they released each month throughout the year. The format was great and I wonder what other book-host combos would benefit from it.  Each episode is about 2.5 hours long. While I don’t usually listen to podcasts that long, they broke it up w

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