Doc Searls Weblog

Just trying to make stuff happen

  • Harvest Moonday

    Stripe, Meta, and Apple, sitting in a tree

    In Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution, Patrick Collison (of Stripe fame) says (among much else), 

    Much of what I’m writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer’s side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it’s true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions. Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they’re proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.

    This sounds like what VRM is about. 

    Is it good, bad, or neither that Muse is using Stripe, and Collison is on the Meta board?

    I dunno, and I'm more confused now that Apple and Meta Just Teamed Up on AI, and Zuckerberg Thanked Apple’s CEO by Name, says the Yahoo Finance headline. The money graf:

    Zuckerberg rarely thanks Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) publicly, but on October 15, 2026, he did by name. He posted on X that Muse Spark Open, with weights released that day, "runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple." Meta released the model as open weights, meaning anyone can download the trained files and run them. Meta said it worked with Apple so developers can run it on two to four linked Mac Studios with the M5 Ultra chip. It is the first public partnership between the two since around 2017, after years of friction that included Apple's 2021 privacy changes, which hurt Meta's ad business.

    I think this means Apple is serious about getting developers to work on personal AI. Does it also mean that personal AI using open-weight meta models on Apple iron will give Muse the airgap they need to plausibly offer fully private personal agents, or agent services?

    Almost in time for Halloween

    Cambridge Day: MIT professors bedazzle cameras to protest expanding surveillance network. Subhead: "Tenured faculty are using rhinestones and googly eyes to demonstrate against 500-plus new cameras and plans to potentially implement AI capabilities."

    Feet feats

    Three NBA players in the last two decades have had injuries in which one of their feet bent 90° sideways, as one of their calf bones broke completely.  They call this a "fracture," but "break" is the more telling verb. 

    1. Paul George in August 2014. ESPN called this "an open tibia-fibula fracture." Meaning one or both calf bones broke completely, above the ankle.
    2. Gordon Hayward, in October 2017. His injury was described as "a dislocated left ankle and a fractured left tibia."
    3. Jalen Williams, yesterday. He suffered "a dislocated left ankle and a fractured left tibia."

    Paul George returned to form eventually. Gordon Hayward returned, but had an up-and-down career, and retired two seasons ago.

    Sounds to me like the Paul George break was the worst, bone-wise, but bones are less complicated to mend than ligaments and connective tissue. That's the "dislocated" stuff that made Gordon Hayward's recovery more difficult. We'll see how it goes with Jalen Williams.

    The larger point, at least for me, is that injuries are very common in pro sports, and in sports in general. I wasn't a varsity-grade basketball player—or even close—but I loved to play, and still bear scars. Examples:

    • My lower front teeth came through the skin under my lip when I took a shoulder to my jaw in the Guilford College gym. Facial hair covers that scar.
    • I sustained "gamekeepers thumb" injuries to both hands, in separate games. As a result of that, opening jars became problematic. Also, my shot was never the same.

    I probably could have avoided all three of those if I had been more skilled. But having been through them makes me more empathetic with the players I watch hammering each other for eighty-plus games a year.

    Among many

    One more way the US defeats itself.

    A briefing

    Inside Anthropic.

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  • The Fossil Present

    ChatGPT’s response to “I need an image of the World Wide Web as a fossil, to use under the headline ‘The Fossil Present.’”

    The Web isn’t dying, but it is being distanced from us. As a place to seek knowledge and connections, it is being replaced for many (including me) by AI chatbots that harvest findings from it, rewrite and summarize what they find, and—as gravy on that steak—point to sources it finds there.

    To some degree, this disincentivizes publishing on the Web. Chatbots remove readers and viewers, discourage advertisers and subscriptions, and tell writers that the Web is less worth their effort than it was in the past.

    Also, as the sum of information harvested to train and inform chatbots approaches a virtual Everything, it almost seems as though the collective provisioning of human knowledge is complete—or near enough.

    Of course we’ll continue to publish, because we are curious, thinky, and chatty animals. But the land rush that gave us forty zillion websites (seriously, about 210 million, according to Netcraft) actually ended around 2011 (Netcraft again), and has pretty much plateau’d since then:

    Source: Netcraft April 2026

    If the blue or red line starts to drop, I am sure that will be because agent-to-agent connections between buyers and sellers push aside the old roles of websites for publishing goods, and for buying them. Available inventories will be published in other media, using AI agents, while customers will shop and buy through agents of their own, which will peruse those same media, and make smart deals. We might still call this new matrix The Web, but its nature will be different.

    We always mischaracterized the Web with mixed real estate and publishing metaphors: pages we’d author and post in sites we’d construct or build at locations on domains that we’d visit and browse, as if these were the solid and durable occupants of a world wide library.

    But in fact the Web is a whiteboard. And it’s much easier on the Web to erase stuff than to produce and keep stuff up.

    While I love the Internet Archive and consider it the most saving grace ever invented, it’s a cemetery with glass-top graves. What’s there is done. It’s of near-infinite value, but not new. And new is what keeps the Web alive.

    I don’t know if chatbots are to the Web what the Chicxulub event was to dinosaurs. But I fear that it might be. I just hope the resemblance is a small one.

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  • Friday Tab Clearance Sale

    Stormy Whether

    GDPR services is a market we shouldn’t need at all, but it’s growing like a thundercloud. See the above. (Source: Mordor Intelligence)

    Looking up, more or less

    Though not the intention, Starlink’s 11,000 satellites are a planetary barometer. Spaceweather.com:

    Starlink has many downsides. The megaconstellation interferes with astronomy, pollutes the atmosphere with metallic re-entry debris, and has pushed Low Earth Orbit to the brink of the Kessler Syndrome.

    On the other hand, it makes a terrific barometer.

    Earth is absolutely surrounded by Starlink satellites. More than 11,000 of them are circling our planet right now. Without exception, they all skim the outermost layers of our atmosphere, and so they experience aerodynamic drag. Drag pulls them down, and they have to fight back with thrusters. This makes them ad hoc detectors of air pressure. Every day, we read those detectors and boil the result down to one number: the sink rate.

    The sink rate is the answer to a simple question. If a typical Starlink at 480 km switched off its thrusters today, how many meters of altitude would it lose in a day? A value of, say, 30 m/day means it would sink 30 meters. Why 480 km? Because that’s where most Starlinks are.

    The number changes every day in response to solar activity. In 2026 it has ranged from 19.7 m/day on Aug. 10th, the quietest air of the year, to 127.6 m/day on Jan. 20th, during the year’s biggest geomagnetic storm. That’s a factor of six. The satellites didn’t change; the air did.

    Toward Agentic VRM

    vCon is “A new IETF open standard defining how conversation data — audio, video, text, and metadata — is structured, signed, and exchanged across any system. The foundation of VCONify.” More:

    A vCon (Virtualized Conversation) is a standardized JSON container for all data related to a real-time human conversation. Think of it as the universal format for conversations — the way PDF standardized documents or MIME standardized email.

    One vCon carries everything: the audio recording, video stream, text transcript, participant identity, timestamps, derived analytics, and a cryptographic signature that proves the record hasn’t been altered.

    It is platform-agnostic, vendor-neutral, and AI-ready by design.

    A Brake on the Breaks

    ReverseAlignment says,

    Most of the effort and capital in AI goes to two tasks: making systems more capable, and aligning those systems with human values.
    Both matter. But even a perfectly aligned system will underdeliver, or do real harm, if it is released into economies, governments, and information systems unprepared to receive it.

    We call that neglected work reverse alignment: the deliberate redesign of institutions, norms, skills, and governance so that societies can absorb AI safely and share its gains widely.

    They have a coalition.

    Along those same aligns,,,

    Functional Consciousness is the site for a paper: Functional Consciousness: A Proxy Metric Using Self-Models, about which the abstract says,

    This paper proposes Functional Consciousness (FC) as a measurable architectural property: the observable capacity of a system to access and reason about internal representations of its own states. We introduce a computationally tractable metric on FC that operationalizes core tenets of major consciousness theories through self-models and their associated reasoning power, measured through informational richness and state-space expansion under inference. The resulting Functional Consciousness Score (FCS) is applied to benchmark systems with known internal structure, including a Waymo L4 autonomous vehicle. To extend the framework to black-box systems, we present Functional Self-Model Analysis (FSMA), an abductive methodology for inferring self-models from behavioral evidence. Applied to stream-of-consciousness literature, FSMA yields a catalog of self-models that serves as a reference for estimating functional consciousness in more complex biological and artificial agents. The resulting scores align with intuitive gradients of cognitive sophistication while remaining operationally grounded. Finally, we compare FC with major theories of consciousness and argue that several of their central functional claims become partially measurable within this framework.

    Frontiers of Importance

    Agents of Chaos is an academic study abstracted this way:

    We report an exploratory red-teaming study of autonomous language-model-powered agents deployed in a live laboratory environment with persistent memory, email accounts, Discord access, file systems, and shell execution. Over a two-week period, twenty AI researchers interacted with the agents under benign and adversarial conditions. Focusing on failures emerging from the integration of language models with autonomy, tool use, and multi-party communication, we document eleven representative case studies. Observed behaviors include unauthorized compliance with non-owners, disclosure of sensitive information, execution of destructive system-level actions, denial-of-service conditions, uncontrolled resource consumption, identity spoofing vulnerabilities, cross-agent propagation of unsafe practices, and partial system takeover. In several cases, agents reported task completion while the underlying system state contradicted those reports. We also report on some of the failed attempts. Our findings establish the existence of security-, privacy-, and governance-relevant vulnerabilities in realistic deployment settings. These behaviors raise unresolved questions regarding accountability, delegated authority, and responsibility for downstream harms, and warrant urgent attention from legal scholars, policymakers, and researchers across disciplines. This report serves as an initial empirical contribution to that broader conversation.

    The list of co-authors is half as long as that paragraph.

    So I’ll wait

    I want a Mac Studio for M5-grade personal AI and 16 TB of storage for my massive photo file collection. Wired calls it “only a preview of what’s to come.” Only $18,299.00.

    So I’m not

    The Observer says, “AI giants are trying to sell us the apocalypse. Don’t buy it.” Subhead: “Corporate spiel about the dangers of the technology is paradoxically just a way of marketing it as a transformative power of world-changing significance.”

    And much else that makes good and useful reading

    In The death of history’s most successful publisher, Cory says “Google has a scorching case of ‘main character syndrome.’”

    Doesn’t pay to get old

    In How the Government Forces Doctors to Defraud Our Seniors, Matt Bivens M.D. says, “Medicare has decided it can avoid paying its bills by simply changing the meanings of basic words. ER doctors like me sign off on this every day.”

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  • Fuseday

    First, and most importantly, don't miss Peter Kaminsky's talk today at 4 PM Eastern.

    Required Viewing

    I EXPOSED what big tech knows about you by becoming… a data broker, by Chris the Producer, on YouTube. It's brilliant. More about him here. And here. And here. Hat's off to Don Marti for the find. Bonus link.

    Because data edges (yours, mine) will do more for each and all of us than data centers alone

    The AI Data Center Bet Is Collapsing – And Asia Is Quietly Building the Lifeboat, by GD Naidu. Actually, it's two kinds of data centers, one built under failing regulatory capture (the US model) and the other built under central political control (the Asian model). And the latter isn't really a lifeboat (or choice of lifeboats) for the former.

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  • Cluesdays

    Soon as we skirted that ridge, the skies opened. Then it got colder. A lot colder.

    Riding wide

    On the road for a while. Above is a storm coming over Elk Country in north-central Pennsylvania. After that, Elk Country, Ohio, and back to Indiana, by RAV4.

    Didn’t know there was one, but yeah

    Chick-fil-A takes a stand against fast-food drive-thru AI trend.

    Maybe

    Is doomscrolling doomed?

  • The Mentat’s Method of AI

    This is the flyer for the next talk in our speaker series at IU. It’s on Tuesday, and a can’t-miss event. I explain more below.

    I know a lot of people who know a lot about AI. Or seem to. Or say they do. But Pete Kaminski is the real deal. More importantly, he knows more about putting AI to work for you than anyone else I know. If you want to know how to get personal—not personalized—AI working for you, Pete’s your guy.

    His talk is this coming Tuesday, 20 October, 4 PM Eastern, in the Student Building, Room 150, at Indiana University. And on Zoom. Go here to register and tune in (see the Join Event button). It’s participatory, so be ready to ask questions.

    The Dune fans among us should grok the headline, but in case not, mentats are superintelligent humans. These would be handy to have if AIs were outlawed, as they were in the Dune universe. For AI knowhow, Pete is my mentat, even if nobody in reality fits the description.

    Big thanks to the Ostrom Workshop and the Hamilton Lugar School at IU for their help and support in this, our sixth year of the series—and for all their earlier efforts as well.

    See ya’ll there!

    *A Heinlein thing.

  • Enjoying the Shows

    Nikki D & Sisters of Thunder at the 2026 Lotus Festival

    The idea was to get my photos from the latest Lotus Festival up right after the three-day event ended on Sunday the 4th. I had too many other things to do, so a week went by. But at least my shots of the last two performances are up. This one is for Nikki D & Sisters of Thunder, who describe their show as “sacred steel gospel and blues.” Fun group. Singing and musicianship are first-rate. Great personalities. Very charismatic. Dancing is required.

    This one is for Gadan, which does “Irish trad and bluegrass with the soul of Celtic and Appalachian roots music – all spiced with unmistakable Italian flair!” Here’s that photo album:

    Gadan at the Lotus Festival

    Another great band. Loads of fun. Great music. Can’t sit to them either.

    Here’s another thing. All the photos in both albums are Creative Commons licensed CC-BY-4.0: there for anyone to use, requiring only photo credit.

    I invite both bands, the Lotus Festival folks, and any member of Bloomington’s news commons to have at them as well.

    Here’s more about Lotus. It’s an amazing event. If you like great music from everywhere, you’ll love the show. It’ll be back next October.

  • Running

    I'm in Chicago for the Marathon and our son's birthday (he's running tomorrow). Also hanging with relatives and enjoying the city, which always feels to me like a giant Boston. (Color me wrong, it's okay.)

    Meaning it was fully yours

    Steven Levy: I’m Still Convinced the iPod Was the Perfect Gadget—Apple’s original music player got many things right. Chief among them: It didn’t connect to the internet.

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  • Time to book your rides

    AI isn’t just a “surf’s up” moment. It’s a tsunami. You have to surf that tsunami, just to keep from drowning. 

    Using your time. Your calendar is your surfboard.

    What’s your best beach for riding that calendar?

    Well, right now there are countless conferences with “Identity,” “AI,” or “Agentic” in their titles. Yes, they’re beaches. You can ride there.

    But where will you get the most done? Where can you write the agenda, and work with other people dealing with the same problems or pursuing the same opportunities? Real people doing real work. People who can help.

    Really, do you want to hear yet another CEO blather about what their VCs and marketing people want them to say? 

    Or do you want to get work done?

    IIW was made for getting things done. It has been a wide beach for surfing big tech waves since 2005, twice a year at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. The next one is our 43rd. It’s on November 3rd to 6th, less than a month from now.

    We immodestly believe that IIW is the most leveraged conference in the world. Two reasons:

    1. Our focus (without limits) is on identity, with lots of real-world results. OAuth, OpenID, passkeys, self-sovereign identity (SSI), decentralized identifiers (DIDs) UMA, SSI, VRM, and Personal AI—to name a few—would not be the same without countless forward-moving conversations and work at IIWs.
    2. What we don’t have. No keynotes. No panels. No agenda other than what participants choose.

    And that’s you. IIW is what you make of it.

    So join us. Register here.

    You’ll leave wet but a lot more fit.

  • Cluesday

    I write from the easternmost dark green state.

    Closer to homes

    Tornado Alley moves east. Here’s one I recorded live on my phone in February here in Bloomington, Indiana. Here is the trench of destruction dug by a later tornado that went through thick woodlands about twelve miles north of here.

    Didn’t know there was one, but yeah

    Chick-fil-A takes a stand against fast-food drive-thru AI trend.

    Maybe

    Is doomscrolling doomed?

    Always a bad sign

    NPR has a new privacy policy. Specifics.

    Here’s a PageXray of the policy page:

    Also, “Adserver Requests: 38 • Tracking Requests: 38 • Other Requests: 70” Just what you want from noncommercial radio.

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  • WaningCrescentMoonday

    Now, roughly.

    That’s what it says at MoonPhase.today

    Specifically, 26%.

    I’ll consider them unreal if they’re not at IIW.

    The UOR Foundation has plans to… Well, I can’t copy and paste the text, so here’s a screengrab:

    I’ll say not. Quite.

    AM I? | A Documentary About AI Consciousness.

    Ever notice the groovy ditches in tidal swampland?

    This swamp is under three AM broadcast towers south of Boston, built in 1940, when AM radio listening was at high tide. They were built for WNAC/1260. It’s now WBIX, known to Portuguese speakers as Nossa Radio USA. The towers were also used by WMEX/1510 until that station shut down on the last day of September. I shot it on approach to Logan in 2011.

    It’s called “grid ditching,” and is explained here:

    Grid Ditching

    The grid ditch system still evident on our salt marshes today, were dug by hand between 1928 and 1934. The primary purpose of this era of ditching was to put as many people to work as possible, as this was the time of the great depression. No entomological studies were conducted in conjunction with this ditching effort; mosquito control was a secondary consideration at best.

    However mosquito control was achieved by default as practically every square inch of marsh was drained by the extensive project. Some engineering studies were done to determine where and at what intervals ditches were dug. Ditches were dug in straight rows by hand with sod saws and two man shovels. In 1934, at the peak of this ditching effort, over 11,000 men were employed digging ditches and when completed nearly 3,000 linear miles of salt marsh ditch were dug in Massachusetts alone.

    Virtually all salt marsh in New England was ditched with the exception of one marsh in Rhode Island. Later in the late 1940s and early 1950s soldiers returned home from World War II. Housing shortages were a big problem in the more populated areas particularly in and around Boston. A generation of young families, eager to get their lives back on track migrated to the north shore of Massachusetts to start new lives.

    This migration coincided with the degradation of the grid ditch system created in the 1930s. These ditches had not been maintained and now produced far more mosquitoes then they had initially eliminated. By many accounts it was so bad some considered the area to be almost uninhabitable. A few local programs were established to try to reopen the ditches but it was impossible to duplicate the labor force that had originally created the ditches.

    In 1958, a grass roots effort, fueled by public demand for relief resulted in legislation establishing the Essex County Mosquito Control Project. For reasons unknown the project was not formally funded until 1965. Equipment was purchased and a major effort was launched to reclaim salt marsh ditches.

    Salt Marsh Ditch Maintenance in Northeast Massachusetts

    In the late 1970s, Walter Montgomery was an equipment operator for what was then, the Essex County Mosquito Control Project, ECMCP. Montgomery’s primary duty was to maintain the extensive salt marsh grid ditch system, excavated for the most part, between 1928 and 1934.

    Montgomery recalls using an implement known as a scavel plow; this was a large wedge shaped device mounted under a wing plow and could be attached to the front of a tractor or sometimes towed behind. A scavel plow wedge was basically constructed to the original ditch dimension. The wedge would be dropped into the ditch and the tractor either pushed or pulled it along. As the wedge peeled spoil out of the ditch the wing plow would roll the spoil into furrows approximately six feet wide on both sides of the ditch. These furrows of spoil were then either run over to flatten them or plowed off the marsh.

    On a productive day Montgomery recalls completing two or more miles of ditch maintenance but even at that rate maintenance of hundreds of linear miles of ditch was an endless endeavor. It was Montgomery’s experience that freshly maintained ditches were really only effective for about two years before requiring additional maintenance.

    Typically ditches would become blocked on the high marsh and previously drained salt pannes would often reestablish. Montgomery observed that the open water areas of these pannes or ponds didn’t have mosquito larvae but the grassy sheltered areas around the edges or isolated depressions adjacent to the ponds, supported mosquito larvae.

    Montgomery’s observations further supported his belief that continued maintenance of the grid ditch system was not productive and furthermore there had to be a better way to manage salt marsh mosquito populations.

    That is from a .pdf titled MASSACHUSETTS MOSQUITO CONTROL OPEN MARSH WATER MANAGEMENT STANDARDS MAY 2010. It is worth continuing to read, if mosquito control is your jam.

    Alas, as you may gather by now, everything is my jam.

    Seems Flickr is having an outage of some kind:

    Pages load. Notes load. Text loads. Photos don’t.

     

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  • Lintlinks

    infect other planets

    If  you don’t, you’re a human AI

    Test: See if you don’t laugh at something as you scroll down through this.

    Am I alone in finding it annoying?

    Does anybody want, or use, the “workspace” that shows up, whether you want it or not, every time you open a Zoom session?

    Getting less faint

    Wall Street Journal: The Global Bond Rout Is Getting Messy—Unwinding popular hedge fund trades helped drive U.S. Treasury yields lower, but there is also ‘a faint smell of a crisis in the making’

    Overheard

    “That was like hearing a mirror.”

    How advertising ends and something you like less begins

    Jamie Smith: Meta turning its money-printing machine (ads) into a ‘customer engagement machine’ – and it should be 100x bigger.

    Theory

    We can’t reconcile the Hippocratic Oath and executions.

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  • Thumbsday

    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.”

    Grayed matter

    Also gone are all the digital archives of Fast Company, Industry Standard, Business 2.0, and Red Herring, which competed with Upside in the early days of the Web. Pieces written by David Weinberger and Chris Locke, two of Cluetrain‘s co-authors, are also erased from the Web’s whiteboard.

    I agree

    Dylan Tweeney says  AI is going to increase demand for human writers.

    OMGF

    This was bad.

    Warning: Severe Public Service Wolf Crying

    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.

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  • Notesday

    In wasted dollars

    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
    • 66.6% set cookies before consent

    And the consent management platform (CMP) business weighs in at $4.1 billion.

    We now return to hiss

    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.

    You can deal with the identity piece at IIW

    I just learned that Reverse Alignment is a thing. It addresses—

    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.

    We found a clubhouse!

    Reason: Kids Are Using NPR Podcast Comments as Secret Group Chats.

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  • Don’t fall in

    AI shit gets so weird.

    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:
      • 61590279580369 — Grace Brooks
        • Profile
        • This is one I saw. One reel says: “I have a question for you old men… If I texted you first, would you actually reply? … follow me and say your name.”
        • Example reel
      • 61590736615465 — Grace Brooks
        • Profile
        • This separate account posted a nearly identical script: “I have a question for you old men… If I texted you first…”
        • Example reel
        • Another reel asks “old men” to follow and provide their names. www.facebook.com
      • 61591441983335 — was Grace Brooks, now Emily Bennett
        • Profile (Later: now blank)
        • 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.
        • A current Emily Bennett reel. (Not much later, it’s gone.)
    • Multiple accounts are on Instagram too:
      • @graciebrooks07 — the account I first found when I started digging. Has about 45,000 followers and 90 posts.
      • @graceeegf — another “Grace Brooks”: about 7,900 followers, 13 following, and 53 posts.
      • As of this evening (29 September 2026), both are still there
    • The second account uses the same material and language:
    • 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:

    1. Paid adult content, or referral
    2. Pay-to-chat
    3. Romance fraud (such as the FTC cares about)
    4. Fake investment (typically in cryptocurrency)
    5. Phishing
    6. Malware insertion
    7. Affiliate traffic pumping
    8. Growing an affiliate account for someone to sell off

    I vote for #1, but whichever it is, “Grace” and her friends are all bait at the top of a funnel.

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  • Cruiseday

    Real hard forks

    Hmm… NiemanLab: NPR, the quintessential audio news brand, adapts to a video-first future. Specifically, “NPR … landed Machine Gods, the new video-first podcast from veteran tech journalists Casey Newton and Kevin Roose.”

    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—

    1. What we watch for entertainment on TV (mostly on-demand streaming)
    2. What we watch during work on our computing devices (including news and business-related stuff)
    3. Gaming and other non-work stuff on our personal rectangles, some during work hours
    4. 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:

    1. 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.
    2. If Machine Gods is anything like Hard Fork, it won’t be a news show. It’ll be in the Technology list of Apple Podcasts and in Spotify’s version.
    3. 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
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  • Moonday

    Ilmoonination

    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. 

    Heavy reading

    Of uneven weight but equally weighty importance:

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  • Sunlint

    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?

    I nominate KXTL-TV’s 1997-foot tower in Walnut Grove, California, which I shot in 2019. (Fact: when I shot that set, one could walk right up to that thing. It’s a helluva sight.)

    Google him

    This is a great Indiana Football rap song.

    Like RuPaul said

    Bruce Schneier on what AI—and you—are for.

    The obvious is dawning on them

    Jacobs Media on radio’s future.

    Warm news

    Bare facts about bears.

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  • Performing a pooplic service

    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 these two 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.

  • Attaday

    This is the current model for personal AI. (The original photo is by Chad Davis. The data center is one of Google’s, in Council Bluffs, Iowa)

    It’ll get better before it gets worse before it gets better

    I trust Meta’s Muse.ai about as far as I can throw a data center. But at least one person whose wisdom I value says Muse will be the winner in the personal AI wars that I want none of the giants to win. It will, they say, beat Google’s Gemini, Apple’s Siri (starting in iOS 27), Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic’s Claude, and Amazon’s Alexa+.

    Alexandr Wang, Chief AI Officer at Meta, explains, Why I’m Building Muse:

    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 an NVIDIA graphics card.

    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:

    Meaning truly personal AI, of my very own. Not a suction cup on a corporate monster’s tentacle.

    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:

    I mean for you and me. Not just enterprises.

    What does it mean that Keenable.ai is building The Web for AI agents?

    Did I hear that right? I’m building sites with agents too.

    Just heard from Keith Teare on The Gillmor Gang that this Leica site was entirely made by a team of AI agents.

    Effects will persist

    Just learned from danah boyd that the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research has come to a close.

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