Doc Searls Weblog

Just trying to make stuff happen

  • If privacy matters to you, this is a required assignment

    I’m kinda proud of the stars we’ve been bringing to our salon series here at Indiana University since 2021. And there are none I’m more excited to welcome than Helen Nissenbaum, who will be here on Tuesday to speak both in person and on Zoom. The title of her talk is “Why Obfuscation is (still) Needed (more than ever).”

    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.

    Her day job is as Professor of Information Science and the founding director of the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech. Visit that page to get a small sense of her range of involvements and influences.

    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.

    Or click on this to put it on your calendar:

    nissenbaumDownload
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  • Thrust Day

    Some public notes::::

    How can one not appreciate AI as a teacher and problem-solver? ChatGPT just taught me how to make a .ics file to put on emails out to people who should attend an event. Here’s my first, for Helen Nissenbaum’s talk next Tuesday. Click on it if you’d like it in your calendar. It even has the Zoom link you’ll need.

    nissenbaum

    In The Ozempicization of the Economy, Kyla Scanlon discusses “the shift from infrastructure that served everyone to technologies built around the mobile, private individual.” She concludes, “Despair right now is extremely convincing and extremely profitable. Hope would be the opposite – something that doesn’t need you to feel desperate in order to work.” It’s all over the place, but a worthwhile read.

    This post on Antipodes is getting some action.

    Algorhythms is going on here at Indiana University. If you’re here, be there.

    My blog on infrastructure is getting a facelift soon: from an ancient WordPress theme to a modern one.

    “Broadcast” still gets mentioned a lot. As far as I know, I am the only person in my town to watch broadcast (over-the-air) TV. You know, with an antenna.

    A Reddit thread on the Canada Air flight crash at LaGuardia is frozen but interesting as it stands. It starts with a passenger who was on the plane.

    Music streaming is a bad business.

    Once an airport is gone, it doesn’t come back.

    The Corporate BS Generator echoes BuzzPhraser, first published in the early ’90s and still there!

    Somebody pointed me to this talk, which I gave back when I still had hair. Interesting how the exterior of one’s body ages while one’s voice does not. (So far.)

    The four roads to the intention economy are still open.

    Dr. Barkhuff‘s stoic approach to the Trump matter.

    Hadn’t watched Parks and Recreation until last night. It’s funny, as promised. We were also charmed to find the show set (as are we) in Indiana.

    A little reliving of a warm and fuzzy past of mine, with WQDR radio in Raleigh, in its rock years.

    Now that we’ve left, Hawaii is looking great.

    Please enjoy Eddie Dalton.

    Remembering Kai Tak, Hong Kong’s amazing and scary waterfront airport in the heart of the city.

    Is this wrong? I think so.

    Overheard: “Does your body prove a concept?”

    Despite my pushback, a search for “intention economy” is still thick with bad PR.

    In an email response to this Wall Street Journal story about how much people hate seeing ads on their Samsung refrigerator screens, I wrote this:

    Advertising corrupts, and digital advertising corrupts absolutely.

    Samsung TVs come with Samsung’s own collection of channels. Two thousand of them, it seems. The UI prioritizes those, robo-subordinating the streaming services, over-the-air, cable, and your own HDMI-connected devices to places as far as possible away from the action on your screen, so you get dark-pattered into looking through those channels (old westerns, stations from Wichita and Fort Wayne, no-name news and weather services…) instead of what you want. Why? Because Samsung sells ads on those channels. Probably personalized, because they want to spy on you as well. If they go to that much trouble, and junk up their UI so much on their own TVs, why not do that on a full-screen fridge?

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  • Back in the Straddle Again

    New frontiers for reality

    In case you’re wondering how MyTerms will change everything (for example, by getting you real privacy online and obsolescing cookie notices), the first proofs-of-concept will be coming from JLINC. Here’s the open protocol. Here’s the blog. And here’s Iain Henderson’s blog, which does a great job of explaining how MyTerms opens paths between demand and supply that are closed in an online world where personal privacy is an insincere corporate promise rather than a working feature.

    Craig BurtonBy the way, we were lucky that Craig Burton lived long enough to sing the praises of JLINC long before it evolved into what it is and does today. Thank both Craig and Iain for my prior mentions of JLINC here and at ProjectVRM. That’s Craig on the left

    And, conveniently, JLINC, MyTerms, and other future necessities for fully working markets will be front and center at VRM Day, the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW #42), and the Agentic Internet Workshop (AIW), all at the Computer History Museum, March 27 to April 1 (Monday-Friday). Don’t risk your futures by missing them.

    I’ll still probably be late for stuff

    I think I’m back on Eastern, after jumping here from Hawaiian time. Best things about Hawaiian and Pacific Times: evening games are all earlier.

    And free

    I’ll be saying more about Helen Nissenbaum’s talk here at Indiana University next Tuesday, but meanwhile you can read more about it here, and sign up. It’ll be live online.

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  • Early Day

    Hope he doesn't block my double-shot

    I took Luke Kornet's coffee test, scored high, and wrote a comment.

    Go there

    I spent most of today writing Making a New News Business over at the ProjectVRM blog. It begins,

    In the dawning decades of our new Digital Age, the news business has shrunk from a galaxy of bright stars to a loose collection of white dwarfs glowing in otherwise dark empty spaces. The empty spaces are called “news deserts.”

    In the meantime (at least in the US), the redstream is the new mainstream, while more and more people get news (or what passes for it) from social media and each other. Countless sources are also faked up by AI.

    Less metaphorically, the news business has de-institutionalized. How can we re-institutionalize it in digital ways that can also be trusted?

    Answers follow. I'm still working on more.

    Getting ahead of my selves

    I'm up in a few hours to fly from LAX to ORD to IND tomorrow. So I'm getting a few tabs out of the way here before I finish packing.

    Speaking of flying

    Jim Fallows, writer and pilot (among other things), explains some of what happened to Air Canada Flight 8646 at LaGuardia. I go to Jim first when things like this happen.

    Black eye

    Scott Fybush on CBS Radio News shutting down.

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  • Sat a Day

    Time for her own Wikipedia page

    I just ran across Aiyana Lee. She's good. More.

    Bonus link.

    Rutilance

    The FCC has green-lit Nexstar's purchase of Tenga. This will move much of local TV into the red, politically. Wrote about that here and here back in September. Pull-quote:

    Trump and Carr want MAGA-aligned affiliates. Simple as that. Sinclair is already there. Nexstar is leaning that way. If Nexstar gets the green light to acquire Tegna, we can assume that all the former Tegna stations will also veer from mainstream to redstream.

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  • Deep Fry Day

    This little guy is a Brown Anole (Anolis sagrei) lizard, native to Cuba and the Bahamas, but invasive  here on kauai. This one is posed on a garden faucet. Note that my Sony a7iv camera defaults to autofocusing on an eye, if it sees one. That’s what it did with this lizard.

    Misappointment

    I hoped to get into the Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF) today here on Kauai, because (unlike the last time I was here), they now allow visitors to pay $25 admission after a background check (which I was willing to risk). Alas, the guy next to the guy with the AR-15 said they are open Monday to Friday, but the background check people are off on Friday, so it was a no-go. But, with a couple brothers-in-law we had a fun day trip anyway.

    I did get to see and shoot the PMRF from a boat back in 2021.

    Bad News

    LA Times: CBS News shuts down radio unit amid division-wide cuts, leaving 700 stations without  their CBS news feed. Axios has a mostly budgetary angle. Neither says that radio is largely dependent on “barter,” which is free programming paid for on the providers’ side by advertising, with holes in the schedule for local ads that are the stations’ actual source of income. I know that most or all syndicated talk programming is bartered. I don’t know if the CBS News audio (radio) feed is bartered as well. If not, I suspect the paying market for CBS radio news has been going away. I’ll dig into it when I get a chance. (Still on vacation in Hawaii here.)

  • Turtles all the way up

    Not an ideal pet.

    I’m fascinated by Hawaiian Green Sea Turtles (Chelonia mydas), which bask on the sands of Poʻipū Beach, here on the south shore of Kauaʻi. Known locally as honu, they typically range from 200 to 400 pounds, but some have weighed in north of 800 pounds. They can also live more than 90 years, are the largest hard-shelled sea turtles, and range across all the ocean’s non-frigid seas. They also migrate up to hundreds of miles, can dive to 1500 feet, and are herbivores, living mostly on seaweed.

    The Hawaiian population is unique to the species in their choice to bask on beaches. Other green sea turtle populations come ashore, but only to lay eggs. These guys, however, don’t lay eggs where they bask, preferring instead to repopulate on remote outlying islands such as French Frigate Shoals.

    They also aren’t green except on the inside, where their fat and cartilage have a verdant hue. And they are a protected species, so don’t try to check that out.

    Here is an album of turtle shots I took yesterday, and another I shot four years ago. It’s possible some of the same turtles are in both sets. The number of people observing the turtles these days, however, is a high multiple of what I saw the first time around.

  • St. Patrick’s Spleen

    Archimedes’ leverage on the world, and a spleen. 

    So here’s one

    Iain Henderson: If I Had a Place to Stand and a Lever I Could Fix The Internet … Excerpt: “Endless positive possibilities become possible when we move beyond the weaknesses in the current architecture, and build genuine digital capability on the side of the human.”

    But I still miss the damn thing

    My spleen was removed on this day in 1961. The doctors did it because they thought without a spleen my low hematocrit (~32%: anemic, technically) would go up. All they knew at the time was that the spleen’s job was filtering out old red blood cells (erythrocytes). Mine were mostly misshapen (resembling spheres, rather than frisbees), making them suboptimal at carrying oxygen and too easy for the spleen to destroy. But my hematocrit never went up.

    Decades later, after science improved, doctors at Bethesda treating my sister (an officer in the US Navy) triangulated several medical disciplines to re-diagnose the problem we share (she’s anemic too). Rather than spherocytosis, we have dyserythropoietic anemia type II, which is also herditary (congenital), but doesn’t automatically suggest spleenectomy as a treatment. Instead (at least in our cases), they do phlebotomies (take blood). This reduces the amount of iron in solution in the blood system, which risks hemochromatosis, a kind of iron overload. But I also haven’t needed that in years.

    Bottom line: my sister and I both have a mild form of the disorder. So we are fine, though down one spleen apiece.

    Back when I was a kid (guessing around eleven), and they told me I was anemic, I asked what that meant. They said, “You probably can’t run a mile without collapsing.” So, the next time I was at the beach, I ran a mile. In high school, I ran a mile on an indoor track in under seven minutes. I also loved playing soccer and basketball. And skiing. So, no worries. I’m fine.

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  • HI Day

    Gatherings of the beached.

    They’re watching us too

    Hundreds gather to watch turtles on Poipu Beach in Kauai.

    Overheard. In Hawaii:

    “I was only following odors.”

    “I didn’t catch his name. I think he said “Mahalo.”

    Your next Aurora

    From Spaceweather.com (slightly edited to explain stuff):

    A NASA model predicts a CME (Coronal Mass Ejection from the Sun) will arrive on March 19th, mere hours before the northern vernal equinox (~10  AM EDST)

    This is perfect timing because auroras love equinoxes. It’s called the “Russell-McPherron effect.” At this time of year, the magnetic field of Earth can link to the magnetic field of the sun, providing a superhighway for solar wind to enter our planet’s magnetosphere. Even a weak CME can can penetrate to spark mid-latitude auroras. NOAA is currently predicting a G2-class geomagnetic storm.

    There’s more: A New Moon on March 19th will provide dark skies for long exposures. Even if you can’t see the auroras, you might be able to photograph them. Point your smartphone at the sky and take a nighttime exposure. You could be surprised by what appears on the screen.

    Here in Hawaii, we’ll miss it. But we have Hawaii stuff, such as the big turtles.

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  • Midweekend

    And now we are hear

    Our vacationing crew likes The Rippingtons, so I played some of their music through CarPlay on the rental car’s dashboard while sitting in the Lihue Costco parking lot. The above came up.

    How to enjoy bad but not worse weather

    Dig the webcam at Poipu beach, on the south side of Kauai, near where I’ll be for a week, starting tomorrow. Also, the turtles, in calmer weather.

    I love me a water matrix printer

    This fountain in Moravian Square (Moravské náměstí), in the Czechian city of Brno, prints the time in falling water.

    Two stories, one slo-mo tragedy

    Radio World: How AM and FM station totals have changed in ten years. And Cord Cutter News’ story about it.

    I dunno why, but I did give it an image

    This was my most-visited blog post yesterday.

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  • Santa Barbarian Again

    The California Poppies were profuse yesterday (and probably for the next few weeks) at the Botanical Garden.

    No complaints.

    Back at the ranch for the next two days in California’s most beautiful town. Man, I do love it here. Alas, I mostly live elsewhere, and I love those places too.

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  • Heading Out Day

    A wide view on the outbound of the atrium out of which the two concourses of Indianapolis International Airport (IND) branch. IND is a great airport. Uncrouded, efficient, friendly. Some good food. Makes travel easy. BTW, I shot this while walking to my flights to DEN and LAX, after I wrote all of the below. I am now (as I write this) at my desk in Santa Barbara.

    Life in the vast lane

    The thunderstorms have passed by, and we’re finishing packing for Santa Barbara and Hawaii.

    In a related matter, people often ask me why I endure the hassles of travel. The answers: 1) Because it’s not a hassle for me; 2) I love flying and driving; and 3) I like being somewhere else.

    On that third item, that’s everywhere I am. Even now, at home, at my desk, in Bloomington, Indiana. Tomorrow I’ll be home at my desk in Santa Barbara. Next week I’ll be at some AirBnB, I think, in Kauai.

    Why keep beauty when ugly will do?

    The iconic Hughes Memorial Tower in Washington DC will be demolished.

     

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  • This Tuesday

    Verily

    What's happening today is today. All day.

    Also, it's absurd that Indiana is mostly in the Eastern time zone. This time of year, the sun rises at four hours before noon and sets eight hours after noon. 

    And fast moving storms from southwest to northeast tend to produce tornadoes.

    There's a long arc of thunderweather moving lengthwise to the northeast from Texas and across Chicago right now. ORD is all delays. Good view of the action on Windy. Good view of the delays on FlightAware's MiseryMap.

    Apparently, yes

    Ted Gioia: Is Spotify Enabling Massive Impersonation of Famous Jazz Musicians?

    Also, AI Actress Tilly Norwood Drops a Video—and It's Cringe on Steroids "At least Skynet was honest about trying to erase humanity…"

    Bzzz

    Marginal Revolution: A Fly Has Been Uploaded. It begins, "n 2024, the entire neuronal diagram of the fruit-fly brain–some 140,000 neurons and 50 million connections–was mapped. Later research showed that the map could be used to predict behavior. Now, Eon Systems a firm with some of the scientists involved in the fruit-fly research and with the goal of uploading a human brain has announced that they uploaded the fruit fly brain to a digital environment. The digital fly appears to behave in the digital environment in reasonably fly like ways–this is not a simulation, the fly’s “sensors” are being activated by the digital environment and the neurons are responding.

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  • Behind the Eye Ball

    This is the eye.

    Here’s not looking at you, kid

    Three and a half weeks after cataract surgery on my left eye, vision improvement seems to have plateaued. I’d say it’s 20/80. The new lens is fine, but the corneal edema persists, so it feels like it’s smeared with vaseline. My right eye, which had its cataract replaced with a new lens fifteen years ago, is 20/10, so I rely on it entirely, even though my left has always been the dominant eye and wants to take over, layering a blur over everything. It also has a lot of floating debris that looks like pepper grinds or small insects in the air. I’m going back to see the surgeon this afternoon, because there are other symptoms (irritation, headaches), and I’m leaving for two weeks on Wednesday (California, Hawaii). Anyway, that’s why a lot is going undone and unwritten.

    A market of one, speaking

    The new M5 MacBook Pros look appealing. I might buy one if Apple offered storage in excess of 8TB. I have that in this 3-year-old M2-based MacBook Pro. Why have they gone through three generations of CPUs without raising the maximum storage, when we’re generating more data all the time?

  • Stun Day

    I don’t know either. I have almost 100,000 better photos on Flickr.

    But their work has not

    My photos on Flickr (here and here) have had more than 20 million views. The photo with the most views is this one (above) with 83,000+ so far. It was shot with a camcorder to accompany a conversation I was having with somebody about gold crowns and inlays, of which I have many, all installed more than fifty years ago by students at the University of North Carolina Dental School, for $25 apiece. One student was John Berry, who practices (or practiced) in Durham. The other was Steve Herring, who practices (or practiced) in Fayetteville. Both studied primarily under Dr. Clifford Sturdivant, who passed in 2008. John and Steve were both younger than me, but not by much, so I’m guessing they’ve both retired.

    Preach!

    Luke Kornet is not a saint. Not yet. But he was my favorite Knick before becoming my favorite Celtic, and he is now my favorite Spur. He is also my favorite blogging pro player in any sport. Here’s his blog.

    Luke hardly mentions that his claim to fame in college was shooting more threes than any player seven feet or taller (I think he’s 7’3″, though he’s listed two inches shy of that) something he rarely does in the pros, because his main role is blocking shots, which he does a lot. (One game-winning example.)

    Last week, Luke stretched his blogging game by throwing a block against the Atlanta Hawks. Dig:

    This week, the Atlanta Hawks “announced a special one-night collaboration to celebrate the city’s iconic cultural institution Magic City” during the team’s home game against Orlando on Monday, March 16. In its press release, the Hawks failed to acknowledge that this place is, as the business itself boasts, “Atlanta’s premier strip club.” Given this fact, I would like to respectfully ask that the Atlanta Hawks cancel this promotional night with Magic City.

    His reason:

    The NBA should desire to protect and esteem women, many of whom work diligently every day to make this the best basketball league in the world. We should promote an atmosphere that is protective and respectful of the daughters, wives, sisters, mothers, and partners that we know and love.

    Here is Luke’s first post, which lays out his mission, so to speak. Like my wife and I, Luke seeks out interesting Catholic churches as he travels about with his team. There are, as Luke and we both know, a huge variety of those. It’s a big old church. Lots of choices.

    Here is a graphic Luke added to this blog post. Says a lot about him.

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  • Sat Enough Day

    Questions

    Are Company Contacts as useful as I hope they are?  HT: Recommendo, which I recommend.

    Is Conditional Consent compatible with MyTerms? This—_Instead of "accept all" or "reject all" per site, users define rules across three dimensions: cookie purpose, website category, and third-party processor. Allow analytics on shopping sites but deny tracking on news sites — your preferences, your logic._—suggests the answer is yes. Or at least maybe.

    When your intentions are inferred by surveillance and AI guesswork, are they really your intentions? This is the question raised for me by MasterCard, with this:  When AI starts buying for you, trust becomes the product—Mastercard introduces Verifiable Intent – a new, standards-based trust paradigm for agentic commerce, co-developed with Google. My answer is, No, it's not.

    Is Sam Altman going to sink OpenAI/ChatGPT? Links:

    —Casey Newton: What is OpenAI going to do when the truth comes out? Sam Altman’s deal with the Pentagon seems too good to be true. What happens when the public realizes that?

    —Gary Marcus: BREAKING: Sam Altman’s greed and dishonesty are finally catching up to him

    —Keith Teare: Missing in Action: Real Leadership

    Why not to "verify" your Linkedin identity

    Rogi: I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here's What I Actually Handed Over.

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  • Fried Day

    It’s all about making The Inention Economy happen.

    Dave Lockie: We Get to Decide What the A in AI Stands For. This follows The Intent Stack: A New Design Space for Human-AI Collaboration. Also dig Intent-Driven Commerce: What E-commerce Can Learn from AI Agents and DeFi.

    Dialing out

    Cumulus Media, one of the three big owners of commercial radio stations, just filed for bankruptcy. Audacy, another of the big three, did that two years ago. iHeart, the third, did it in 2018, came out later, and today is less weak than the other two. But the whole commercial radio station business is doomed.

    For the civilized world, radio was for many decades the main way to hear music, news, and talk over the wireless connection we called “signals,” which came from “stations” and heard on devices called “radios.” Now we can listen to an infinite variety of music, news, and talk using smartphones, which are also required for much else in our civilized lives. Want a radio for your house? You won’t find one at CVS, or even Best Buy. (Well, maybe online.) But you’re likely to find one at a thrift shop or an antique store.

    The value of AM stations is diving to zero. When Cumulus took its off-the-shelf conservative talk programming off KSFO/560, and put it on its 810 AM signal, it turned off the 560 signal completely, and erased the KGO callsign on 810, ending KGO’s century-long landmark existence, during which it ruled ratings for something like eighty years. Apparently, there is no market for the 560 AM signal, even though it could easily be diplexed onto any number of other stations’ AM towers around the Bay. Nobody wants to spend money on AM at all.

    In cars—the only places where broadcast radio still has listeners—the makers are burying radio functions behind others on dashboard “infotainment” systems. Gone are knobs for tuning. What people mostly want now is to put their phone screens on the dashboard, with Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, and then play whatever they like.

    I have a lot more to report on this, but I will save it for another post somewhere. Meanwhile, I will say I have hope for noncommercial (public, religious) radio. I think they’ll be most of what’s left after the market collapses, simply because their listeners will pay for it. Advertising at most has been a side thing for them.

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  • Furlsday

    See you there!

    Eli Pariser will address the question What Might “Public Parks of the Internet” Look Like? at 4 pm Eastern today. Register to attend here. And here is the Zoom.

    Brief observations of a perfect place

    Photos of Pink Sands Beach on Harbour Island: January 31st, February 2nd.

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  • Headnesday, the Longer

    Haste makes Trash

    For reasons unknown, I had two posts called Headnesday (because I had to name it something), and I trashed the wrong one because I was in a hurry. Then I

    No app shows more, FAIK

    Windy is by far the best site and app for weather geeks. Right now we have a thunderstorm in Bloomington, and Windy reports the location of every lightning flash. Such as right now, here.

    Coach in Peace

    The great Lou Holtz died today, at 89. Two stories. First, Coach Holtz did a kindness for my ex-wife when she was stuck somewhere, and as a UNC fan found then-NC State coach and asked for help finding her a ride, which he did. Second, he coached my cousin Andy Heck during Notre Dame’s college championship season in 1988. Andy is now the offensive line coach for the Kansas City Chiefs.

    Still beautiful, I guess

    Camp Aheka, the Boy Scout camp where I was homesick but had fun in the Summer of ’59, is long gone and now an estate for sale.

    Though attendance is low

    The Moon has hot spots.

    Blame Canada

    The LA Times reports that California’s wine industry is taking a big hit these days.

    Your kids have a new god

    I didn’t know Ms. Rachel was a real thing until I read this Onion story.

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  • Toes Day

    This is only to make the headline work. Talent: my grandson and one of his buddies.

    Let the Games Continue

    I didn’t know what Figma was until I heard that Danila Poyarkov created an alternative called OpenPencil, explained here.

    This news came in a thread where I gave my wish list for old-app resurrection by Muggles using AI. Here it is:

    1. Raise MORE from the dead. MORE was the best writing tool ever invented. It ran only on Macs and died around the turn of the 90s, but I continued using it into the late 90s. I still miss it every day.
    2. Raise Phase One Media Pro, formerly Microsoft Expressions, originally iView Media Pro, from the dead. I explain here how it was, for me, the best workflow software ever made for photography.
    3. Raise Adobe GoLive from the dead. It was a great WYSIWYG HTML editor. I don’t need something that complex, but I miss writing with it.

    Hell, combine #1 and #3. I don’t care.

    God (now with AI!) help us all.

    I always hated time as a measure of work. I sucked at keeping time sheets, and even screwed up punch/time clocks before that: for example when, in the late ’60s, I made 60¢ an hour in the Guilford College kitchen, and 83¢ an hour delivering food and washing dishes at Wesley Long Hospital. Both still exist: the places, that is, not the pay scales and systems. Anyway, toward life after all that, Joe Mandese writes, Billable Hours Are Dead, AI Killed Them, Here’s How To Survive. Of course, AI helped Joe write it.

    Seriously. Read them both.

    Connect these dots—

    Jordan Klemperer:  Moltbook’s alleged AI civilization is just a massive void of bloated bot traffic.

    Tim O’Reilly: A Conversation About What I Lack or: Why AI Needs You.

    Moving on

    Jeffrey Epstein is a black hole topic: a gravity well of human interest and consequence into which everyone with a connection to him falls and no light escapes. Joi Ito is one of those people. In hope of shedding light, Joi has issued a public statement describing how he used Epstein to raise funds for the MIT Media Lab. Joi is an old friend. I thought (Epstein aside) that he did a great job with the Media Lab when he ran it. While I also don’t think anyone with connections to Epstein (and no connections were good ones) will ever fully recover, I hope that Joi, like everyone else, can get on with a productive and happy life.

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