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 credible ahead of their time. 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 worn down to hills amidst fresh volcanoes: stars 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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?
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.
By 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
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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. Always have been.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
By the way, we were lucky that 
