How Google’s Chrome browser warns against just one site using http.
A billion rights don’t make a wrong
Except for a few books and thousands of long-since-tossed magazines and newspapers, all my writing is on the Web.
Some of that died long ago. For example, David Bunnell (four days older than me, and for whom I was often mistaken) did nothing (to my knowledge*) to save the archives of Upside, which contained an enormous sum of early Net and Web history, and to which I contributed a single essay, not long after The Cluetrain Manifesto came out.
But lots more is still up. Alas, Google now considers them dangerous, because they are known to the world by the Web’s founding protocol—http—and not by its encrypted version: https. So Google calls all the millions (billions?) of http sites dangerous and scares visitors away. One example is the Linux Journal page linked to by the image above.
In Let me say this: Fuck Google, Dave gets this right. His explanation here is required reading for anyone who cares about history and archives. Bottom line: Google’s not secure message means this: “Google tried to take control of the open web and this site said no.”
The Monroe County Alert System just ran their sirens all over town for more than a minute. They do this once a month at noon. Do they need to? Do they also need to warn that there will be a “severe thunderstorm” when what’s coming is typical summer afternoon thundershower? Or warn that “severe flooding” might be coming from the same? Yes, I appreciate warnings about approaching tornadoes. Thanks to that (and all the weather apps on my phone), I was able to shoot some tornado video back in February. (You get to hear the sirens on that one.) But I’m close to canceling the alerts, because they come too often and not for real emergencies.
_________
*As I recall, he wanted the whole thing gone when it went bankrupt. But I might have that wrong, and I welcome correction. He was a good guy, and a born journalist and publisher. I liked him, and he passed way too young.
Our species began to get civilized when it invented clothing: the original privacy tech. But that was in the natural world. In the digital one, we are still naked, and privacy is just a promise you get from “consent” (cookie notice) agreements and settings. It’s a fail. Example: the GDPR Privacy Monitor examined 97,000 websites and found that—
55% displayed no consent (cookie choice) banner
80.4% continued tracking after the user clicked reject
68% activate third-party tracking before the user has given consent
WMEX/1510, which in its heyday was Boston’s main top 40 music station, has signed off for a final time. The station had a cursed transmitter history you can read about at the opening link. When I lived in Arlington, Mass from 2007 to 2013, the transmitter was nearby in Belmont, using four towers in a parking lot in an industrial part of town. It was 50,000 watts at the time. Killer signal, but a doomed site. I shot it in 2008. Here’s the photo album. In the late Teens, after a period of silence, it moved to the 1260 AM site (built for what was then WNAC) on a tidal swamp south of town. Then only 10,000 watts and just 100 watts at night, it operated as an oldies station. I shot that site too, from an airplane on approach to Logan in 2011.
What we’re watching is the slo-mo heart failure of the AM broadcast band. Knowing that, I like to document what was there before it’s gone.
In case there is a reason
This piece (first of three in a series) about Zoom’ privacy practices was written more than six years ago, and I haven’t revisited the topic since then. But I thought it might be worth bringing up.
Large, coordinated investments in the human and institutional side of the AI transformation. They span identity, privacy, markets, governance, work, and knowledge. They share an architecture, and they share a method. No single sector can deliver any one of them alone.
For example, the fake golfer Grace (aka Gracie) Brooks appeared in the midst of my Facebook doomscrolling (above) to say something to me (scrolled across her boobage) about “an older guy” watching her. Never saw her before, or cared to see her. But I am curious about “her” business model. So, after getting that screen grab, I went off to research her fake ass.
What I (and my AI employees, which can search faster and wider) have found so far:
Multiple newly numbered Facebook accounts use the same “Grace Brooks” identity. The fuck:
Earlier search indexing labeled reels from this account “Grace Brooks” and described the woman as a golf influencer addressing “old men.” It now appears in current indexing as Emily Bennett, still asking “old guys” to watch and follow her.
Instagram’s indexing repeatedly connects the two accounts on the same result pages. That makes @graceeegf a confirmed duplicate or companion account. I dunno, cuz I’m still new to this shit. Here are some other accounts operating in the same apparent cluster:
There is no independent biography, established social presence (other than these on Facebook and Instagram), golf history, or other evidence that “Grace Brooks” exists in the natural world.
As for her unreality, here are the tells:
Too good-looking. Call it statistical perfection: symmetrical features, flawless teeth and skin (with slight humanizing imperfections, such as Grace’s freckles and tiny lines on her face), perfect hair, improbably high boob/waist ratio, perfect makeup (or a perfect absence of it). In sum, a maximized perfection of improbabilities. (I asked ChatGPT to find similarly attractive real-life female athletes. In declining order, it gave me Alica Schmidt, Jutta Leerdam, Claire Hogle, and Romee Strijd, none familiar to me. Look ’em up. No ‘fence, but none look as perfected as “Grace.”
Perfect lighting. As an inveterate photographer, I know how hard it is to get lighting that right.
Inconsistent fake backgrounds. (Is that driving range the same every time?)
Modular gestures. “She” seems to have a limited range of head tilts, direct looks, smiles, arm movements, golf swings, and flips of her skirt for a peek at her perfect butt with its pink panties.
Identity without history. Does any athlete as perfected-looking as this one exist in the natural world? Of course not.
But why are the creeps that make her (actually, it, and them) trolling geezers on Facebook? Well, clearly this is a funnel-top operation. For what? I imagine one or more of these might be down in the vortex:
I subscribed to Casey and Kevin’s old podcast, Hard Fork, and I’ll subscribe to Machine Gods too. But I doubt I’ll watch it—Just like I don’t watch the Netflix feeds of The Ringer podcasts… or much of anything but the road when I’m driving, my tools and plants when I’m gardening, the scenery when I’m walking around, and my espresso machine and its components when I’m making coffee in the morning. Those are places where I do most of my podcast listening. If I’m at my computer or watching my TV, there are many things I’d rather see than a podcast.
But,,,,, There seems to be a budget of time that people in modern civilization devote to staring at glowing rectangles: some number of hours per day. TV got us into that, starting around 1950. Some of that appetite spread over onto computer screens starting in he 1980s. Smartphones and tablets took some of that over starting in the late ’00s. Now that we have ambient connectivity and rectangles in our pockets, the division of that budget of hours is divided between—
What we watch for entertainment on TV (mostly on-demand streaming)
What we watch during work on our computing devices (including news and business-related stuff)
Gaming and other non-work stuff on our personal rectangles, some during work hours
What we listen to when we’re doing something else.
NPR has always been in #4. With Machine Gods, it wants to be in #2 as well.
Anyway, three things about this:
Podcasts are audio. The first time I hear “wherever you see your podcasts,” I’ll be willing to widen podcasting’s definitional scope. Before then, nah.
NPR sees the writing on the Internet’s wall. Over-the-air broadcasting is a dead field walking. I’ve been following that trend for years here, on my Trunkline blog, and in more than 6000 photos on my Flickr site that follows infrastructure. NPR is living off stations now (wholesaling programming that stations retail to listeners), but radio has two giant problems:
Over-the-air requires special devices called transmitters, antennas, and receivers. These days, only cars have those, and old-fashioned radio functions are buried deeper and less accessibly in dashboard infotainment systems.
Apps on phones can act as virtual radios, but how long will apps last? Look downstream at where Apple’s new App Intents will go. Try not to see apps disappearing the same way they do when you say to a phone or a smart speaker, “Play KQED.” This means that stations will become streams for live programs, and podcast sources for other stuff. How will NPR’s revenue model work with all that?
What happens to news is a big issue that it seems (to me, a geezer) only older people care about. NPR has always been a news organization. News needs currency: liveness, or close enough. With “what’s on” fading away, that’s a tough challenge.
Will U say Si to SI?
Last Tuesday, in his speech to the UN, the US president said this:
Hereinafter officially called superintelligence, changing the name, and that the use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake. It makes it sound fake. And it is not fake; it’s actually amazing, but we have to be careful. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports. From this point forward, all of United States documents, and hopefully the world’s, will be changed to use the much more accurate term Super as opposed to Artificial. So, it’s Superintelligence. In other words, welcome to the new world of Superintelligence — SI. SI; let’s see if that goes. It sounds much better; it is much better and it’s much more accurate. Let’s see if I have any power. Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t. We’re going to find out pretty soon. Superintelligence — every major new technology brings challenges, and Superintelligence is no exception.
“Artificial Intelligence”is itself an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. There have always been better names. “Machine Intelligence,” for example. But AI is what everyone in the field, and the world, calls it. A Google keyword search for “AI” returns “About 10,140,000,000 results.” A search for “super intelligence” gets “About 2,390,000 results.” I guess that’s a start.
The Onion‘s American Voices gets these three responses to “President Trump directed U.S. agencies to rename AI to “super intelligence” on all official documents, claiming that the term “artificial” made the technology sound fake. What do you think?”:
“Even the Constitution?”— Anton Pastranak, Systems Analyst
“Why didn’t AI think of that?”—Will Stratton, Manifest Reader
“There goes my one last objection to it.”—Cordelia Huestes, Retired Shipwright
Actually, we have a waning gibbous moon tonight. It was full two nights ago. But I need to a headline, so there ya go.
How's fishing?
Mainstream media continues to get sidestreamed. That's what I take from Ad Market Resumes Tepid Growth In August, 'Traditional' Media's Share Falls Below 20%, by Joe Mandese in today's MediaPost. I want breakouts in the broad Digital category. I mean, I know the new Allstream is much broader than the old Mainstream, and also that some rivers are much wider and deeper than others.
Liblice II, the prettiest pair of guyed lattice towers in the world. (Source: Google Streetview.)
A taller way to tell time
Liblice II, the tallest structures in the Czech Republic, are about to come down. They carried the 1.5 million-watt signal (30x the maximum power of an AM station in the US) of Czech Radio Two until 2021 on 639 mHz. The cool thing is this (from that last link, translated):
After the removal of the Liblice masts, the Czech height record will move to the Pilsen Region. The Krašov transmitter, which measures 347.5 meters, will become the tallest structure in the country.
The Krašov transmitter in the Pilsen region has become part of the largest sundial in the Czech Republic. It casts a shadow several kilometers away. (March 20, 2018)
Since 2018, its mast has also served as a giant gnomon, a sundial indicator. A three-meter-high dial with Roman numerals has been built on the land near the transmitter.
Whoa! There are hundreds of broadcast towers around North America—some almost twice the height of these Czech ones—that could also serve as giant sundials. Has anyone thought of that? Or built one?
HT to Cory Doctorow for the original, which graced the cover of Enshittification.
When a whole business category is fubar, and its members together exemplify enshittification better than each does alone, I suggest we speak of their collectivity as a fecosystem. I’ve been using that word since 2016, and bring it up now because thesetwo posts about the subscription industry‘s fecosystem have been getting action lately, and I think Cory can have fun with a collective noun for all the enshittified companies in a category.
Every unrealized want is a quiet tragedy of human potential.
Now imagine every person on earth with a second mind beyond their own. A general manager whose whole job is to find out what you want and make sure it happens. Someone that hears the half-sentence, “I feel like there’s something more I could be doing,” and helps fill in the blanks. This might not be a genie in a bottle, but it can be someone that says, “This is the thing you’ve been dreaming of your whole life. Let’s go get it. Here’s how.” And then builds a plan. Sends the email. Makes the phone call. Finds the funding. Keeps you on schedule. Clears the way and solves all the problems it can until the human part, the wanting and the dreaming, is all that’s left.
Here’s the best part: we have no idea what people will want. The world until now has been shaped by the small number of fanatics who have somehow found a way to make their wants real. But we’ve never seen humanity with every single person’s agency fully switched on. Eight billion people who just need to write their dream down in order to get started making it happen.
So we built Muse to help people build the world they want.
Gag me with a data center.
My pharyngeal reflex aside, personal AI in the near future will be what these bigs give us. What I want, and am working toward us eventually getting, is on the George Carlin model of AI:
Lives and death
When an adult in prime health dies “unexpectedly,” and no cause is given (sometimes ever), you know what the assumption is. I don’t want to use the word, but you know. It’s what I thought when I heard that Chris Spatola, ESPN analyst, former Duke basketball assistant, husband of Coach Mike Krzyzewski’s daughter Jamie, and father of three, had died unexpectedly at age 47. By coincidence, he, Daniel Barkhuff, and Steve Kornacki, grew up together, were on the same high school basketball team (Steve was the manager), and remained close. In The Imposter Syndrome, Barkhuff writes,
Now I know he was struggling in ways I did not see. I keep revisiting conversations, wondering whether what I heard as indifference might have been exhaustion, or whether the confidence I envied was something he needed to hold himself together. I don’t know. His death doesn’t give me the right to diagnose him after the fact, or to turn every ordinary exchange into a clue I should have caught. It does make me wish I had been less concerned with how I came across and more curious about how he was doing.
I used to think the chief cost of feeling like an imposter was that it kept you from taking your place. You hesitate, you hold back, you spend your energy proving to yourself that you belong. But there is another cost. When you are preoccupied with your standing in someone else’s eyes, you can lose sight of the person standing in front of you. Chris was my friend. We both loved basketball. He was better at it, which just meant I spent too much time worrying about whether I belonged beside him to ask what it felt like to be him.
I remember the passes. I remember the fear of missing them. What I ought to remember now is that he kept passing me the ball. We had known each other since we were boys, and after years apart, we had found our way back into conversation. I wish I had asked him more questions while I could. I wish I had listened without waiting to learn something about myself. Maybe he had tried to tell me something.
Which tells me something too. I hope we learn Chris died instead of a heart attack.
And this all started in the Pleistocene
This post about Blackhawk Slide is getting some action lately, my stats page says. It features a photo I shot, but this one tells the story better and has more geology. In revisiting that piece, I learned that two of my own sources, geologists Robert M. Norris and Arthur G. Sylvester, are both now gone. I have a bunch of their books, and sought their tutelage when I was hanging out at UCSB. I knew Bob Norris had died in 2012, but I thought Art was still around, since we last talked a couple of years ago. But that conversation happened earlier, because I just discovered (by his Wikipedia page above) that Art died in May of 2023, not long before we also lost our good friend Michael Benedict, who worked with both those guys in the course of his own work as a botanist at UCSB and a founding vintner in Santa Barbara’s Santa Ynez Valley. Here’s Michael in his natural habitat:
The most informed, entertaining, and sarcastic guide you’ll ever get for anything breaks more than a few eggs to whip up the oeuvre that is New Jersey Uncovered. Highly recommended.
Anu Bradford‘s book, The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (Oxford, 2019), hardly exaggerates the EU’s influence. Many EU regulations have global reach, especially in respect to personal privacy. And for that we should be grateful, because the US and China mostly don’t give a shit.
On the other hand, every cookie notice you hate is a stain on the EU’s reputation as a protector of personal privacy in the digital world. They know that, of course, which is why the European Parliament is working on fixes.
They want their regulations to actually protect personal privacy, rather than just serving as ideals that the adtech business—which relies on tracking to personalize its messages—nods toward while violating the spirit of those regulations with impunity.
Naturally, pro-tracking lobbyists in the advertising industry and its dependents (such as publishing) are working overtime to preserve easements that allow tracking to continue.
EU lawmakers need to listen to those people and not just to lobbyists who euphemize the failure of “consent” by calling it “cookie fatigue” and “consent fatigue.”
Cookie banners grew out of compliance with the ePrivacy Directive, especially its 2009 amendment requiring consent for storing or accessing information on personal devices, subject to limited exceptions. Their use surged after May 25, 2018, when the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became enforceable. Neither law requires that every website display a banner. Even where cookie information is required, it need not take the form of a pop-up. Italy’s privacy regulator explicitly makes that distinction. Yet banners became the standard interface for a vast consent-management business.
Here is a key fact that the EU (and all of us) need to keep in mind: To the adtech industry, personal privacy is a bug, not a feature. They are rewarded for surveillance, not for regulatory obedience. So they feign obedience to regulatory requirements while circumventing them. Their recommendation for the Omnibus is to eliminate their need to circumvent regulations by changing those regulations to support continued surveillance, under the guise of “improving” consent mechanisms.
Here is another key fact: So long as only the web server side sets all the rules, provides all the mechanisms, and keeps all the records, consent itself is meaningless. Persons interacting with these mechanisms can do no more than what the mechanisms allow. Again, they aren’t meant to work for the person. At all. They are completely one-sided, unfair, and broken by design.
For a while, there was an anti-tracking section of the Omnibus called Article 88b, which would have required sites and services to recognize people’s automated, machine-readable privacy choices. It would also have let people express those choices through their own software, instead of repeatedly confronting interfaces biased to allow rather than prevent unwelcome tracking.
Alas, the Council presidency removed 88b from the Omnibus’ compromise text in June. Its explanation cited concerns about evidence and technical challenges.
As part of the ‘Digital Omnibus’, the European Commission now finally wanted to get rid of cookie banners and replace them with an automated signal. However, Google and some of the very EU Member States that are actually calling on the EU to “simplify” and “cut red tape” – including Germany and France, for example – are now standing in the way. In the Council’s latest position paper of 18 June, the plan to abolish the cookie banner has been scrapped. This baffling outcome is likely to continue to cost European users a great deal of hassle, frustration and billions of clicks per year.
That paragraph is followed by links to Google’s (formerly) secret lobbying paper and four other helpful documents:
Cookie banners are not an invention of data protection, but of the tracking industry. Without consent, there is no snooping online. Now there are fears that a simpler way of saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ will result in a loss of revenue for Google and the like. That is why the tracking industry is currently lobbying as hard as it can to keep the cookie banner. Clearly, it wants to retain the ability to directly manipulate users’ choices.
As I said in this earlier Customer Commons post, 88b by itself is not enough, because it still operates inside the old and broken consent framework. Also, from The Only Way to Get Privacy Online: No regulation to make organizations respect personal privacy will work…The only way we will get privacy is with contracts, which are laws that two parties make for themselves.
Those contracts would also be backed by standing contract laws everywhere. No need for even more regulation.
The possible agreements are all contracts posted on the website of a disinterested nonprofit (such as Customer Commons and MyData Global)— much as a choice of personal copyrights are posted at Creative Commons. (Which we thank for serving as a model.)
The person, acting as the first party, proffers their choice of an agreement to a site or service (broadly called an “entity” in the standard), acting as the second party, both using agents. (These can be as simple as browser and web server plugins, or as advanced as AI agents on both sides.)
If both sides agree, they keep identical records of their agreement, to support later auditing and support dispute resolution, if necessary. (This would typically be done using ODR: a mature discipline already working in the world.)
If the second party declines to agree, the first party is free to keep a record of that.
The most basic draft agreement is SD-BASE, which stands for “services only.” This is what any of us expect when we walk into an establishment (store, church, government office) in the natural world. In none of those places do we expect to walk out covered in tracking beacons. Nor should we expect to do the same online.
With a clear contractual commitment to personal privacy, trust becomes a cooperative fact rather than a corporate promise.
The commercial possibilities are substantial. Companies can learn directly what customers want and what kinds of relationships they are willing to enter. Customers can express demand without submitting to surveillance. Corporate offerings can be based on first-hand knowledge rather than surveillance-based guesswork.
The difference between what’s possible in the surveillance economy and what MyTerms enables is like the difference between mainframes and PCs, LANs and the Internet, landlines and smartphones. Or, at the most basic level, freedom and captivity.
We will also get what I predicted in The Intention Economy: working proof that free customers are more valuable than captive ones—to themselves, to businesses, and to society.
The initial parliamentary amendment deadline passed in July, but Parliament has not adopted its position. The Parliament and Council must now develop their respective positions and ultimately agree on a text. There is no final adoption date (that I know of anyway).
Restore Article 88b and make individuals’ automated refusals effective.
Protect people’s ability to choose the software that represents them.
Require accountability for how signals are received and honored.
Ensure the framework can accommodate person-originated privacy agreements, drawing on existing work that includes MyTerms.
If you are in the EU, find your MEP, share our submission, and ask them to support a strengthened Article 88b, while also welcoming person-originated contracts that protect privacy.
There isn’t a better way for Europe to use its regulatory powers for the good of us all.
Nirit Weiss-Blatt, who gave us The Weak Foundations of AI Doomsday back in May, and followed that with First They Built a Secular Apocalypse Belief System. Now They Want Religious Authority. Excerpt: “AI doomerism borrows religious structure while denying religious content. It offers ex-believers a replacement meaning system with cosmic stakes. Now, it reconnects with organized religion in seeking broader moral authority. But this is an old playbook: a small group of believers claims it alone understands the coming apocalypse, then asks everyone else to hand it centralized control.”
Friends and organizations I know are involved in the Pro-Human AI Coalition, which was just announced. It’s “a global effort that brings urgently needed infrastructure and resources to the work of keeping AI under human control and prioritizing public interest over corporate profit.” Should we join?
For many years, I have despaired of ever saving the contents of my old blog (1999-2007), my writing for Linux Journal (1996-2019), and countless other articles, essays, and posts, published mostly on the Web—which looks and sounds like a permanent place (“sites,” “locations,” domains”), but in fact is a whiteboard.
Then, last week, I asked Claude for help. I pay Anthropic $20/month* for Claude’s services (Sonnet 5 at the moment), and it successfully rescued both my old blog and every item I ever submitted to Linux Journal. They are now at searls.com
There is still some missing stuff in the Linux Journal corpus, and a lot of lint to pluck out as well. But the fact that this got done at all is, for me, a freaking miracle.
Yes, it took a lot of work, but I learned a lot of skills that I’m now leveraging on new projects that will make a future and not just re-make the past.
I also want to thank Dave Winer for providing a .zip of my old blog (and for both inspiring and hosting it in the first place), and Jake Savin for keeping a copy of the old blog running on an old server while I kept putting off my rescue efforts.
*I only started paying for Claude in July. I have been paying the same to OpenAI for ChatGPT’s services for a lot longer. While ChatGPT has been very helpful for many things, I’ve been told that Claude is better on projects like these two, so I gave it a whack. So far, so good.
Officially named McGetchin after pioneering lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, the crater formed on the Moon’s eastern edge sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, after a comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-story building hit the surface.
The crash left a crater, 728 feet wide, that spans the length of two football fields. And at 141 feet deep, the crater could fit three vertically stacked yellow school buses.
Scientists estimate that an impact of this magnitude happens on the Moon about once in a century or even longer.
So the perpetrator here was roughly the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor, which made a great show in the sky, caused some havoc on the ground, and left a widely scattered shower of meteor chunks.
The atmosphere is a pretty good shield. For Earth. The Moon isn’t as lucky.
WBT’s three Blaw-Knox towers and nineteen-acre transmitter site, looking toward Uptown Charlotte. Google Earth imagery: Landsat/Copernicus.
In the foreground are three towers standing on nineteen acres in Charlotte’s south side. They transmit the signal of WBT/1110 AM, a 50,000-watt giant, with a signal that stretches from Canada to Cuba at night:
WBT-AM was born 104 years ago and is about to die, because the land under its towers is worth more than the signal. The property is for sale, pitched as a site for apartments or townhouses. The broker does not publish an asking price.
As of today, programming consists of nonstop music interrupted by requests that listeners tune instead to the station’s FM signal on 107.9
I think Charlotte should buy the WBT property and its towers—or find the people and/or foundations that will —and make the WBT site a Museum of Broadcasting and the Antenna Age.
Broadcasting shaped civilization for the century before we all turned digital. Nothing has both enabled and symbolized broadcasting more than antennas: towers for AM, FM, and TV, and metal whips and stubs on the receiving end.
AM transmits using whole towers, and the most historic of those is the Blaw-Knox diamond design, emblematic of the Art Decoage.* Only eight still stand. Three of them are WBT’s. Built in 1934, here is how they looked when I shot them on a flight out of Charlotte in 1985:
Two of those towers were destroyed by Hurricane Hugo in 1989—
Source: Wikipedia
—and replaced with identical ones, because these kinds of towers are like old lighthouses: they are too attractive and iconic to replace with structures that are merely functional. Also, like lighthouses, they deserve to be kept up after technology has moved on.
The transmitter building is also legendary, having contained, among other things, a Cold War bunker. Dig this 2013 report by WFAE, Charlotte’s public radio station:
In fact, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, WBT was beaming pro-American propaganda to Cuba with a program called “Radio Liberty.”
WBT Chief Engineer Jerry Dowd has preserved that original bomb shelter with the care of a museum curator. He keeps a picture from 1963 on hand to prove it. With that photo in hand, we head downstairs into a chilly basement with government-issue green walls.
“As you can tell, not a lot has changed,” he chuckles. “The clock has stopped.”
Literally. At just after 6 – a.m. or p.m.? Would it even matter if an atomic bomb went off?
Everything else still works. And the emergency supplies to keep some poor engineer alive and broadcasting for up to 60 days are still here, too.
“We have a leftover can of survival crackers that were date coded from April 1963,” says Dowd, with a gesture to the can. “We had drinking water. The most important thing we had was the sanitation kit.”
He picks up a cardboard bucket with a plastic donut-like lid: “It’s a porta-potty.”
And there are giant turntables poised to broadcast the most natural of things for the end-of-times.
With a photo:
I’ll bet that stuff is still there, museum-ready.
Yes, there are good broadcast museums out there. This one could be much bigger, better, more broadly focused, and more fun. To compare—
Land and infrastructure on which broadcasting history happened
A museum at WBT could begin with Charlotte’s own history and grow outward to encompass all of AM, FM, and TV broadcasting. The original building could explain (and perhaps demonstrate, if it keeps the signal going) WBT and high-power AM. Its emergency facilities open up a Cold War story. As other stations retire equipment, the museum could give some of it a home.
We’re talking here about a destination museum. Let’s give people a reason for coming to Charlotte that isn’t business meetings or ball games.
The towers would be the biggest and most obvious attraction, but there is room enough in nineteen acres for a park where kids can run around, and everyone can appreciate why broadcast radio needed so much room. And for parking!
Charlotte’s N2-B district allows multifamily housing. A museum would be classified as a cultural facility and require a change in the property’s permitted uses. A buyer could ask for a conditional rezoning that spells out the museum, park, parking, educational work, and preservation work. Since this would be a major Charlotte Thing, it’s a challenge worth taking on.
The main challenge is finding funding for purchase and development. My own guess is that the property would go for a few million dollars. There are countless pockets and purses much deeper than that, in the pants of people and institutions that value history and like to preserve legacies before they are lost forever.
Charlotte can build another apartment complex anywhere. Here it can stand up something found nowhere else: a museum where people can experience the scale and importance of broadcasting, the dedication of its pioneers and workers—and the fun one can have understanding it—before it falls into digital dust.
Oh, and we have a working model of a legacy station that’s a museum on the air: WSM/650. The station that gave the Grand Ole Opry to Nashville and Country Music to the world persists today as a working example of Radio Done Right. When you visit their website, note how the main animated background image is their own Blaw-Knox diamond tower. WBT has three of those, and can stay on the air as a living historical beacon of good radio—however one chooses to define it. The possibilities are endless, and the opportunity is huge.
Take it, Charlotte.
*Art Deco was expressed in bold, geometric forms: chevrons, rhombuses, zigzags, tapering pyramids. The Blaw-Knox double-conical diamond tower profile, with narrow points at both ends, uses Art Deco visual vocabulary to express what lattice towers, whether guyed or self-supporting, cannot. Like the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, these towers spoke of power and optimism: Eiffel-grade expressions of the best industrial aesthetic of their time.
Art Deco was also as much an embrace of machine-age industrial technology as it was an architectural and artistic expression. Structures from the era were styled to look like machines, while machines were styled to look dynamic and futuristic. (Recall how steam engines were for a few years wrapped in smooth metal cowling to appear “streamlined.” That was Art Deco too.)
Blaw-Knox diamond towers were all commissioned during the height of Art Deco’s expression in American public life and architecture. All were built as high-profile flagship investments by major broadcasting entities (chief among them WSM, WLW, and WBT) to project a modern image while maximizing technical achievement. (It was thought at the time that diamond towers radiated waves more optimally than straight guyed or tapered self-supporting towers.)
In newspaper stories, posters, and other visual media of the 1930s, radio was symbolized by lightning bolts, concentric geometric waves—and stylized diamond towers. Blaw-Knox towers, including WBT’s, were the real-world embodiment of those graphic design motifs expressing what radio was, and meant. (Find many examples in Broadcasting Magazine and Broadcasting Yearbook in the 1930s and 1940s.)
Given the size of my corpus here, most visiting to it, on most days, is to old stuff. One currently getting some action is Desert warfare training in live ghost towns, seen from the sky, which I posted ten years ago. I've shot its scenes (five of them) often since then, while flying overhead, usually en route from Los Angeles or Santa Barbara to Denver or other places on the far side of the desert southwest. I'll look for some and see what changes have developed.
Ad minutes per hour rose 18% on top streamers in the US from January to August, according to data from entertainment research firm Ampere Analysis shared exclusively with Business Insider.
To quote Laurel Kilgour, research manager at the American Economic Liberties Project, an anti-monopoly, nonprofit group: “Judges keep finding Google guilty, but Google keeps walking away with both its ill-gotten gains and its empire intact. Without actual structural remedies, antitrust rulings are just inconvenient speed bumps that allow Google to lock down search and ad tech markets today while using that same unchecked power to monopolize tomorrow’s AI frontier.”
The three towers of WBT/1110 in Charlotte, which I shot on departure from CLT in 1986. They were destroyed by Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and rebuilt with the same design. Today the station and its land await buyers, and the towers are the subject of preservation efforts.
See them while you can
As I’ve been writing about at length on my Trunkline blog, broadcast towers are both a lifelong preoccupation of mine, and (like all of us) doomed in the long run. That’s because high-bandwidth wireless digital tech doesn’t require them. (Yes, over-the air broadcasting may be with us forever, but on the long tail of an asymptotic curve.)
But a few are beautiful enough to preserve. Specifically (and perhaps exclusively) deserving of preservation are Blaw-Knox“diamond” towers: ones that are wide in the middle and pointed at the ends. Designed and built in the 1930s, they are contemporaneous with, if not exemplary of, the art deco movement.
Tallest of the survivors is the Lakihegyi tower in Hungary. It is also preserved. The famous ones in the US transmit the signals of WSM/650 in Nashville, WLW/700 in Cincinnati, and WBT/1110 in Charlotte. WSM and WLW are both functioning stations, and their towers are too iconic to lose. But WBT is now just broadcasting music interrupted by announcements that its programming is now only on FM. The transmitter site is for sale, and presumably its three Blaw-Knox towers with it.
Preservation efforts are in the works. See here. I think it’s a long shot. The owners have made clear that the signal has no economic value. That it covers the whole east coast at night is interesting, but with AM being abandoned by listeners, no longer useful. The towers will need to be maintained (preservation isn’t cheap), and with no use other than standing as landmarks, a cost for whoever or whatever maintains them. Even if only one of them stands, the cost is still there. So I’m betting they will be gone not long after the land sells.
Others diamond towers still standing are WBNS/1460 in Columbus, Ohio, and WFEA/1370 in Manchester, New Hamphire. My guess is that neither will outlive their licenses.
I posted What does the Internet make of us? seven years and one day ago. I’d be inclined to write a new one about what AI is making of us if I could see AI’s full import better than I could see what the Internet was doing to us in 2019.
But I can’t. None of us can. We are boating on the AI tsunami and can’t see solid ground in any direction. But we can build bigger and better boats out of stuff we find floating on the surface. And some of what we can do is freaking miraculous.
For years I have put off rescuing eight years of writing on my old (1999-2007) blog, which would require turning it, by hand, into thousands of pages of static HTM. But yesterday Claude converted all of it in minutes, and together we’re standing it up again on my own server at Searls.com (which also needs work with which I am getting AI help).
In a similar way, I am standing up browser, server, and website products and services required to make what I have been waiting here since 2006 for others to build. (Many have tried. Hats off. Now it’s my turn.)
But maybe AI really is an apocalyptic threat, and we’ll never find solid ground if we’re always floating on it. The Daily podcast today is an interview with Jacob Coxon, who just got instant fame for posting a warning about the future of AI. If you want to skip forward gto the scary part, start listening at around 19 minutes in.
Oliver Willis has a good Q&A explaining what Coxon is talking about.
None of that visits who Coxon is, other than a young former employee of OpenAI and Anthropic. His accent sounds Oxbridge to me (but not “received pronunciation“), run through some kind of auto-tune. It’s interesting.
Anyway, his case is better than I expected. Worth a listen.
Catch it while you still can
Of likely interest only to Santa Barbarians is news that Roy is closing. For many years Roy has been the good restaurant that stays open to midnight. Food was good too. Still is.
Reason for smiling
A thousand Internet years ago, perhaps as far back as the last millennium, I was walking to my hotel room at an event (in Monterey, I think), when on the opposite sidewalk walked a young woman carrying a violin case and wearing a huge smile for no obvious reason. Later she performed, and knocked the audience out. she was Ann Marie Calhoun, and I recommend checking her out.
There were whole forests of these, along the Wabash River in Southern Indiana. So, of course, humans harvested all of them.
Just the Anthropocene, rolling along
The photo above was shared in a group I’m in. It was photographed by ornithologist and naturalist Robert Ridgway in November 1875. The tree is identified as an American Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis) in the lower Wabash River bottoms of Gibson County, Indiana, across the river from Mount Carmel, Illinois, Ridgeway’s home town. He recorded a diameter above the trunk swell of 10 by 15 feet, a height near 160 feet, and a crown spread of over 134 feet. This made it one of the largest trees recorded in North America outside of California.
While the land under this tree and others like it was likely cleared for farming, the ~7.8 million board feet of lumber consumed per year at its peak by the Showers Brothers Furniture Company (largest of its kind in the world, it was claimed) here in Bloomington also contributed mightily to deforestation of southern Indiana in the early decades of the last century. Here’s how Showers Brothers looked in its prime:
Bloomington’s City Hall is in what’s left of this vast building. If that’s the railroad in the foreground, I believe it is the right corner, above the red dot. Our house a bit behind the aerial point of view.
I’m relieved and pleased to see Matt Mullenweg return as CEO of Automattic, the largest financial contributor to the WordPress project. Having WordPress’s Co-founder and Project Lead at the helm gives me confidence that their support will remain strong. Matt has my support.
Good cure for optimism
Michael Burry, of Big Short fame, is shorting a bunch of AI stocks. On September 5th, he wrote, “Today is the AI extended version of the bubble that did not burst like it should have in 2021. It will be a doozy when it comes down.”
The anti-AI (and especially anti-data-center) narratives (the new word for stories) are many and widely held, while the guys (they’re all guys) running the shows have no counter-narratives. And the only person who seems to be for endless AI progress is Donald Trump.
A violinist entertains Linus Torvalds and Paul Kunz on the Linux Journal Geek Cruise where I shot this photo 23 years ago. Linus and Paul are two athletes whose work has taught the world well.
On the whole, AI writing is good. Yes, I’ve called it “AutoTune for the human kind” and “fancy blah.” Claudio Nastruzzi called it “semantic ablation.” But Big AI’s grammar, styling, and prose still tends to beat the shit out of the ways most people write. Does that have to be a bad thing?
Nearly all of what ChatGPT and Claude write for me (usually without my asking first) isn’t as good as what I write on my own. If I use any of it, I completely rewrite it. But once in a while one of the damned things will produce a sentence that is clearly what I mean, and says better than what I was about to say. I don’t like that, but I do appreciate it.
There are a few vivid lines in Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself that I think describe what Big AI does for everyone’s writing—and we do for its writing as well:
I am the teacher of athletes. He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own. He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.
Big AI’s writing style in some ways resembles mine: contrasty prose, one-line paragraphs, clever headlines, em dashes, blurb-ready one-liners. It also spreads a wider breast than mine—and of every other professional writer—by many miles, because it is trained on damn near everything we’ve ever written.
The other day Claude came up with a better headline for what we’re trying to do with MyTerms than any I had been generating with my own head. You can see it atop the MyTerms page on this blog, and on the one at Customer Commons. Here it is:
We can’t not use it, because it does the job too well. When I show either page to people I’ve meet at social gatherings who want to know what we’re up to, they get it, instantly.
Am I destroyed by that? No, but I’m improved. AI’s instruction by example (in this case) or in procedural ways (such as by walking me though a tech support challenge—usually better than the product’s maker) have improved me, every damn time.
And who is being destroyed here? Is it me teaching an AI that honors my style, or an AI that learns better writing constantly from the humans who train it?
Or how about the old educational system? The old tech support system? The old business office system?
In Laws of Media, Eric and Marshall McLuhan teach that every new medium (including every new tech) does four things: retrieve, enhance, obsolesce, and reverse. They call this a tetrad, which they illustrate this way:
Big AI retrieves all digitizable (and already digitized) human expression, enhances what we do with it, obsolesces much of it, and reverses into semantic ablation, fancy blah, hallucination (better word: bullshit), fakery on a grand scale, giant unwelcome data centers, vain oligarchs who can no longer read the world’s rooms, and much else.
I think one challenge (among many) for us is making the most of how Big AI mirrors (also distorts, amplifies, and other-verbs) our collective whole. Maybe the challenge for both humanity and AI is to leverage Whitman in our time. From the concluding passages in Song of Myself:
Each man and woman of you I lead upon a knoll. My left hand hooks you about the waist, My right hand points to landscapes and continents, and a plain public road.
Not I, nor any one else can travel that road for you. You must travel it for yourself.
It is not far. It is within reach. Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know. Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.
Shoulder your duds, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth.
If you tire, give me both burdens and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip. And in due time you shall repay the same service to me.
Long enough have you dreamed contemptible dreams. Now I wash the gum from your eyes. You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.
Long have you timidly waited, holding a plank by the shore. Now I will you to be a bold swimmer, To jump off in the midst of the sea, and rise again, and nod to me and shout, and laughingly dash your hair…
Do I contradict myself? Very well then. I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes…
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me. He complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable. I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
The last scud of day holds back for me. It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadowed wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the desk.
I depart as air. I shake my white locks at the runaway sun. I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt and grow from the grass I love. If you want me again look for me under your boot soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean. But I shall be good health to you nevertheless. And filtre and fiber your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged. Missing me one place search another I stop some where waiting for you.
All of humanity, in addition to Walt Whitman, is now under AI’s bootsoles, and ours as well.
But we, not AI, are human. It is humans that Whitman calls to be wild, free, and untranslatable.
Eric McLuhan one told me that almost nothing is ever completely obsolesced. We still have steam power. We still have handwriting. We will always have music, and other arts that only humans can create and re-create.
No AI, and no robot (no matter how human it appears) could ever be those musicians, or do what those musicians do. It also cannot be or make any of their instruments. Nor could any AI give us a better Beethoven or Mozart. But could it help students of those musicians? Or luthiers wishing to become another Stradivari or Guarneri? I think probably.
I’m not a writer whose skills approach the ever-perfecting levels of those musicians, or of the great writers whose works improve me every time I read them. But I do learn from Big AI, constantly. And I look forward eagerly to when all of us have personal AIs of our own that we can teach, while they teach us as well.
Context: We are all both biological and digital now.
As biological beings, we are mortals whose best loves and works outlive us whether we know it or not. Fr. Seán Ó’laoire, my old friend, priest, and shrink, calls us spirits in space suits. I share his optimism—for both ourselves and for what we make, including AI.
While we have been biological for the duration, we have been digital for not very long: maybe since we started being copeless without our phones. How long has that been? Less than two decades, tops. (The first iPhone and Androids came out in 2007.) And we will remain digital for many decades, centuries, and millennia to come.
The older I get, the earlier it seems.
I’m a born optimist, and have been one for going on 80 years, which it turns out is a very short time. (I’m still shocked by that. Bodies shouldn’t wear out, should they? But they do. Biology wins, and that’s not a bad thing.) I’ve seen and participated in many tech revolutions: automatic transmissions, air conditioning, FM radio, personal computing, the Internet and the Web, Smartphones and tablets, digital photography and video, fiber and Wi-Fi, cellular telephony and data, ubiquitous connectivity.
Now it’s AI, and soon—inevitably—we will have personal AI that is entirely ours and not provisioned through suction cups on corporate tentacles.
After that happens, I expect that The Cluetrain Manifesto, ProjectVRM, and The Intention Economy will all prove out, though likely not in the ways I’ve imagined or forecast. Same with MyTerms, which I expect will activate all three of those. But I don’t know. Faith is evidence of the unseen, St. Paul (or somebody) said. So I go on that, or change my mind. (I contain multitudes, and they argue.)
I do know that all forms of tech, from stone tools to AI, are genies that grant uncountable wishes. They also, as Marshall McLuhan taught, shape us after we shape them. Digital tech plus the Internet are the greatest shapers of humanity since whatever evolutionary circumstances made us walk upright, think, speak, and make tools. AI is the latest and greatest family of products and services engendered by digital tech and the Internet.
Let’s be athletes who make sure our best wishes for AI are the ones that win.
The Indiana Hoosiers football team, still-undefeated national champs (17-0 including last year and this one) take on the Howard Bison today at noon. I’ll be watching. (It’s on Fox One.)
My biggest concern about AI? That we all start sounding and thinking exactly the same.
We spend so much time talking about AI alignment. I worry about how much we’re aligning ourselves with it.
Same words. Same ideas. Same “unique perspectives.”
And scrolling through LinkedIn, I feel like it’s already happening. 😂
I want AI to help me develop my thinking. I’m less excited about outsourcing what makes it mine.
Commented I,
How services trained on everybody and everything make everybody sound like everybody and as if they know everything about everything.
