The front page of today’s Los Angeles Times. I can read it, because I subscribe. I also recommend that everyone subscribe to newspapers, because facts still matter to those troubled entities, regardless of how screwed their business is.
You may have noticed there is a war going on. I’m not here to cover it. I’m here to cover, or at least visit, stories about it.
See, stories themselves are a problem, both in human nature (we love and live stories) and in journalism, which feeds and is fed on the human appetite for stories, all of which have three elements:
Character—a person, country, cause, team, player, whatever, that one might have feelings about (love, hate, anything but disinterest or indifference)
Problem—a situation that causes or is comprised of conflict or struggle
Movement—whether forward, backward, or sideways, it must maintain interest and at least hint toward a conclusion, even if one never comes
And war cranks all that stuff up to eleven. As Geoge S. Patton put it, “Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God help me, I do love it so.” (Bonus link.)
I’ve written about the story’s problem for journalism here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Among other places. A common thread: facts, while good to have, aren’t required. In fact, a story might be more compelling and effective if it’s just about your most or least favorite character, or characters. It might be best by those measures not to have facts at all. Or to have fake ones. As Scott Adams put it, “Facts don’t matter. What matters is how much we hate the person talking.” Daniel Kahnemann agreed: “Facts don’t matter, or they matter much less than people think.”
With those framings in mind, some sources you might want to visit:
Apple's Mail.app sucks. I could give reasons, but it would only make me more tired than I already am from dealing with my storage issues. I just downloaded and set up Thunderbird for my Searls.com address to see if that works better. I've stayed away from Thunderbird since 2013, when it did real damage somehow. Things have changed. It looks a lot better now. [Later: but it crashed. Hmm.]
Richard M. Stallman gave a talk at Georgia Tech in January. Hard to make out what he's saying since it's recorded from the audience rather than the stage. Is there a better source of audio for it? Maybe one or more of you knows.
A GrandPerspective map of my laptop’s hard drive. The vertical green block is Apple Photos. The large yellow blocks are videos I neeeded to offload to an external movie drive. Lots of smaller ones had to go too.
I hit a storage crisis yesterday when I needed to copy a lot of fresh photos to my laptop’s hard drive, and it was clear that I would soon run out of room there.
The laptop is a 16-inch 2023 M2 MacBook Pro with an 8TB hard drive—the most loaded and maxed-out computer I could get at the time. On it, I keep most of my life’s digital work, going back to the early ’90s, including a zillion photos and a smattering of videos, though some of them are large. Externally, I have—
an 8TB WD Elements external drive for offloaded archives
a 16TB Unionsine external drive serving as my maxed-out Time Machine.
I started dealing with the problem by offloading some videos still on the main drive to the movie drive. After that, I erased the videos on the main drive to clear space, but discovered that the move had failed (I was tired, and my vision hasn’t fully recovered from cataract surgery), so I needed to restore all of the erased videos to the main drive from the Time Machine. I could see where they had been on the main drive because I had created a GrandPerspective tree map visualization of my drive contents before the move. That’s what you see above.
[Later: I just discovered that I had my old 4TB portable drive, formerly devoted to movies still hooked up. It was to that drive that I offloaded the videos, thinking they were going to the new Sandisk 4TB SSD, to which the contents of the old movie drive had already been moved.]
I’ve moved them again, along with a lot of other .mov, .avi, and .mp4 files, but I’m still left with less than one TB of open storage space on the laptop. But that’s enough to hold me for a while.
Meanwhile, I am thinking about how I want to expand archiving and backup. So, a situation analysis.
First, I’m 78. So I need my archives to be easily navigated by my heirs and others who value my life’s work. I need to name my directories, files, and drives in ways that make their contents obvious and navigable.
This I have mostly done, at least for my photos and videos. The directory structure and file names for my photos are simple and easy to navigate. For photos, the directory is called photos-by-year, and every directory path goes YYYY/MM/DD/subject (named by date: YYYY_MM_DD_subject). Every photo in folders at the ends directory paths is named YYYY_MM_DD_subject_###.jpg, .png, or RAW file type (CR2 for Canon photos and ARW for Sony).
Most of my videos are now on the external drive, where my iMovie library also lives. My writing is less organized, but fixable.
Second, it’s clear by now that Apple will not offer storage larger than 8TB on its laptops. In three years they have gone from M1 to M6 CPUs without raising the ceiling on storage. This sucks, because I would like to work on my whole photo collection on one drive, internal or exteral. So 8TB is all I will ever have to work with, even if I get a newer laptop. So I need to look at external drive options and configurations.
Right now, I am leaning toward getting a SanDisk 8TB Extreme Portable SSD, which is $1067 at Amazon, just for most of my photos. I’ll leave the rest on my laptop drive,. For a Time Machine, I’m looking at this 30TB drive for $919. I’ll back up all three drives on that one.
That’s just to get me out of my current mess.
Of course, I want more than one backup. Not sure what to do there yet. So I invite advice.
This is the time of year when California turns into Ireland, but with big highways. This scene is I-580 westbound through Altamont Pass, across the Diablo Range between the Central Valley and the East Bay. Shot it on my way from San Marino in SoCal to San Rafael in NorCal.
Apologies for the relative silence. Between travels and slow recovery (still far from over) from cataract surgery for my left eye, looking at screens and writing on them hasn’t been easy. But things are improving.
The digital world is not civilized. If it were, we’d have real privacy, rather than its opposite: wanton and uncontrolled surveillance, mostly in service to the adtech industry.
In the civilized natural world, privacy is a tacit matter. We all understand and respect it, though we can’t explain it in explicit terms.
The digital world has no tacit, because it’s all bits and code. So we need to make our privacy requirements explicit and enforceable.
Contract is the only way to do that. The organizations you encounter online need to agree to your terms, not you to theirs.
MyTerms is the only standard supporting that approach. Therefore,
MyTerms is the only path to real personal privacy in the digital world.
Afterwards, I was amazed to be greeted right away by Esther Dyson, an old friend I hadn’t seen in a few years. We had a brief catch-up, which for a while included an inveterate advertising guy. Esther left me with this observation, based on (among other things) her ten years on the board of WPP: advertising is”a parasite.” I’ve been thinking a lot about that since then.
Pretty much everything I do is in the Venn overlap of ProjectVRM and Customer Commons. Now that MyTerms is in the world, there are many ways to get involved with either or both of them. If you’re interested, let us know.
Today I’m trying to blog in the style of Dave Winer, whose Wordland is my tool here. It’s a break from trying to blog the way I did on my original blog. With those (in case that link doesn’t work), the punchline of each day’s sub-posts was the subheadline. Like this:
I uploaded my iPhone video of the February 19 tornado in Bloomington, Indiana, here. Watch it in full-screen, and you can at least see the funnel shape coming down from the thunder cloud, lit by lightning flashes.
I left dinner at the Uptown to stand at the corner of Kirkwood and College in downtown Bloomington, Indiana, to shoot the tornado my phone just told me had formed eight miles west of there. That’s where I was facing when I shot this video, from which I pulled a bunch of screen grabs in Photos’ edit view. This covered about four minutes starting at 7:03 PM.
Earlier, when we got the first tornado warning, I went out and shot this video, from which I have a similar series of screen grabs:
That was about five minutes, starting at 6:42 PM.
Both these videos and all these screen-grabs are free to use, and Creative Commons licensed to only require photo credit. And I’m also not prickly about that. It’s just fun to see where they prove useful. Have at ’em.
And if you’re interested in news, and how we can start remaking it, starting here in Bloomington and towns like it, see what I’ve been writing about that, with a big hat tip to Dave Askins of Bloomington’s B Square Bulletin.
Marshall McLuhan: “People don’t want to know the cause of anything. They do not want to know why radio caused Hitler and Gandhi alike. They do not want to know that print caused anything whatever.” Likewise, the Internet caused Obama and Trump. That’s because radio was the dominant media environment in Hitler and Gandhi’s time and place. The Internet was for Obama and then for Trump. Bonus link.
It's still vendor sports. And we still need truly personal AI
Dana Blankenhorn: Peter Steinberger’s Secret Sauce. Key line: "How does Steinberger get so much code into the world? It’s because Steinberger isn’t Bill Gates. He’s Linus Torvalds." More: "Rather than building a team from inside OpenAI, the plan is for Steinberger to do what he did with OpenClaw. That is to get thousands of outsiders involved in building agents, using open source. As Om wrote to me when I asked about this, Peter 'started an open-source project and galvanized hundreds, including a few key ones on the core team.'"
Today is Ron Phillips' birthday. He died five years ago, but his absence remains constant and heart-wrenching. I'm also sad to note that I haven't written a proper remembrance for him here. So that's now on my list.
What you’re reading is written and posted on the Web. While the Web isn’t a place, we know it as one. The language we use to describe it is concrete and structural: domains at locations, with sites that are built and have pages that are authored, and contents that are uploaded and downloaded.
For a generation or more, we mostly saw and navigated the Web through Google, whose original mission was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” When we searched Google, we relied on its PageRank system to bring us lists of pages ranked by the number and quality of sources of inbound links, and how likely a given site was to contain keywords, text strings, and other search terms.
But that’s gone. Old pages are missing from many searches. AI guesswork is replacing formerly normal search results. The sense of Web structure is gone as well. This matters to me, and not just because it’s break because I’ve been writing on the Web for thirty-one years, almost entirely on static sites. But Google no longer finds many of those. My friend Dave Askins tells me the same malady has befallen much of his own archival work, which is present on the Web, but absent from Google searches. Why?
I asked Google’s Gemini that question. Here’s what it said:
The “disappearing” of the old web is a result of a massive shift in Google’s priorities over the last few years.
While you might be looking for a specific historical document or an old forum thread, Google’s systems are now aggressively tuned to filter out what they consider “stale” or “unhelpful” content…
In the race to be a ‘helpful assistant,’ Google has stopped being a ‘universal library.
PageRank is still there, it tells me, but subordinated. To what?
Of course: Advertising.
Taking my clues from Keyords are dead, by Shalom Gonzalez in Search Engine Land, I asked Gemini to tell me “how searches by the helpful assistant might constantly be looking for what the person might eventually want to buy, so they can be advertised at when the right time comes.”
Gemini replied,
This is the “secret sauce” of the 2026 search model. If the old search engine was a librarian, the new one is a personal shopper who is taking notes on everything you do to predict your next “need state. The transition you’re sensing is the move from Reactive Search (answering what you asked) to Predictive Search (answering what you’re going to ask).”
I am sure this is good in some ways, but it is also fuckery.
Google now treats the Web not as a library, or an archival space, but as a roiling heap of data in which patterns can be found, and answers given, based on algorithmic assumptions—not just about who and what the AI thinks it knows about us, but what advertisers are paying to pitch at our eyeballs. Constantly. In real time.
There are four giant problems to pull apart here:
How Google is deprecating the Web.
What to call the vast everything that Big AI now uses to give us answers and pitch us shit.
How AI dependence is changing us from homo sapiens to homo something else.
How we can stay human in the midst of it all.
Since these are each giant, I’m taking what was one 3000+ word post and turning it into five. This is the first. The others will be at the links above.
I. How Google is deprecating the Web.
We need to name the machine equivalent of hubris that Google and Gemini display in their deprecation of the Web and their presumptions about our intentions.
Dictionary.com sayshubris is derived from hýbris, the Greek word for insolence. It means pride, arrogance, or an excess of ambition…ultimately causing the transgressor’s ruin.
When I asked ChatGPT to define AI hubris, it said, “AI hubris is the condition in which a system expresses or operationalizes confidence that exceeds its actual competence, epistemic grounding, or contextual awareness.”
Then, when I asked it to explain how that manifests, it gave me—
A model that acts as if it knows rather than predicts.
A system that is treated as an oracle rather than a probabilistic engine.
Designers who mistake fluency for wisdom.
When I asked it to be more specific, it confessed to—
Overconfident answers: The model presents uncertain, incomplete, or fabricated information as authoritative.
Boundary blindness: It fails to recognize where its training data ends, where knowledge is outdated, or where a question exceeds its capability.
Illusion of comprehension: It produces fluent language that implies understanding when it is pattern synthesis.
Prescriptive overreach: It gives decisive advice in domains requiring caution (medicine, law, policy) without signaling uncertainty.
System-level hubris: Not just the model—but the designers or deployers assume the system is more reliable, objective, or neutral than it truly is.
Then I asked it to give me some words we might use to label AI hubris. It generated a large pile of them, abridged here—
Hybris mechanica: Latinized Greek; “mechanical hubris.” Evokes classical overreach, but makes clear it’s structural, not emotional. Good if you want rhetorical force.
Pseudomnēsis (ψευδομνήσις): “False memory.” From pseudo- (false) + mnēsis (memory, recollection). Captures the illusion of knowing.
Doctia ignorans: Modeled on docta ignorantia (Nicholas of Cusa: “learned ignorance”). This flips it: Doctia ignorans — “ignorant knowing.” Sharp, ironic, philosophical.
Epistemic hybris: Blunt and precise. The sin is not pride, but overstepping epistemic bounds.
Authodoxia: Illusion of Authority. Self-authorizing belief. Authority generated from itself.
Autognosticism: Self-certifying knowledge. Simulacra scientiae. A simulacrum of knowledge. Very Baudrillard-adjacent.
Oraculitis: Mock-Greek: “oracle-itis.” The disease of speaking as an oracle.
Technohybris: Structural or Systemic Hubris. Technological overreach. Blunt but serviceable.
Logomimesis: Mimicry of reasoned speech. Less accusatory, more descriptive.
Sophomimesis: Imitation of wisdom.Sophia (wisdom) + mimesis (imitation).
Pseudoepisteme (ψευδοεπιστήμη): False systematic knowledge. More formal than pseudognosis.
Kenodoxia: “Empty glory” (historically attested in theology). Could be repurposed. Stark and Memorable
Vox vana: “Empty voice.”
Certitudo vana: “Vain certainty.”
Machina praesumens: The presuming machine.
Sophomimesis: Imitation of wisdom.
Kenognosis: Empty knowledge.
Pseudodoxia mechanica: mechanical false belief.
Logohybris: Hubris of speech (from earlier).
Paragnosis: Mis-knowing.
Well, Big AI is all of those. But let’s pick one, because we need it. I lean toward logohybris, but I’m open.
II. What to call the vast everything that Big AI now uses to give us answers and pitch us shit
We are the only species that talks. A lot. About everything. We also make sense of the world through our experience as embodied creatures:
We say good is up and bad is down because we are built for standing, walking, running, and squatting without falling over. This is why heaven is above, hell is below, and to fail is to fall.
We say good is light and bad is dark because we are diurnal: optimized for daylight. So a smart person is bright, and a dumb person is dim. Good futures are bright and bad ones are dark.
We frame life as travel, not a biological process. That’s why birth is arrival, death is departure, and we get stuck in a rut, lost in the woods, and fall off a wagon.
We frame time as money, not as a progression of existence. That’s why we save, waste, spend, invest, and lose time.
We also lay nouns on everything (and non-thing) that we can. We make taxonomies to organize the nouns. We make verbs for the actions that happen among and between all the nouns. We make prepositions to locate the nouns. We would be lost without all the ways we understand the world as a structured place.
To illustrate how important this is, look at how some drugs detach our minds from structures:
LSD—acid—detaches what we see and know from all the nouns we project on them.
MDMA—ecstasy—liberates other beings from what might in a normal state of mind make them separate from us and unlovable until proven otherwise.
THC—weed—disconnects percepts and thoughts, so they become “strings of pearls without the string.” (That’s one of the few smart things I ever said when I was high.*)
While all those drugs are good for recreation and therapy, and may even help civilize us in some ways, they distract us from the structures that make civilization work.
Nearly all of what we know about the natural world is also tacit, meaning we know it, but can’t explain it. For example, we know how gravity works, even though we can’t explain it as well as Einstein or Feynman. Or at all. Doesn’t matter. We know how it works, and that’s what matters.
We can still be explicit about what we know. About gravity, we might say, “It’s what gives things weight.” Or, “It’s what makes things in a vacuum fall at 9.8 meters per second squared.”
Here’s the key: What we know tacitly far exceeds what we can say explicitly.
The digital world, however, is entirely explicit. It is composed of data and code. There is no tacit there.
In the digital world, we also have no distance and no gravity, at costs that lean toward zero. A video conference might have people from India, Germany, and Australia, with none sensing distance or cost. Everyone is present. Conversation moves along just fine. Gravity is also absent, because nobody manifests in material form, or appears upside-down or sideways. There might be light outside the window of one participant and dark outside the window of another, but only if the camera points toward a window and the person isn’t using a fake background.
But we still have structures in the digital world. For example, the World Wide Web uses a hypertext protocol (http/s) to connect sites at domains locations, between which packetized data can moves up and down. Note that these are real estate and shipping metaphors. We use those because they make sense to our embodied selves in the natural world.
Directory paths on the Web—what we call locations—are inherited from UNIX. For example, https://science.what/geology/phanerozoic/paleozoic/devonian/fossils/ammonites is what’s called a path. It’s like one you might follow through the stacks of a library. That’s still how the Web works for us. It has structure.
When search engines indexed everything in those published directory structures, they made sense of the whole Web in a library-like way.
But, as Gemini told me, not any more.
We can see how the Internet is drifting away from its old structures by reviewing the titles of David Weinberger‘s literary oeuvre, starting with The Cluetrain Manifestoin 1999:
Yes, toward AI. Big AI absorbs all those miscellaneous small pieces in the vast chaos of the digital world. It calls on patterns in that totality to answer every question we ask of it. It’s the room that includes everything that’s too big for us to know.
But here’s the rub: Big AI also doesn’t know a damn thing. It recognizes patterns in a vast totality of data and uses programming and language to answer questions and perform tasks for the human inhabitants of its environments.
Think about what’s in the rooms built by OpenAI (ChatGPT), Google (Gemini), Microsoft (Copilot), Perplexity (Perplexity AI), Anthropic (Claude), DeepSeek (DeepSeekAI), and Grok (Xai).
The short answer is everything. All of the Web, all books, all utterings on social media, you name it. Everything explicit, that is. Nothing tacit. It doesn’t have tacit knowledge because it’s not human.
We need a word for that everything. Here are some candidates (with minimal AI help this time):
Akasha: (Sanskrit) The aether or mystical compendium of all human events, thoughts, words, emotions, and intent ever to have occurred. Perhaps a poetic synonym for a universal database.
Pleroma: (Greek) “fullness,” totality of divine powers, or the sum of all knowledge.
Pantology: (Greek root?) The systematic view of all human knowledge.
Wànwù: (Mandarin: 万物) Literally “the ten thousand things.” It’s used to describe the entirety of the universe and all its manifestations. It’s a beautiful way to describe the sheer variety of data I hold. (Says Gemini, when I asked for a word in another language to encompass what it “knows.”)
What’s in all those companies’ akashas are not databases. Instead they are trillions of “tokens,” which (as NVIDIA explains here) “are units of data processed by AI models during training and inference, enabling prediction, generation, and reasoning.” These are not structured in ways familiar to us in the natural world. They are also not sources like those Google used to index and treat as directories. They are opaque to us. Every Big AI data center is a black box in material form.
Marshall McLuhan taught that every new medium, every new technology, creates an environment that changes us. What we are as drivers in the rolling carapaces we call cars is not what we are when we are walking around. We are changed. Extended. Enlarged.
Big AI does some of that for us, but we don’t have truly personal AI yet. That’s a whole ‘nuther rant (going on here). But after we get personal AI, we’ll still be radically changed. Which brings us to—
III. How AI dependence is changing us from homo sapiens to homo ________
When I asked ChatGPT to “tell me what to name the AI-dependent species that succeeds homo sapiens,” it gave me this (which I’ve abridged into a less wordy form):
Homo delegatus. The delegating human. Clean. Roman. Almost bureaucratic.
Homo auxiliatus. The assisted human. Gentler. Less tragic.
Homo symbioticus. The symbiotic human. Optimistic framing. Mutualism implied.
Homo prostheticus. The prosthetic human. From prosthesis — extension. Suggests cognition extended outside the skull.
Homo algorithmicus. The algorithmic human. Likely to stick. Slightly dystopian. The defining trait is AI reliance.
Homo automatus. The automated human. Bleaker.
Homo machinatus. The machinated human — shaped by machines.
Homo instructus. The instructed human — guided by systems. The defining trait is epistemic submission
Homo credulus. The believing human. Short. Dangerous.
Homo confisus. The trusting human. Ambiguous — trust can be good or naive.
Homo oracularis. The oracle-dependent human. Strong mythic tone.
Homo synthetica. The synthetic human. Hybridized.
Homo copulatus. The coupled human.
Homo nexus. The networked human.
Homo cyberneticus. Classic mid-20th-century feel.
Homo exocerebralis. The external-brained human. Scientifically plausible.
Homo delegans sapiens. The wisdom-delegating human.
Homo post-sapiens. Simple, brutal.
Homo paragnostica. The mis-knowing human.
Homo servomechanicus. The servo-mechanical human.
Homo dependens. The dependent human.
Homo exocerebralis. External-brained human
Homo delegatus. Delegating human
Homo symbioticus. Symbiotic human
Homo algorithmicus. Algorithmic human
Homo exocerebralis. It names the real shift: the brain extends beyond the skull into networks and models. Biologically grounded and conceptually sharp.
Homo delegatus. Has quiet menace.
I don’t like any of them. But we need one. Vote on one of these, or give us a better alternative.
IV. How can we stay human in the midst of it all?
First, by stopping the surveillance. That will at least begin to restore and protect our humanity.
We can’t do it all at once, but we can do it through relationships with organizations that don’t participate in the surveillance economy. There are still a lot of those.
These can’t be relationships that organizations initiate. We started getting those kinds of relationships (in name only) when industry won the industrial revolution, and they have infected the digital world with endless “consent” (non-) agreements and “Our terms have changed” gauntlets requiring acceptance of terms we don’t read and don’t matter.
We can do it with agreements that we proffer, as sovereign and independent human beings. And now we have a standard for that: MyTerms (7012-2025 – IEEE Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms). These will allow us to visit sites, use services, and buy stuff without worrying if we’re being tracked like marked animals by parties unknown. They will also form a solid base for additional relationships based on mutual trust.
That’s the second step. Both are tabula rasa today. But if we want to keep from turning into any of the many not-fully-human species listed above, we need to start with ourselves and our relationships with willing second parties. MyTerms will do that.
Everything else can follow.
__________________________________
*My minimal and pathetic drug history:
I was never more than a casual drinker, though I do like dark beers and good wine. I also stopped drinking anything a few years ago.
I’ve never taken LSD, shrooms, or any hallucinogen.
The first time I took cocaine was at a party in the North Carolina woods. When nothing happened, the guy who gave it to me said, “Well, maybe ya’ll’s personality masks the effects.” The second time was when a friend and I wanted to stay up late to watch the first round of March Madness. The third time was to stay awake on a very long drive. The fourth and last time was to stay focused through an all-night conversation with an old friend. Afterwards, I felt like I might die and had no perception of color. After that, I never touched cocaine again.
The only time I ever took ecstasy was with old friends. It was beautiful. Their dog said to us, “See? This is what it’s like to be a dog! You love everybody!
I never smoked tobacco, and only smoked weed a few times. One of those yielded the one-liner I shared above. Another caused such intense pain behind my right eyeball that a bit of it recurs every time I smell weed.
Seventy-two hours since my cataract surgery, and nothing is better. The cornea of my left eye is still swollen and I'm essentially blind (meaning my vision is 20/infinity. It also feels better closed than open, which I'm not sure is a good thing. I'm still wearing a bandana over it. My surgeon says relief will gradually come in a few days. I eagerly await. Meanwhile, if you're depending on me to get work done (and there is lots in my queue), have patience.
Guess heaven was tired of waiting
Sad to learn that Robert Duvall has moved into the past tense.
I watched the whole 2026 NBA All-Star games, and they didn’t suck. In fact, they were surprisingly enjoyable. Players cared. (Well, not Jokić and Luka, who seems to be losing his skinny off-season look.) There was real defense. The best team didn’t matter, but it did win.
The first thing my wife heard me say was “I’m a Leo, so I don’t believe in astrology.” She’s a Scorpio, and that’s her constellation, above another of my affections, the Walnut Grove tower farm in California’s central valley. Left to right, the towers are 2,049, 2,000, 1,549, 524, and 1,997 feet tall and transmit all of Sacramento’s TV stations.
Happy Valentines Life
My favorite line from the musical Les Misérables is “To love another person is to see the face of God.” My wife and I have been living that truth since not long after we met, thirty-six years ago.
Towers
I love to look at them, know what they’re for, and (many decades ago) climb them. Places where I write about towers and post photos of them:
• Trunk Line, my blog about infrastructure
• Nfrastructure, my Flickr collection of infrastructure photos (most of which are about broadcasting and transmitters)
• This subset on my main Flickr collection
• All these (121 of them), posted on this very blog
Consider all of them a long love letter to the now-gone golden age of broadcasting. I want future historians and archivists to remember what broadcasting was and how it worked before digital tech absorbed and obsolesced it. Long may it wave.
My old friend David Beaver, vastly versed in magic, has a new Substack that riffs off many ways that magic isn’t what you think it is. And yet it has near-infinite promise in the AI age, when falsity on a grand scale passes damn near every variant of the Turing test.
Thirteen years ago, when I was entering my final demographic, I had the cataract in my right eye replaced. It was a quick and easy procedure that left me with 20/10 vision when I walked out the door of the surgery center. It’s still that sharp.
Which is good, because this morning I had the cataract in my left eye replaced, and now I’m blind on that side, at least for now. In retrospect, I should have had both cataracts replaced way back when I had the first one done. I didn’t then because the cataract in my left eye wasn’t bad, and that eye could still focus. (Or, optically speaking, accommodate.) Vision on that side was 20/25, and I could use that eye to read as well, meaning that most of the time I didn’t need glasses.
But, because I waited, the cataract in my left eye gradually turned brunescent, meaning brown. This required an extra $2050 for Femtosecond Laser–Assisted Cataract Surgery (FLACS), which isn’t covered by Medicare.
Anyway, the surgeon had to turn his emulsifying machine up to 9 (normal is 3) to demolish the old brown lens. This, plus the antiquity of my eyeball, caused the cornea to swell and turn gray, so the world to my left eye is now just colors and shapes. If all goes according to plan, this will gradually clear up. Meanwhile, no driving, no lifting heavy things, and hopefully no new regrets.
Advice: If you do have cataracts, don’t wait around. Get them done.
As you see, she’ll be speaking in both the natural and the digital worlds, so you can join us on Zoom if you’re not in the former. You can also register here. Meanwhile, put it in your calendar: February 19, 4 PM Eastern.
MyTerms is the only thing that will get us personal privacy in the digital world (seriously). We'll be working on ways to ubiquitze it at three consecutive events at the end of April:
My (guessing) seven-year-old LG 5K Ultrafine 27" display has become flaky. Repair estimates run into many hundreds, so I need a new display. Currently, I'm browsing Apple 5K Studio Displays on eBay. Saves me several hundred dollars from the $1599 Apple Store price.
I don't know why.
Scam phone calls I don't answer make me sneeze.
More feathers.
We've been watching the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics on Peacock, which is worth the expense (cheaper than the other streamers) just to not watch ads, and to have a wide selection of events to see. My only bummer is that they didn't use my ice crystal photos like they did for the Vancouver Olympics in 2010, when those photos were in every frame of every event.
An early bird. Shot at my sister’s house in North Carolina in 2016.
Book them now
Early bird tickets are on sale for the 42ndIIW, which began on a Gillmor Gang podcast the last day of 2004. In my biased but correct opinion, IIW is the most leveraged tech conference on Earth. This one will happen on April 28th to 30th, Tuesday to Thursday. But for the full experience, block out the whole week, so you can catch VRM Day on Monday the 27th, and the Agentic Internet Workshop on Friday, May 1. All will be at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.
MyTerms will be a wide weave (not just one thread) of conversation through all three events, each of which are open space: no keynotes, no panels, no booths. It’s all about breakouts gathered around work and conversation toward outcomes.
Nice write-up on one of the greatest radio stations ever: WQDR/94.7 in Raleigh, during its album rock era, which ran from 1971 to 1984, as I recall. My own involvement (as a creative director for the station’s ad agency) ran from ’78 to ’83 or so. (Hard to nail the dates down, because many good friends worked there and we all hung out a lot.
As a side thing, it’s worth noting that the big FM stations in that part of the country have a lot of range. When hung out there, WQDR was 100,000 watts on a 1200 foot tower, wth a signal that stretched from Winston-Salem to Greenville. On a hot summer morning, you could get them from the mountains to the beach. Earlier, when WRAL/101.5 was a thousand feet up the WRAL/5 tower, it was 250,000 watts and bragged about being audible “from Hatteras to Hickory.” Later, it dropped to 100,000 watts at close to 2000 feet, on the new WRAL/5 tower, which was dropped by ice in 1989. Both WRAL and WQDR are close to the top of the replacement tower today, when most of us aren’t listening to radio on radios anymore. We’re getting streams and podcasts on our phones. Only some of that comes from radio stations, and most radio stations lack local talent and programming. Telle est la mort.
Years ago, one of my sons said something about a “river” that runs through each of us. It’s what we are each about. Might be anger, or love, or vanity, or feeding people, or something less describable. In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman writes about one’s inner acorn, or “diamon,” that contains and expresses our true and full selves. Something like that. I think Victor’s principle is similar.
I lost the spreadsheet.
Have you ever totaled up the costs of all the things you subscribe to?
Keyords are dead, says Shalom Gonzalez in Search Engine Land. The new thing (with your Google searches, and much else) is “inferred intent.” Not real intent. Not you, expressing your will and your agency. Just Google’s constantly improving guesswork about you, and the auction block where those inferred intentions are sold to advertisers in real time.
Oh, and search is dead too. The Web is no longer something Google indexes, as it would a library. That hat is old and gone.
I can tell with my easter egg: a nonsense word buried in one of my writings that has been sitting in the same place on the Web since 1995. Google used to find it, but no longer does. To Google, the Web is not the library any more, with pages one authors, and posts on sites with locations and domains. No, it’s a vast fuck-all of tokens with commercial implications that can be made into useful information. That it gives us radically useful information (dig any NotebookLM podcast of a book—or of anything) masks Google’s commercial intent: to put your soul on its adtech auction block, where hints toward possible purchases ooze out of your captive pores.
Bonus observation: A good thing about listening to both of these podcasts, all the way through, and not reading the transcripts, is that I had to take everything in. Or at least more than I would have taken in had I just read the transcripts. Or, being me, speed-scanned them.
Later… I didn't see this ad during the Super Bowl. But maybe it ran but I got sacked by the Seattle defense, which several times came right through my TV screen and threw me on the couch.
