Finally Fixing Health Care is a post I started here and finished on the ProjectVRM blog, where it belonged in the first place. It's about how Google and Microsoft wasted $billions not fixing a problem they could only make worse. And how healthcare needs a VRM solution: because it's our health, our data, and we're the only ones in a position to scale it.
A world-wide view of MarineTraffic.com. The site and its app are extremely useful right now.
The world runs on boats.
Yes, also on trains and trucks. But boats are at issue, as the Strait of Hormuz is being blockaded. Here is how it looks at the moment (12:35 PM Eastern) on MarineTraffic.com:
The red arrowhead shapes are tankers in motion. The green ones are container ships in motion (or underway, as they say). Small green arrowheads are general cargo or bulk carriers in motion. The red and green dots are the same kinds of ships, but not in motion. Note how those are clustered on either side of the strait. Click on any of them for more info. Zoom out and look around the world to learn more types of ships, where they are headed, and more.
Most of what you’ll see are boats sending AIS signals, explained here. Since military vessels tend not to be interested in that, you won’t see them.
But you will have some live background on news being made.
This story appeared in the April 2019 issue of Linux Journal. It’s still there, but with no photos (which seem to have vanished from much of the magazine’s archives).* I think both the story and the photos are too important (and now timely) to leave in a state of neglect, so I’m running the story again here.
It starts here, in the heart of Long Island, a couple dozen exits east of Queens. I saw it with my own eyes in Mineola’s Public Schools, where kids, led by a nonprofit called kidOYO (“kid-oh-yo”), are learning to program in different languages on different devices and operating systems, creating and re-creating software and hardware, with fun and at speed. Their esteem in themselves and in the eyes of their peers derives from their actual work and their helpfulness to others. They were also moving ahead through levels of productivity and confidence that were sure to create real-world results and strip the gears of any system meant to contain them. Mineola’s schools are not one of those systems.
OYO means Own Your Own, and that’s what these kids are learning to do. In geekier terms, they are rooting their own lives online. They’re doing it by learning to program in languages that start with Scratch and progress through Python, Java, C#, and beyond. They’re doing it on every hardware and software platform they can, while staying anchored to Linux, because Linux is where the roots of personal freedom and agency go deepest. And they’re doing in all in the spirit of Linus’ book title: Just for fun.
With kidOYO, the heuristics go both ways: kidOYO teaches the kids, and the kids teach kidOYO. Iteration is constant. What works gets improved, and what doesn’t gets tossed. The measures of success are how enthused the kids stay, how much they give and get energy from each other, and how much they learn and teach. Nowhere are they sorted into bell curves, given caste-producing labels such as “gifted” or “challenged.” Nor are they captive to the old report card system. When they do take standardized tests, for example, the college AP (advanced placement) ones for computer science, they tend to kick ass.
kidOYO is the creation of the Loffreto family: Devon, Melora, and their son Zhen, who is now 13. What started as a way to teach computing to Zhen turned into ways to teach computer science to every kid, everywhere. kidOYO’s methods resemble how the Linux kernel constantly improves, with code contributors and maintainers stamping out bugs and iterating toward ever-expanding completeness, guided by an equal mix of purpose and fun.
Before we met, I had assumed, from Devon’s writing style and deep knowledge of stuff, that he was a gentleman perhaps of my own age, or even older. So I was surprised to find that he was not only a youngish guy, but a New York state high school champion baseball and basketball player who went to college on a sports scholarship. Also that he looked a stunt double for George Clooney.
I’ve also known for a long time that what kidOYO does is important. But my mind wasn’t blown by it until I obeyed Devon’s invitation to see their approach at work. That happened on Groundhog Day in February of this year. (An album of pictures I took on that visit is on the Linux Journal Flickr sitehere. Many links here go to captioned photos in that album.)
Mineola is about as prototypical as a middle class New York suburban town can get. It’s a 2-square mile village of about 20,000 in the heart of Nassau County, which lays between Long Island’s north and south shore and is home to about 1.5 million people. The Mineola Free Union School District, however, is anything but typical. I’ve never seen a public—or any—school system with its feet equally planted in the digital and the physical worlds, or as determined to help kids master both. For example, all three schools I visited had created social and hacker spaces, called Coding Centers, within their libraries. The books and the stacks still mattered, but so did the ability of kids to research, learn and teach together using computing and related gear, such as 3-D printers and programmable robots.
Standing in the Coding Center at the Mineola Middle School, surrounded by kids doing amazing stuff on their Chromebooks, Dr. Michael Nagler (@naglersnotions), superintendent for the district, gave me the backstory on how kidOYO got involved.
“Three years ago my wife signed our son up for a coding class these guys were putting on,” he said. “So I drive my son out there, and I’m watching what they’re doing, and I’m impressed. I ask Dev, ‘Why aren’t you in schools?’ He says, ‘The schools won’t talk to us.’ So I say, ‘Well, you’re talking to one now.’ We worked to help adapt their platform for schools, starting with ours. And I mean all of ours. We jumped in the deep end, starting with the little kids and pushing it up through high school. And now we’re on this three year journey, so far, during which everything changes. Constantly. The little ones get the skills, and they roll up. Now I have to adjust my next level, and do it waaay faster than I have to with any other curriculum. Right now, for example, for the AP Computer Principles course in high school, they’re doing the learning path for Hatch 1 and Hatch 2.”
Later, when I asked Melora in an email what Hatch was, she replied, “Hatch is an app within OYOclass that uses the Scratch programming language. Here are two projects made in Hatch: one by 10 Yr Old kidOYO Student ‘Lucy’ and one by me.”
Dr. Nagler continued, “Meanwhile, my sixth graders are already finished with it. So by the time these sixth and seventh graders get to ninth grade, my expectation is that every student in the district is taking AP Computer Principles. That’s going to replace our Exploring Computer Science class. And then we build in connections. So we’re doing Arduinos here in the Middle School’s sixth grade, and simultaneously in ninth grade in the high school. Then, as the younger kids move forward, we’ll change the ninth grade setup.”
Since Maker Faire New York is a great place for kids from everywhere to show off their maker chops (and where I first met the whole Loffreto family), I asked Dr. Nagler if they had plans for that.
“We merge CS and computational thinking with making. We have a whole design and creative thinking framework tied to our mascot, the mustang. We make ways for the kids to conceptualize, design, iterate, prototype, test, refine, go, back, and build things.”
I asked, “How do you deal with the variety of kids who are already on this path, plus other kids who want to come in and need to catch up, and eventually everybody in the school doing AP level work on computers?
“A couple of ways. First, it’s not an elective. Here in Mineola, every kid has to do it. They also have to do it in their subject classes. So we tie a coding project to a curriculum project. Every grade has to do three a year. We also teach it both independently the OYO way, and in the existing the formal way, cycling kids through CS classes, for example here in this room. I think we’re unique in that we don’t want it to be a formal class. I want CS to be ingrained in everything we do.”
“How do you see this scaling and spreading?”
“We constantly refine what we do so we can share it in ways that can be adopted by other districts. I’m a big open source guy. Sharing is key. So, for example, I’m taking the kidOYO platform and building an open computer science curriculum in social space. The beauty of their platform is that it lets me build OER—Open Educational Resources—using their concept of learning paths, which we also work on together. Dev also built me a community that I can share with an organization I belong to called the League of Innovative Schools, which is a national organization. We can crowd-source content there. I built a sample curriculum unit I can push outside New York to other states. By crowdsourcing we already have a ton of content on there.” (Later, as we were editing this, Melora clarified what’s happening here: “Dr. Nagler is building a repository of open curriculum of all subjects currently taught in school. The CS curriculum comes from kidOYO.”)
“Right. It stands for Mineola Creative Content, and it’s a video production studio. We do fun learning videos, which are a basis for the learning pathway here.”
The opening text on the MC² site (https://mc2oer.oyoclass.com/) explains, “This community showcases open educational content and other materials from the Mineola School District…Our school district is dedicated to the #GoOpen movement which supports sharing educational resources.”
“It’s all about #OER—Open Educational Resources—and open source,” Dr. Nagler explained. “We use the videos here in the district, and we throw them out to the world where everybody can use them.”
Look up “Dr. Nagler” on YouTube, and you’ll find lots of them. He’s the star, as both a mentor and an animated character. There’s even one video where he talks with his own disembodied brain, which speaks through his signature goatee.
“An important context is that there is no central repository of educational materials in this country, because they’re all locked up by proprietary publishers. What we’re doing here is a way to get around that. And I have a lot of flexibility. I can market MC² as a school district entity, and not worry about all the copyright restrictions. It’s all made to share.”
I asked, “What happens after these kids graduate?”
“They’re going to change the world. That’s clear. We’re also all dealing with astronomical change in the technical environment along the way. Constantly. This makes everything very hard to predict. Look at my 2019 high school graduates. They started Kindergarten in 2006. Even from just 2006 to 2009, the technology advances were astronomical. And then look what happened in the next ten years. Huge. So if I start planning now for where Kindergarten kids will come out at the end of the next twelve years, I’m already lost. But if I trust the process we have in place already, I’ll be fine. We’re driving it, and the kids are driving it too. It’s a constant cycle.”
I replied, “We also live in a world where giant companies are working to contain those kids’ agency inside corporate silos. Some of those silos also spy on everyone constantly. How do you deal with that?”
“The common denominator is CS, and the flexibility within it. There’s freedom in that. I’m not going to force you to master, say, just one language. I’m going to get you on a platform where you can play with any and all of them, learn quickly and well, and apply whatever language you like toward building something. And because we’re merging the making and the coding, your next question will be, ‘What will this code do?’ The answer is, computational thinking will always push you toward solving problems. If you look at the big picture, content already is readily available to every kid. And content has always been our specialty, as a school. But with CS, the kids learn to master that content in many ways. That’s key. Kids need to know and feel they’re on top of things, that they Own their Own. You can’t lock up that kind of confidence and competence.”
“What about curricular necessities? The mandates that come down from the federal and state level?”
“We’re still a public school, and we do have formalities. For example, here in New York every kid has to pass the state Regents Exam. We teach to that, but we also make sure there’s no way a kid graduates without exposure to computer science.”
“And you trust that’s going to equip them, once they’re out.”
“It’s more than that. Working with kidOYO, we’ve developed something that not only should be replicated everywhere, but needs to be. Here’s the important thing: there aren’t enough people who know computer science who can also teach it. So when you figure out a way to virtually do it, to scale the knowledge outward for everybody, it’s a big deal. The investment I make here probably cost me one teacher’s salary. But it scales to the whole district. In fact it’s the only way to scale up computer science through schools, because the current credentialing system is too slow, too top-down, and formal training is too far behind the curve. The kids and their mentors are moving too fast for that.”
Watching the kids, and listening to this, made me wish I could show it all to John Taylor Gatto, possibly the most highly regarded (and often awarded) teacher in the history of New York. Gatto famously quit his job after 25 years in protest against what he listed as called the seven lessons he was actually paid to teach:
Confusion
Class position
Indifference
Emotional dependency
Intellectual dependency
Provisional self esteem
That you can’t hide
What I saw in both kidOYO’s and Mineola’s approaches were well-crafted ways to fight all of that. Their systems are rigged so every kid progresses and every kid succeeds.
John Taylor Gatto died last October, but I hope his ghost was listening a few minutes earlier when Melora explained to me, “We have no lowest common denominator, because everyone succeeds. There are twelve-year olds in this program that a 7th grade teacher wouldn’t look twice at in an ordinary classroom, but in fact is an outstanding programmer. And choice is key. When Dr. Nagler brought this program to his schools, it wasn’t just for a select few kids. He wanted it to be open to everybody. And everybody has the ability to chose anything they want. It’s a totally different ecosystem than you’ll find anywhere else. And he’s gracious enough to reach out to other school systems to help them break down their own classroom walls. One of the things he preaches is that you have to believe. That’s a requirement of being on the cutting edge. The failing forward principle works for everybody too. It’s a model that works.”
Jordan Chaver and Connor Scott, co-hacking in the Coding Center at Mineola Middle School
The spirit of helpfulness and failing forward also fosters kids’ confidence that they can weigh in with solutions of all kinds. To show me how that works, Devon took me over to a table where Jordan Chaver and Connor Scott, a sixth and a seventh grader, were working together on something.
“These two guys,” he said, “are your app builders. They came with us out to Stony Brook University for some of our software program there. Jordan pitched them on building an app on iOS, which he already knew how to do. But there was not a single mentor in the room who knew what Jordan was trying to do, because in university CS they don’t want to work in a closed environment. So we transitioned the challenge over to the Web, because what we really needed was a Web based app with database functionality. So that’s what these kids are building here. And there isn’t just one app. There’s a set of them. There’s one they call Social Emotional. There’s another called Class Dash.”
Then Devon asked the boys to demo Class Dash. Connor pulled up a Chromebook, angled it toward me and said, “Let’s say you have a research paper. One that’s big and complicated. And you press Submit. Behind this you have something kind of like Dropbox, where you can share documents.”
Devon explained, “They’re sharing all their class assignments in a firewalled white spaced environment where they don’t have access to their emails. So this is a simple way of sharing inside that environment.”
Connor continued, “You also have this five-character ID code. Jordan can type in the code, and he gets the same exact document. So can anyone else with the code. The idea is to share something with the class in a way that avoids complications. We’re also in a class play, Once Upon a Mattress, which is based on the Princess and the Pea. I’m the Prince and Jordan is the Wizard. So Jordan made this schedule for all the performances, where you can buy tickets, and so on.” On his Chromebook, Jordan showed me his page with the schedule next to a graphic of the play’s title. He then gave Connor the five-digit code for access to the schedule, which then came up on Connor’s Chromebook. (A picture of that is here.)
Connor again: “Right now I’m adding a way to lock a document. Let’s say that Jordan is the teacher and he finds a spelling error in my document. I’ll add a button you can click on and see if anybody has updated the document.”
Jordan said, “Let me tell you more about Class Dash, which I did for Stony Brook. It’s a student-teacher companion app. It has multiple uses, but the one that’s currently available is called Schedule. It covers notes, teacher, room, and supplies. I play drums, so drumsticks are an example of supplies. I also have Instant Messaging Teacher. The idea is, if you have a homework question, instead of emailing the teacher and getting a response the morning after, the teacher gets a push notification on their phone.” Class Dash will first hit the market in April as an iOS app, because that’s Jordan’s plan. Other versions will come after that.
Joseph Malone, also twelve, is at the same table, hacking AI algorithms. Devon said, “Joseph here is spinning up his own virtual machine and generating algorithms to train his AI to run his scripts. He’s going into OpenAI, playing with AI algorithms, modifying them, and putting them to use. It’s neat stuff, and it’s also huge.”
Melora told me Joseph is also helping out by volunteering a stream of challenges, solutions and badges for kidOYO courseware. “He does all the work himself, and makes it open and available to everybody.”
“We’re fully networked here,” Devon added. “No need for back-end support.” Meaning no external corporate dependencies. kidOYO and its participants—learners (they aren’t called students), mentors (they aren’t called teachers), parents, schools—all work together, and for each other, as a “community of communities.”
They’re also not moving at the speed of anybody’s clock, or anybody’s class. Though they’re sure to change the world, that’s not the goal. In fact, there is no long-term goal. The journey is truly the reward, and the journey is called the learning path. That’s what matters. Its not seen, or built, as a way to plow through the status quo. Even though that’s one of the things it does. Neither Mineola nor kidOYO want to burden kids with anything other than the need to master their digital worlds, and to constantly advance their mastery.
The Middle School was the second one we visited in Mineola. The first was Hampton Street School, which is Pre-K to 2nd grade. There we saw clusters of five and six year old girls and boys in the library’s Coding Center, hacking away on school-issued tablets using Scratch, which is free (as in both liberty and cost), open source and runs on anything. They were doing this both by themselves and collaboratively.
With kidOYO, all the kids know they are working to expand both their own skills and those of other kids. There are also rewards along the way, such as on-screen fireworks and badges. After a bit of working on their own, the kids’ work is shown on a screen for review by each other and Melora, their mentor. (The learner/mentor relationship is central to the kidOYO system and practiced in the Mineola school system as well.) Devon later explained what was going on: “Melora was reviewing the process of getting challenge submission feedback from mentors, as well as introducing them to a new app called Sprite Editor that we recently released for kids to create art they may want add to their Scratch, Python or Web-based projects. Often it’s their own video game character art.”
When one boy failed a particular challenge, he embraced it, knowing that FAIL means “First Attempt In Learning.” Three girls came over to help the boy out. It was interesting to watch how they knew their job wasn’t to jump in with the right answer, but to help the boy learn what he didn’t know yet, so he would have the satisfaction of succeeding for himself. This was a far more sophisticated and mature than I would normally expect of second grade kids. Instead I would have expected kids that age to show off what they knew, or to one-up each other. But that’s not how the kidOYO approach works.
Have you ever played the red/black game? It tends to be taught in self-improvement retreats and workshops to show there’s more to be gained from cooperation than from competition. My point in bringing it up is that it’s damned hard to teach adults how to deal with each other in ways that are as empathetic, helpful and vanity-free as what I saw as normal behavior among these little kids.
At Hampton Street, Devon spent most of his time working with a second grader named William Ponce, who was clearly grooving on what he was doing. Later, Devon wrote to explain what was going on:
Here is William Ponce’s portfolio. Every kid has one. You can see badges he has earned. If you click on one of his “Mastery Badges” you will see the “Learning Pathway” that he navigated in earning it, displayed as evidence in the badge. Clicking on the micro badges will also show you the badges earned on his way to the mastery badge.
In this photo you see William earning his first Mastery Badge. Since we left that class, you can see he has earned two more already!!
Our third stop was Mineola High School, which has a fab lab and manufacturing facility. “We actually source product from them,” Devon told us on the way over. “For our store. Coding is the underlying infrastructure, but it’s applied everywhere.”
The Fab Lab is beyond impressive. It’s as big as a lumber yard and has lots of machinery, materials, and students making stuff. Ken Coy, one of the five teachers who collaborate to run the lab, explained, “We do it all. Welding, electronics, coding, Arduino, hand tools, computer tools. We bring it all together here. We have all the old traditional tools that were around in wood shop days—drill press, band saw, lathe, tools for sanding—plus all the new stuff that’s both manual and computer controlled. Large format printers, laser cutters…”
When I asked him about Linux, he brought me over to the shop’s Linux CNC (Computer Numerical Control) computer, running on Ubuntu and attached to a Probotix controller and a router. (Not a network router, but a powered workworking tool that cuts with bits or blades.) In the design class space, Andrew Woolsey (@WoolseyDesigns) showed me a CNC controlled laser cutter where the students were tracing, carving and printing out parts for art projects, signs and much more (which occupied students working on adjacent tables). He also showed me a printer as wide as a piano churning out student portraits and posters of amazing quality, including ones for the Mineola Robotics Team (@mineolarobotics), which is always competitive. (Or so it appeared, given awards and posters hanging on the shop wall.)
I don’t often see stuff that makes me wish I was fourteen again, but Mineola High School did the job. Walking around the fab lab, the library and the halls, I didn’t see a kid who wasn’t upbeat and engaged, or a teacher who wasn’t the same.
To me, however, this isn’t just about education. Or learning. It’s about a sea change in the world, caused by digital technology in general and Linux in particular. And not a small one. As sea changes go, this one is on the scale of Snowball Earth, or maybe larger.
Not long ago I was talking with Joi Ito, who runs the MIT Media Lab, about historic precedents for what we might call our species’ digital transition: the one by which we become digital as well as physical animals. Was it as big as the industrial revolution? Movable type? Writing? Speech? Walking on two feet? Joi said, “I think it’s the biggest thing since oxygenation.”
Oxygenation caused life as we’ve known it since then. What is the digital transformation causing now?
Marshall McLuhan taught that our tools are extensions of our selves, and that they shape us after we shape them. He also said every useful new technology “works us over completely.” That’s what’s happening in our new digital age, and it’s still just beginning.
At this early stage it’s easy to take a dystopian view of what becoming digital does to kids. It is also easy to take a Utopian one. Both are extreme outcomes that surely won’t happen. But what will?
Aristotle said there were four causes: material (what something is made of), efficient (what makes it happen), final (the purpose), and formal (the form or design of the result).
These kids’ learning paths are full of material, efficient and final causes. To them, those are computer programs (material), programming (efficient), and rewards at every step (final). But the formal cause I saw behind them, the design of OYO itself, is a great leap forward and outward in the useful work of individuals and the societies they make.
There will be downsides. One of the ways new technologies work us over, McLuhan said, is with bad outcomes. We already see some, such as the social isolation that comes from staring at glowing rectangles all the time. Every parent I know laments the degrees to which their children are lost in the phones and tablets they carry everywhere, and how they can so easily hurt each other through unkind things said at safe distances in the physical world and zero distance in the networked one.
But the OYO approach maximizes positive social interaction by making it constructive for everybody. OYO doesn’t work unless people are good to each other, and good to themselves. And by making stuff constantly. Being creative.
If this approach spreads, and I expect it will (mostly because the old industrial education system is better off adopting than competing with it), the hands in which we are leaving the world will be good ones.
*I want to make clear that keeping Linux Journal on the Web, with all its archival addresses and links intact, is deeply important, and I am grateful to the publisher for making that happen. I also hope they can find a way to restore images in the archives. Until then I may occasionally bring back old pieces from LJ and put them here.
I asked Gemini to make me a surreal image of a furry desert. FWIW, here it is. I dunno what’s with the footprints or the horns on the moon, but there ya go.
So today I went all the way with it
I just realized I’ve been naming each day’s Wordland posts (such as this one) kind of the way the US military names campaigns.
Turkey shut down Twitter today. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced, “We now have a court order. We’ll eradicate Twitter. I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic.” (Hurriyet Daily News) He also said Turkey will “rip out the roots” of Twitter. (Washington Post)
Well, Turkey didn’t rip out the roots of Twitter. Elon Musk did, a decade later. But the points I made then still apply. The main one:
At the most basic level, the Net’s existence relies on protocols rather than on how any .com, .org, .edu or .gov puts those protocols to use.
The Net’s protocols are not servers, clouds, wires, routers or code bases. They are agreements about how data flows to and from any one end point and any other. This makes the Internet a world of ends rather than a world of governments, companies and .whatevers. It cannot be reduced to any of those things, any more than time can be reduced to a clock. The Net is as oblivious to usage as are language and mathematics — and just as supportive of every use to which it is put. And, because of this oblivity, The Net supports all without favor to any.
Want to buy an AM station for $0? Too late.
Since 1996, 620 AM has been a beacon on the Dallas-Fort Worth radio dial. The station was 5000 watts by day and 4500 by night. On Texas and Oklahoma’s extremely conductive soil, that’s enough to blanket large parts of both states. It moved to Dallas after operating from 1939 to 1994 as a Wichita Falls station called KWFT. After the move, it was licensed to Plano and had the callsign KAAM. Disney bought it for $12 million in 1998, and renamed it KMKI (for Mickey Mouse). Later, Disney put all its stations up for sale after realizing that radio was in the toaster. Salem Media Group bit, buying KMKI for $3 million in 2015. More callsign and format changes followed, while ratings stayed in the tank. At some point between this Google Streetview in 2024 and this Satellite view in 2026, three of KTNO’s five towers came down (causing, far as I can tell, no news). Since then, the station has been operating at reduced power using one of its towers. Finally, two days ago, Salem announced that it would surrender the license. I listened (at 6 AM Eastern) to a few SDR receiving stations, and still heard the signal. But later (about 10 AM) it was gone.
I know reporting on this stuff is deeply boring for most people, but it’s archival stuff I care about and think is worth noting, especially for the (I’m guessing a few dozen) broadcast engineering types who tune into this blog. Our numbers are falling too.
…as you get deeper into the AI environment, you get smarter. Not just better informed, that’s what the web has been doing for us for 30+ years. The AI stretches your mind the way PCs did initially. It makes you smarter. Can it help us work better together? Remains to be seen. Perhaps each of us is forming our own multi-billion dollar company, and training the (virtual) people we want working with/for us. There are very few human people who seem interested in collaborating. They all want to blaze their own trail, and if you want to improve their product you have to reproduce the whole freaking thing. The web had a different philosophy, adopted from Unix, not the tech industry. We want to work with others. And we do. And it seems there’s an opportunity to cast the entire AI push in the same light, so that the individual developer has the power to make industry standard products.
Converse with and relate to businesses as human beings and not just as seats, eyeballs, end users, or consumers.*
Require privacy for all the above, and are equal partners with the businesses in which they invest trust, opening paths for market intelligence to flow both ways.
A Free Customer Award would be fun for Customer Commons to give to businesses that welcome and eagerly engage with free customers. As a base requirement, these businesses would agree to customers’ MyTerms.
Here are some candidates (links go to PageXrays of each):
I would exclude Apple. While Apple is more respectful of personal privacy than Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and other giant silo operators, it still participates in the surveillance fecosystem through its IDFA (ID For Advertisers) device identifier. That’s there for advertisers, not for you (unless you really want advertising personalized by tracking, which some apparently do). Nearly everybody opts out of it, and I think they should kill it. Bonus thought: Change “Ask App Not to Track” to “Prevent App From Tracking.” (Some background on that.)
Of course, it’s too early for this, because we need code to make MyTerms work. We’ll be seeing some soon at VRM Day, IIW, and AIW, which run consecutively through the final weekdays of this month and the first of next (April 27 to May 1). Casting the net of possibilities wider, I’m hoping (and in some cases, eventually expecting) code from:
Shot this while building and testing the new TV antenna that would go on an 18-foot pole a few feet from what is now my office here in Bloomington, Indiana. The antenna is aimed at the farm of towers on the north side of Indianapolis, about 60 miles away.
Meanwhile, over-the-air (OTA) TV has been tanking in the US since it went digital in 2008. Lots of reasons. TV screens have improved to 4K, UHD, and HDR, which streaming supports, while over-the-air TV stays stuck in the ’00s, with 480, 720p or 1080i resolutions. “NextGen TV” (ATSC 3.0) is slowly being rolled out for OTA, but with big technical limitations. plus absent tuners in most late-model TVs. Meanwhile, viewing continues to decline. Let’s take a survey. Are you watching over-the-air TV, meaning with an antenna? Do you know anybody watching it? Do you even know if your TV can get it? Didn’t think so.† Bonus link.
*Back in the early ’80s, WCTI was a client of my ad agency, together with WNCT-TV and WITN-TV. Some fun stories about that, which I’ll save for another time.
†If you do watch over-the-air TV, let me know where and how you’re getting it. Here’s how I’m doing it.
On this view in MarineTraffic.com, click on the tankers (red directional symbols) approaching the Strait of Hormuz from both directions, and tell us if the strait is open, not, or what.
I wanted to know when the transmitter site for Denver radio station KHOW/630 (above), which I shot from an airplane in 2018, was built. So I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. Three had the answer, sourcing this report by Scott Fybush from January 2018. (Answer:1979.) The AI that found nothing was Claude.
Meanwhile, Claude beats the rest at co-thinking about a problem. At least for me. Today.
All the places your data starts to go after it exits you browser while you read the story below (and when you click on this image). HT: pagexray.fouanalytics.com.
None of which you asked for, and few of which you can thrwart
Adserver Requests: 543
Tracking Requests: 447
Other Requests: 132
Including all those other places in the PageXray above.
Among other crimes
Says UnJustified, Microsoft Corporation’s LinkedIn is running a massive, global, and illegal spying operation on every computer that visits their website…
As part of the campaign in removing everyone from the market who might actually make use of the Digital Markets Act, LinkedIn started injecting malicious code into the browsers of their users, without their knowledge or their consent.
At the time of writing, this code downloads a list of 6,222 software products and brute-forces the detection of each one. The scan covers extensions with a combined user base of approximately 405 million people.
4. The Bigger Picture
Because LinkedIn knows each visitor’s name, employer, and job title, every detected extension is matched to an identified individual. And because LinkedIn knows where each user works, these individual scans aggregate into detailed profiles of companies, institutions, and government agencies, revealing which software tools their employees use without the organization’s knowledge or consent…
The malicious JavaScript that Microsoft secretly injects into the LinkedIn website searches each user’s browser for installed software applications.
The search reveals:
• Political opinions of users, through extensions like “Anti-woke,” “Anti-Zionist Tag,” and “No more Musk”
• Religious beliefs, through extensions like “PordaAI” (blur haram content) and “Deen Shield” (blocks haram sites)
• Disability and neurodivergence, through extensions like “simplify” (for neurodivergent users)
• Employment status, through 509 job search extensions that reveal who is looking for work on the very platform where their current employer can see their profile
• Trade secrets of millions of companies, by mapping which organizations use which competitor products, from Apollo to ZoomInfo.
A video recording of WCBS NewsRadio 880 signing off the air.
Bad Karma
In August of 2024, Audacy killed off WCBS/880 in New York, handing its ratings over to sister station WINS/1010, which now identifies by its new FM signal on 92.3 (even though the AM signal is much bigger). In the process, Audacy also handed off the 880 channel to Good Karma Brands, which already owned WEPN/1050 in New York. The same programming now runs on 1050 and 880. The latter is now called WHSQ. They also share website, branded ESPN New York.
And get this: together they have no ratings. Zero. Nada. Beating both are a collection of online and HD2 streams, small college, ethnic, and outer-suburb signals with specialized formats.
Now get this: 880AM is a clear channel station with a monster signal that covers the metro and outer suburbs by day and half the country at night. 1050AM isn’t as big, but still much bigger than most other stations (and streams) that do get ratings.
Prior to this change, ESPN New York was on 98.7 FM and had poor but extant ratings. At the time, 1050 was ESPN Desportes, the Spanish version of ESPN radio. It had ratings, too. Not great, but… something. Now 98.7 is owned by Emmis, and is called La Exitosa (while still carrying the WEPN callsign). It gets okay ratings. ESPN Desportes is gone from 1050, and its English-language replacement, which had been on 98.7, is in nowhere together with the 880 signal.
Let me sum this up:
1. WCBS—>WHSQ on 880. From good ratings as WCBS to none as ESPN New York.
2. WEPN on 1050. From some ratings as ESPN Desportes to none as ESPN New York.
3. WEPN-FM on 98.7. Now with ratings as La Exitosa, while ESPN Desportes is gone.
Anyone have any intel on what might be next here? This can’t continue. (Well, ESPN New York may still carry the Mets, which might bring some ratings during the baseball season, but that’s not enough.)
A special Facebook hell
Long ago, I made the mistake of creating a second Facebook account just for family members who interacted nowhere else. Since then, I have made additional mistakes, such as thinking I was on my main Facebook account (that I’ve had since Facebook was for university folk only, in 2006) when I was on the family one, joining groups and adding non-family friends to the family account, and then getting notices of postings that might be in eigther place places, so I sometimes end up in my family account site rather than my main one.
Used to be that I could easily switch accounts on the fly, but now Facebook requires a password to get back, and it never fucking works. So I have to get a new one. This requires that Facebook send me an email or an SMS message, and those also don’t come. Or not every time. So I’m locked out for however long it takes before I get an email or an SMS.
(Time passes.) Okay, I’m back on my main FB account. Sigh.
I’m unsubscribing from Substacks that require subscriptions to read whole posts.
I’m glad to pay à la carte. I’d love to use EmanciPay. I’d love any payment option or system that gives readers forms of agency that are not limited to the few choices publishers provide. But, until we have that, I’m gone.
Anyway, like many musicians, Eliza has problems with how f’d up music/recording/streaming/performing/promoting systems and industries are. I have an answer to that, which Dean and others helped author in ProjectVRM, and I wrote about in Linux Journal back in 2015. Since the images are gone from that archive, I just re-published it on this blog.
How music listeners can fill the industry’s “value gap.”
This piece was my column for the November 2018 issue of Linux Journal. I’m running it again here for three reasons: 1) It’s still timely and worth resurfacing, 2) Linux Journal’s archives are now absent of images (and I’m an image guy), and 3) I think this one answers some of what Eliza McLamb, who hails from Chapel Hill (a town I still miss) calls for in her excellent Fake Fans post on Substack.For that answer, scroll down to the section for EmanciPay.
From the 1940s to the 1960s, countless millions of people would put a dime in a jukebox to have a single piece of music played for them, one time. If they wanted to hear it again, or to play another song, they’d put in another dime.
In today’s music business, companies such as Spotify, Apple, and Pandora pay fractions of a penny to stream songs to listeners. While this is a big business that continues to become bigger, it fails to cover what the music industry calls a “value gap.”
They have an idea for filling that gap. So do I. The difference is that mine can make them more money, with a strong hint from the old jukebox business.
You can see why IFPI (ifpi.org) no longer gives its full name: International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. That phonographic stuff is what they now call “physical.” And you see where that’s going (or mostly gone). You can also see that what once threatened the industry—”digital”—now accounts for most of its rebound:
That second graphic is also a call-out from the first. Beside it is this text: “Before seeing a return to growth in 2015, the global recording industry lost nearly 40% in revenues from 1999 to 2014.”
Later, the report says, “However, significant challenges need to be overcome if the industry is going to move to sustainable growth. The whole music sector has united in its effort to fix the fundamental flaw in today’s music market, known as the ‘value gap’, where fair revenues are not being returned to those who are creating and investing in music.”
They want to solve this by lobbying: “The value gap is now the industry’s single highest legislative priority as it seeks to create a level playing field for the digital market and secure the future of the industry.” This has worked before. Revenues from streaming and performance rights owe a lot to royalty and copyright rates and regulations guided by the industry. (In the early ’00s I covered this like a rug in Linux Journal. See here.)
But there’s another way to fill that gap: on the listening side. You can see a hint in that direction from growth in live performance revenues. According to Statista, live music industry revenue “will grow from 9.28 billion U.S. dollars in 2015 to 11.99 billion in 2021. Of the revenue generated in 2016, over two billion U.S. dollars was generated in sponsorship and a further 7.4 billion U.S. dollars came in ticket sales. The industry is expected to grow further in the coming years as the compound annual growth rate for live music ticket sales is estimated at 5.23 percent between 2015 and 2020.”
According to a 16 July 2018 post in Pollstar, “There is perhaps no better indicator of a robust 2018 live market than Pollstar’s Mid-Year Top 50 Worldwide Tours chart. This year’s survey saw a 12% jump in total gross from last year’s $1.97 billion to a record-setting $2.21 billion – a $240 million increase. It’s the chart’s biggest rise since 2015-16…”
Concert promoters are also raising prices. Says a 9 July 2018 report by ABC News, “The average price of a concert ticket during the first six months of the year was $46.69 — 4.2 percent higher than the average cost of a ticket for the same period last year, according to the latest figures from music industry magazine Pollstar. That price is almost 7 percent higher than the average for all of 2000, and an even more startling 43 percent increase over what concert tickets cost just three years ago, according to Pollstar.” That same report says sales are going down: a market signal that the prices are too high. But hey, people are clearly willing to pay a lot for live music and a participatory experience. This is an important clue.
Participation requires good signaling from both sides of the marketplace. So let’s look at the demand side, starting with what the streaming services pay to play us a tune. (The source is Tricordist):
To make that clearer, the top three streamers pay between 13.4% (Pandora) and 78.3% of a penny (1¢) to play you a song.
SiriusXM pays (it says here) “19.1% of the price of all audio packages which include music channels.” That means the $209.76 I paid last August for my SiriusXM subscription sent $40.01 to the rightsholders of all the music played on all the SiriusXM channels for my account over the following year, whether I listened to any music or not. (And mostly I listen to non-music channels.)
YouTube is another special case. The 2018 IPFI report says, “From publicly available data, IFPI estimates that Spotify paid record companies US$20 per user in 2015, the last year of available data. By contrast, it is estimated that YouTube returned less than US$1 for each music user. That’s a big part of the “value gap.”
Some of those rates are negotiated, others are set by regulation, and most are informed—one way or another—by both.
In no case, however, does the music listener pay for digital music on the jukebox model: with cash on a per-listen, per-song basis. (Note that a dime in 1960 was more than 100x what a streamer pays for the right to play a song for somebody.)
So that’s my proposal: create an easy way for any of us to pay what we want for the music we hear. This will give music lovers their own way to close the value gap—and then some.
As it happens, an easy way to do this was proposed by ProjectVRM (which I started at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center) way back in 2009. It’s called EmanciPay, and here is how it is described on the project wiki:
Simply put, EmanciPay makes it easy for anybody to pay (or offer to pay) —
as much as they like
however they like
for whatever they like
on their own terms
— or at least to start with that full set of options, and to work out differences with sellers easily and with minimal friction.
EmanciPay turns consumers (aka users) into customers by giving them a pricing gun (something which in the past only sellers used) and their own means to make offers, to pay outright, and to escrow the intention to pay when price and other requirements are met. Payments themselves can also be escrowed.
In slightly more technical terms, EmanciPay is a payment framework for customers operating with full agency in the open marketplace. It operates on open protocols and standards, so it can be used by any buyer, seller or intermediary…
So, as currently planned, EmanciPay would —
Provide a single and easy way that consumers of “content” can become customers of it. In the current system — which isn’t one — every artist, every musical group, every public radio and TV station, has his, her or its own way of taking in contributions from those who appreciate the work. This can be arduous and time-consuming for everybody involved. (Imagine trying to pay separately every musical artist you like, for all your enjoyment of each artists work.) What EmanciPay proposes, however, is not a replacement for existing systems, but a new system that can supplement existing fund-raising systems — one that can soak up much of today’s MLOTT: Money Left On The Table.
Provide ways for individuals to look back through their media usage histories, inform themselves about what they have been enjoying, and to determine how much it is worth to them. The Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP), and later the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), both came up with “rates and terms that would have been negotiated in the marketplace between a willing buyer and a willing seller” — language that first appeared in the 1995 Digital Performance Royalty Act (DPRA), and was tweaked in 1998 by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), under which both the CARP and the CRB operated. The rates they came up with peaked at $.0001 per “performance” (a song or recording), per listener. EmanciPay creates the “willing buyer” that the DPRA thought wouldn’t exist.
Stigmatize non-payment for worthwhile media goods. This is where “social” will finally come to be something more than yet another tech buzzmodifier.
All these require micro-accounting, not micro-payments. In fact micro-accounting can inform ordinary payments that can be made in clever new ways that should satisfy everybody with an interest in seeing artists compensated fairly for their work. An individual listener, for example, can say “I want to pay 1¢ for every song I hear on the radio,” and “I’ll send SoundExchange a lump sum of all the pennies I wish to pay for songs I hear over the course of a year, along with an accounting of what artists and songs I’ve listened to” — and leave dispersal of those totaled pennies up to the kind of agency that likes, and can be trusted, to do that kind of thing.
Similar systems can also be put in place for readers of newspapers, blogs and other journals. What’s important is that the control is in the hands of the individual, and that the accounting and dispersal systems work the same way for everybody.
I also proposed this earlier in EmanciPay: A Content Monetization Plan for Newspapers, and later in An Easy Way to Pay for Journalism, Music and Everything Else We Like. In the first of those I wrote, “Think of EmanciPay as a way to unburden sellers of the need to keep trying to control markets that are beyond their control anyway. Think of it as a way that ‘free market’ can mean more than ‘your choice of captor’. Think of it as a way that ‘customer relationships’ can be worthy of the label because both sides are carrying their ends of the relationship burden—rather than the sellers’ side carrying the whole thing.”
It’ll be fun to start doing that in the music industry.
A number of developments make the opportunity ripe now:
The music industry is far less scattered and conflicted about its nature (digital now) and future (gotta make up that value gap) than it ever was in the past.
Former enemies can be friends. For example, open source and the music industry have both won, and many aligned incentives can be found between them.
Music listeners are clearly willing to pay value-for-value. We just need to create the ways. And it shouldn’t be hard. (Especially for Linux Journal readers.)
The juke box and live performance examples both suggest that people shouldn’t have a problem saying, “I’ll be glad to set up a way to pay 1¢ every time I hear music I like.”
Apple just bought Shazam, which is a way to identify music people hear. This kind of functionality can be brought into standard ways people can pay for music they passively hear (e.g. in a restaurant or at parties) and like.
We’ve long needed a standards-based approach to tipping artists—or anybody—with maximal ease and minimal friction. One can be crafted out of work on EmanciPay.
While most of my usual appeals in Linux Journal are to the hackers among us, this appeal is mostly to my friends (old and new) in the music industry. They have the connections, the talent, the legal smarts, the money, and the motivation required to make this thing work.
So let’s bring the people who love music into the marketplace as willing buyers. And do it by standardizing simple ways people can, by routine or impulse, be real customers of music, and not just passive consumers (or worse, what the industry used to call pirates). Let’s also create new ways, beyond payments alone, that artists and music lovers can signal each other, and have all kinds of creative fun.
The time is right. Let’s not let the opportunity pass.
Jukebox image by Davide Cavalli [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
I nominate Tyrese Haliburton for MVP. He hasn't played at all this year, because he's out with a hamstring injury he suffered when the Pacers (our Indiana home team) were neck-and-neck with the OKC Thunder in the final championship game. This season, without Haliburton, the Pacers are among the league's worst. Why? No Halliburton.
And we have a controlled study of sorts. Boston lost its star, Jayson Tatum, to the same Achilles injury that dropped Haliburton, and then the Celtics stayed close to the top of the league without Tatum and three valuable players who left last summer. So Haliburton was clearly a lot more valuable to his team than was Tatum. (Who is back and making Boston look even scarier.)
By the way, before the season, I picked the Knicks (my lifelong fave) to win the championship. They're kinda meh right now. So, in the same way I think Tyrese Halliburton is the most valuable player this year (just given the delta between his presence and absence), I say the same about Tom Thibodeau, the coach fired by the Knicks after the team's good run last year. (Hell, they beat the Celtics in the playoffs.) This year, the Knicks aren't as good, with essentially the same team and a different coach. So my vote for coach of the year goes to Thibs (who, by the way, has been NBA Coach of the Year twice. So we know he doesn't suck.)
My DNA (according to 23andMe, which still exists) breakdown goes like this:
48.3% Swedish (mostly central and northwest Götaland) 5.2% Norwegian 17.1% Irish (mostly central and northern) 10.8% Belgian, Rhinelander and Southern Dutch (Hesse) 7.9% Scottish (mostly Glasgow City) 6.7% English (mostly Greater London) 2.6% Dutch and Northern German (Northwestern states) 0.7% Northern Italian and Maltese 0.4% Welsh 0.2% Egyptian and Southern Levantine
For what it's worth— Mom was Swedish. Her parents (Sponberg, Oman) were from Swedish Immigrant families who came over in the late 1800s to homestead in Minnesota and North Dakota. Pop's mom was Irish on her mother's side. Her parents (McLaughlin, Trainor) came over in the early 1800s. And she was German on her father's side (Rung, Englert). That couple emigrated from Alsace-Lorraine. Pop's father was of early American stock (Searls/Searles/Sarles, Bixby, Reed, Allen, Johnson)
Only one of the surnames I just mentioned is among my 1500+ DNA relatives listed by 23andMe. That was an Englert I wrote to (inside 23andMe who never wrote back.
We are digital beings in a digital world. That’s the main thing. And this world is still very new.
We’ve operated in the natural world for as long as we’ve been a species, and we are experts at it. But the digital world is not only new, but sure to be with us for many years, decades, centuries, and millennia to come. And we still lack countless graces we take for granted in the natural world, such as privacy and independence from algorithmic manipulation.
Making full sense of this new world is very hard because we understand everything metaphorically, and natural world metaphors mask what’s really going on in the digital world. So, while we speak of “domains” with “locations” that we “build” and “own” (though we only rent them), and speak of “loading” and “transferring” “packets” of data in “up” and “down,” data are actually collections of ones and zeroes that are by design immaterial non-things that are instantaneously both here and elsewhere, even though “where” only makes full sense in the natural world. How will all this change and make whole new kinds of sense after a few more decades of digital existence?
Progress is the process by which the miraculous becomes mundane. In the digital world, that transition is now happening almost instantly, and in many domains, because AI is endlessly useful.
Big AI does its best to ingest the totality of human expression in all digital forms, and then to make any and all of it available in the most useful ways it can. At the moment (for me, Noon in The Bahamas on February 2nd, 2026), it does this by bringing hunks of that expression back to us, on demand, in constructive conversational forms. Big AI is the world’s largest Magic 8 Ball, within which floats a polyhedron of answers with trillions of facets, each ready to help.
As with all tech, Big AI has its downsides. (Just ask Gregory Hinton or Gary Marcus.) But its usefulness verges on absolute, so we can’t stop using it, no matter how abyssal some credible prophesies may be.
But there is one saving upside. It’s the same one that saved us from HAL 9000 in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s our humanity and independence. Specifically, in the form of personal AI.
We need personal AI for the same reason we need personal homes, shoes, and computers. We need it to know our natural and digital selves as fully as possible, and to participate with full agency in society, its economies, and its governance.
Think about all the data in our personal lives that is not in our full control, and could use some AI help: our schedules, our past and future work, our property, our finances, our obligations, our writing and correspondence, our photographs, our sound recordings, our videos, our travels, our countless engagements with other persons online and off, our many machines, you name it.
Truly personal AI—the kind you own and operate, rather than the kind that is just another suction cup on a corporate tentacle—is as hard to imagine in 2026 as personal computing was in 1976. But it is no less necessary and inevitable. When we have it, many of the questions that challenge us will have new and better answers. And new challenges.
Every form of life, from the microbial to the human, is fraught with challenges. Personal AI is necessary for us to meet and surmount our challenges in the digital world, and to answer all the questions posed to us in this very research exercise.
Amara’s Law says we overestimate in the short term and underestimate in the long. I’ve been doing both all my life, and in all my answers to good questions asked by Pew over the years.
Perhaps the most glaring example of short-term overestimation was my response to a request by The Wall Street Journal in 2012 to compress my new book, The Intention Economy, to a single cover piece for the paper’s Marketplace section. My editor at the Journal suggested writing about how the intention economy would look ten years in the future, which is three years ago as I write this. The piece I wrote was titled (by the WSJ) “The Customer as a God.” In retrospect, I was wrong. The economy I described still hasn’t happened. We are not gods in the marketplace. But there are encouraging signs, and I’m still sure my prophecy will prove out. Meanwhile, the first half of Amara’s Law applies.
I’ve been young for so long that I now have the life expectancy of a puppy. So I don’t expect to see personal AI or the intention economy prove out in my lifetime. But I am sure both are worth working toward, so that’s what I do. And I advise anyone wishing to make the world better to look for their best work to manifest somewhere beyond their own life’s horizons.
Imagine scattered bits of coffee grounds, floating in space in front of your face, a few inches to a few feet away. Among them, blurred filaments float around, like zero-gravity worms. These are bits of debris inside my left eyeball, not far from my retina, exfoliated, I am told, by my cornea, which is slowly healing from the effects of cataract surgery that required a somewhat aggressive emulsification of the lens before a new replacement lens was installed.
An interesting thing: if I don't move my eyes, the debris slowly vanishes, erased by my brain as if by Photoshop's healing brush. Then they reappear when I move my eyes. Strange shit.
I fear that guy is, at least in part, me. The sentence fragments, the short paragraphs, the em dashes. (These: —.) As source material, my writing is thick on the Web’s ground, going back to the early ’90s. Example.
I’ll cop to one of his tells: absurd certainty. Some of mine turned out to be the opposite of absurd. Examples: personal computing, outlining, the Net, the Web, Linux, open source, Cluetrain, blogging, smartphones. And some not (at least so far, or not yet in a big way): home Web servers (or “personal clouds”), desktop Linux, VRM, EmanciPay, the intention economy, MyTerms, personal AI, news commons, market intelligence that flows both ways…
Anyway, AI-style writing is now like Received Pronunciation in the UK: the way things are done.
History doesn’t grade on effort. It grades on outcomes. And right now the outcomes are running about 3-to-1 against anything resembling the vision that justified the operation in the first place.
As usual, the postwar is everything.
David Weinberger once said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people.” It’s the future now, and he was right, or close enough. Because today we live in a world where the power to publish and distribute no longer belongs just to institutions, but to everybody. Me included. Here are some stats for this very blog:
At its peak, this blog had dozens of thousands of visitors daily. But that was in the ’00s, when blogging was a small pond, and I was a large fish in it. That was also when big newspapers and broadcast networks were still mountain ranges on the media landscape. Now those mountains have eroded down to hills amidst fresh volcanoes: celebrities new and old, gushing out “content” on podcasts, social media, YouTube, and the rest. They’re the ones with readers, viewers, followers, and subscribers in the dozens of millions.
While that’s interesting, the media landscape has widened exponentially as millions of consumers have also become producers. In sum, their flow is immense: far larger than what we get from the old hills and the new volcanoes. Let’s call it the allstream.
It’s not “the media” anymore. It’s too different. Let’s explore how.
First, “the media” is a modern label, dating from the 1940s. Here’s Google’s Ngram Viewer, which charts mentions in books.
As a topic, “the media” hockey-sticked when Marshall McLuhan made “media theory” a thing in the 1960s:
Meanwhile, the expression “major media” seems to have come and gone—
—while “mainstream media” is hot shit:
Why has “mainstream media” gone up while “major media” has gone down?
Politics. Writers and talkers on the right and the left both have lots to say about “the mainstream media.” It seems (at least to me) that talkers on both political wings think the old mainstream media—big newspapers, TV networks, broadcast giants, news wires—are still mountains. Or, to follow the stream metaphor, rivers.
But those old rivers were self-limiting. They controlled the production and the flow. That’s what made them main. It’s also what made them costly. Printing presses were expensive. Broadcast licenses were scarce. Regulations ruled. Editors and producers were gatekeepers because there were gates to keep.
Then came the Internet, followed by the Web, blogging, podcasting, cheap digital photography and video, and all the other means by which anybody with a keyboard, microphone, phone, or just an idea could put something into the world. The threshold for expression has fallen to trivial.
One reason was that RSS—really simple syndication—made distribution simple for everyone. Nobody had to ask permission from a publisher, a platform, or a network. It gave individuals the power to speak and flow into the allstream.
Every creator wants to be valued and followed by at least a few people—especially the right people—rather than by large populations. We each have our own public. (At least for this moment, reader, you’re in mine.)
In place of the mainstream, we now have wide slopes of braided rivers:
Canterbury, New Zealand. Photo by Bernard Spragg via Wikimedia Commons.
In the allstream, everybody can publish, distribution is easy, and the number of flows exceeds anyone’s ability to count or follow them all. Their variety is also extreme: blogs, podcasts, newsletters, YouTube channels, TikTok feeds, posts in Mastodon, BlueSky, Threads, X, Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Flickr and Smugmug photos. Substack essays. Discord chats. Group texts. Private forums. Comment sections. Local news outlets (many written and published by just one person). Transcripts. Some are public. Some are semi-public. Some are private. Some are generated by AI or by humans with AI assistance. The scale of each is small by old media standards. But the aggregate is far more immense than what we call “the media” ever were.
In The Redstream Media, I described how partisan flows of news and opinion had already turned the mainstream into a sidestream. But it’s not just happening with politics. Expertise streams around institutions. Communities stream around beats. Hobbyists stream around trade publications. Local knowledge streams around outside authorities. People with cameras, microphones, and keyboards stream around organizations that have long monopolized distribution.
Of course, much of the allstream is noisy, false, manipulative, repetitive, trivial, and thick with propaganda, junk, spam, AI slop, outrage bait, and viral bullshit. It can produce confusion faster than clarity. But the old mainstream had propaganda, junk, exclusions, class filters, geographic biases, advertiser pressures, and institutional blind spots.
But scarcity was the media’s main feature. To see, hear, or read it, you needed a TV, a radio, a subscription, or a newsstand. Through those spincters, the few spoke to the many while the many lacked the means to speak back, or out. Now they have the means. All of them can stream too.
When I look at how far my readership has fallen from the heights it enjoyed in the golden age of blogging (and at Linux Journal in its peak years), I’m glad to have the readers I’ve got. The same goes for my photo collections here and here on Flickr. For two decades, those got ten to fifteen thousand views a day. Now they get a few hundred. I’m fine with that too, because the totality of all the flow on the Net is beyond measure, and growing.
Big AI (ChatGPT, Gemini, CoPilot, Claude, Perplexity, et. al.) stands between you and the allstream and says, “I’ll handle this.” So the sphincter moves from the point of publication to the point of retrieval. (My assistant, ChatGPT, gave me that quote and the sentence that followed. Everything else in this essay is mine.)
When we (David Weinberger, Chris Locke, Rick Levine, and I) wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto, we saw lowering the threshold of public expression as a plus for civilization. We published Cluetrain in March 1999, 27 years ago. Here is the “one clue” (from Chris Locke) that precedes the 95 theses that followed:
And dammit, we are still seats, eyeballs, end users, and consumers. Our reach still fails to exceed the grasp of the surveillance fecosystem. And none of big tech (or big anything) is dealing with it.
But we are more numerous than ever. Our tail is long and wide. What if we get real power? We didn’t have it in 1999. We four Cluetrain authors thought we did. But Web 2.0 came along, and we got all the personal agency the platforms allowed.
And we are still there. All of us can produce video, but if we want it seen, we’ll need to use YouTube, which has a monthly reach of 2.7 billion people. It’s a wide gate, but Google keeps it.
Can we ever get the high degrees of personal and collective agency we saw coming when we wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto?
I think we can, if online service providers agree to our terms, instead of us to theirs. That’s why we created MyTerms, and why I’ve written so much about it. (And I won’t stop.) The case we need to make is that an intention economybuilt on customer agency will be richer, wider, deeper, and larger than what we have here and now, in the final stage of the old industrial age.
Once we have the agency, we will need new and better forms of economic signaling and money flow than we have so far. Everyone who publishes anything should have a piece of the allstream action (whatever that might mean). MyTerms will tee that up as well.
I’ll leave you with a question: What will happen when the landscape across which the allstream flows is a worldwide commons of self-empowered customers?
If you have an answer for that, you can also inform the future of Customer Commons, which we created in 2013 to make good on what I promised in The Intention Economy in 2012. Both pushed forward the body of ideas we started assembling with ProjectVRM in 2006, but actually began forming with the Internet in the 1970s and ’80s, and the Web, Linux, and open source in the ’90s.
Everything takes time. Let’s make a better future happen sooner rather than later.
One thinks of Thomson Reuters as a source of good information on issues (Thomson) and news (Reuters). That's the brand. Alas, it's also a source of information about you and me to ICE, Palantir, and others. That's what The Minnesota Star-Tribune reported back on March 3rd, and 404 Mediadoes again today.
Sam Altman just went on record saying intelligence **_will soon be sold on a meter, “like electricity or water.” _**If you don’t understand what he just said, let me tell you. He is not building a chat interface. He is building the grid for human cognition. And he intends to charge you for your own relevance. They stole all this data from us, the people. Our life’s work, our creativity, our art. They devoured the open internet and blew through every copyright law on Earth. And now they want to “sell it back to us” in the form of a utility?!
Only in America
Cory Doctorow explains how ICE in airports "hanging around like a bad smell and being totally useless" is a warm-up for their armed and masked presence at every polling place in November. He has concrete suggestions for stopping that, which he addresses to Democrats. Wise Republicans should be on board, too.
Karl Bode, via Gary Marcus: “CEO said a thing!” Karl: “‘CEO said a thing!’ journalism involves parroting the claims of a business leader or executive with absolutely no context, correction, or challenge whatsoever, no matter how elaborate the delusion.” His examples—from Altman, Musk, Zuckerberg—are spot-on. Reminds me of why no major tech magazine ever hired me. (Mainly, I didn’t want to do vendor sports coverage.)
Pop was a Republican in the same way he was a fisherman, a carpenter, a Brooklyn Dodgers (and later a Mets) fan, and a Ford man. As a kid, I thought of myself the same way. Republicans stood for fiscal prudence, limited government, personal freedom and responsibility, stuff like that. But then I went to a Quaker college and became a pacifist who marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. Later, as a journalist, I thought it was best to register as an independent, which I’ve been ever since.
But I have never lost touch with Pop’s sympathies, especially around personal freedom. I am also sure that, were he alive today (he died in 1979), he would hate what Trump has done to the Grand Old Party, to conservative norms, to the whole world.
So Pop came to mind this morning when I read what Wired says about the many ways the Trumpist GOP is fucking with (small d) democratic norms, and democracy itself. I hope as many perps as possible get voted out next November. And I say that as a partisan for democracy, not for the Democratic Party. We need conservatism, but not this kind.
Helen is the North Star of personal privacy—a role she earned by changing how the whole field understands what privacy is: specifically, that it’s not about secrecy or control, but about appropriate information flows. This was detailed in her landmark book, Privacy in Context, : Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life, and backed by her work on practical tools such as the Adnauseum browser extension.
Helen has been an influence on my own privacy work, most notably with MyTerms. If privacy matters even a fraction as much to you as it does to me, come or tune in to her talk, and be prepared with questions.
That’s next Tuesday at 4 pm Eastern. You can register and join the crowd here.
