Aaron Shapiro – författare

Boardroom conversations are adapting to a new and brutal reality; there is no such thing as an offline business. And if you don't embrace digital, you'll be out of business altogether.Blockbuster, AOL, Yahoo and Borders were all unstoppable, but they didn't see the new economic order coming. Google, Facebook, Groupon, and Twitter barely existed at the turn of the millennium, but are now rocketing ahead.Aaron Shapiro is CEO of HUGE, the leading digital agency which builds and operates websites that handle 150 million users a month and bring in $1.2 billion annually for their clients. That's the GDP of a small country. He thinks constantly about the most pressing issue in business today: how can businesses can use digital to thrive?Shapiro has studied what the businesses succeeding today have in common, and in Users First, Customers Second, he teaches us to recognise that it's not just customers who interact with the digital version of our organisations.The businesses who are now roaring ahead put the interests and the digital experience of all of their users - employees, business partners, media and anyone else who interacts with you through digital channels - ahead of everything else, including their paying customers.In a world were we are all users you have a choice: you can be sure that people are using your digital ecosystem, or you can be irrelevant.

An in-depth look at life in the “smart” cityTechnology has fundamentally transformed urban life. But today’s “smart” cities look little like what experts had predicted. Aaron Shapiro shows us the true face of the revolution in urban technology, taking the reader on a tour of today’s smart city. Along the way, he develops a new lens for interpreting urban technologies-logistical governance-to critique an urban future based on extraction and rationalization.Through ethnographic research, journalistic interviews, and his own hands-on experience, Shapiro helps us peer through cracks in the smart city’s facade. He investigates the true price New Yorkers pay for “free,” ad-funded WiFi, finding that it ultimately serves the ends of commercial media. He also builds on his experience as a bike courier for a food delivery startup to examine how promises of “flexible employment” in the gig economy in fact pave the way for strict managerial control. And he turns his eye toward hot-button debates around police violence and new patrol technologies, asking whether algorithms are really the answer to reforming our cities’ ongoing crises of criminal justice. Through these gripping accounts of the new technological urbanism, Design, Control, Predict makes vital contributions to conversations around data privacy and algorithmic governance. Shapiro brings much-needed empirical research to a field that has often relied on “10,000-foot views.” Timely, important, and expertly researched, Design, Control, Predict doesn’t just help us comprehend urbanism today-it advances strategies for critiquing and resisting a dystopian future that can seem inevitable.

An in-depth look at life in the “smart” cityTechnology has fundamentally transformed urban life. But today’s “smart” cities look little like what experts had predicted. Aaron Shapiro shows us the true face of the revolution in urban technology, taking the reader on a tour of today’s smart city. Along the way, he develops a new lens for interpreting urban technologies-logistical governance-to critique an urban future based on extraction and rationalization.Through ethnographic research, journalistic interviews, and his own hands-on experience, Shapiro helps us peer through cracks in the smart city’s facade. He investigates the true price New Yorkers pay for “free,” ad-funded WiFi, finding that it ultimately serves the ends of commercial media. He also builds on his experience as a bike courier for a food delivery startup to examine how promises of “flexible employment” in the gig economy in fact pave the way for strict managerial control. And he turns his eye toward hot-button debates around police violence and new patrol technologies, asking whether algorithms are really the answer to reforming our cities’ ongoing crises of criminal justice. Through these gripping accounts of the new technological urbanism, Design, Control, Predict makes vital contributions to conversations around data privacy and algorithmic governance. Shapiro brings much-needed empirical research to a field that has often relied on “10,000-foot views.” Timely, important, and expertly researched, Design, Control, Predict doesn’t just help us comprehend urbanism today-it advances strategies for critiquing and resisting a dystopian future that can seem inevitable.

This isn't about how to write spiritual books. It isn't about the romance of writing. It doesn't cover the ins and outs of publishing and building a brand. Instead, this fresh and unapologetic guide to writing as a spiritual practice approaches writing as a way to turn the spiral of body, heart, mind, soul and spirit that leads to spiritual awakening.Lead by renowned spirituality teacher, Rami Shapiro and award-winning writer and writing coach, Aaron Shapiro - and featuring over fifty unique, practical exercises - it takes you beyond assigning inspirational words to the page. It shows you how to use your writing to unlock the joy of life and the infinite perspectives and possibilities that living provides.