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 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.
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.
This news came in a thread where I gave my wish list for old-app resurrection by Muggles using AI. Here it is:
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.
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.
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.
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.
We won’t have better news until we have better ways of paying for it. EmanciPay is one we thought up at ProjectVRM almost twenty years ago. Maybe the time is finally ripe for it.
I learned that a small plane landed on the Hudson near Newburgh, NY* from a notification on my laptop that said the story was from WNYC. So I went there. Found nothing. Then I went to Google News and searched for plane+hudson. Wanting to give some linklove to one of the local news (formerly newspaper) outlets, I went to the Times-Union, which accused me of blocking ads (which I don’t: I block tracking) and tried to shake me down for a subscription, which I don’t want because I don’t live there. But (this is key) I am glad to pay a small amount using EmanciPay. which doesn’t yet exist, but should.
Bear this in mind: the Web is all hypertext. Files on it are meant to be linked. When you defeat that purpose, you defeat the Web itself.
Stop now and read The Longing, one of David Weinberger‘s chapters in The Cluetrain Manifesto. David wrote it in 1999, or maybe earlier. But it’s still spot-on about what the Web is, and what we risk by losing it. Excerpts:
There are many ways to look at what’s drawing us to the Web: access to information, connection to other people, entrance to communities, the ability to broadcast ideas. None of these are wrong perspectives. But they all come back to the promise of voice and thus of authentic self…
The voice that the Web gives us is not the ability to post pictures of our cat and our guesses at how the next episode of The X-Files will end. It is the granting of a place in which we can be who we are (and even who we aren’t, if that’s the voice we’ve chosen).
It is a public place. That is crucial. Having a voice doesn’t mean being able to sing in the shower. It means presenting oneself to others. The Web provides a place like we’ve never seen before.
Maybe the way to save both the Web and these periodicals is to come up with a better way for people to pay what they like, in countless small amounts, like we have with the convention called tip jars.
So far, I haven’t seen anything better than EmanciPay for doing that. Because only EmanciPay starts by giving readers their own way to pay whatever they like, wherever they like, automatically and with minimal friction. Installing mechanisms and valves on the sell side alone works for a few large publication, but fails for all the rest of them.
We need solutions that start on the readers’ side. EmanciPay is one of them.
*Credit where due: that link goes to the Mid Hudson News, and reported by Hank Gross, who founded it. It has no paywall. Hats off.
We’ll never have civilized life in the digital world while people have no way of their own to signal and enforce their privacy preferences and requirements, as they do in the natural world with what we call manners and clothing. In the absence of personal agency over privacy, adtech has normalized violating privacy by building a vast surveillance fecosystem. MyTerms will obsolesce that fecosystem. But it won’t start there. It will start where adtech’s moon don’t shine: with sites and services that don’t depend on adtech and surveillance. There are millions of those. Hi, guys!
MyTerms is Status Go toward markets based on full personal agency. Adtech is a $trillion Status Quo based on full agency for corporate entities alone and full subordination of the persons who depend on them: a one-sided power asymmetry manifest in every cookie notice.
But, while it is easy to characterize MyTerms as a way to flip the script on cookie notices, and to imagine hordes of people fed up with surveillance storming the walls of Business-as-Usual, the smarter and simpler approach for MyTerms is to start with websites and services that aren’t part of the Ye Olde Fecosystem. There are a lot of those:
Meanwhile, on the regulatory front, officials concerned about personal privacy and mindful of the consent system’s failures, typically continue to look for ways to fix things from the corporate side, because that’s where all the power is. It is hard to imagine that people are more than “data subjects,” and can be just as capable as companies to act as first parties in privacy agreements.
So we have two challenges on our hands. One is to get MyTerms implemented where the surveillance fecosystem doesn’t operate. The other is to remind regulators that contracts are laws that any two parties can make for themselves. And that enforcement can happen inside the framework of plain old contract law (plus plain new ODR—Online Dispute Resolution).
We don’t need a fix for consent that strengthens the status quo and prevents MyTerms from making operative Art. 6 GDPR 1.(b), which specifies contract as one of six grounds for lawful processing of personal data.
In case you’re wondering about the title image, it contains an improvement on this seat I’ll bet is the oldest and most isolated privy in Wyoming. It was built in the very early 1900s by John Love, whose pioneering is immortalized in John McPhee‘s Rising From the Plains (best read as a chapter of the Pulitzer-winning Annals of the Former World). I write more about Love Ranch here.
Here in Bloomington, Indiana, we have a lot of these large-eyed, big-eared roaming free-range cattle that seem not to care much about the two-legged kind and are mindful of traffic. For example, I was headed east on Howe the other day, approaching Euclid, and spotted these two girls on the sidewalk:
After walking to the corner, this one looks first back up Howe behind my car:
Note that her left and right ears are up and down the cross street, which is Euclid. She’s on Howe. Next, she looks straight north up Euclid:
Note that her ears are still trained in both directions. Next, she looks to the right, down Euclid to the south:
Again, ears in both directions. Don’t you wish your dog could do that? (Cats can. Watch for it.)
After that, I kept driving east on Howe, and saw both these girls in my rear view mirror crossing Euclid. Didn’t get a picture, but I did notice them ignoring a two-legged pedestrian nearby.
My sister Jan and I, aged 3 (her) and 5 (me), at our neighborhood park in Maywood, New Jersey. We loved that place. Can we create the same kinds of places on the Net? Eli Pariser thinks so.
One thing I cited from The Filter Bubble was a subchapter that Eli titled “A Bad Theory of You.” Those five words nailed what the whole surveillance fecosystem was already based on back then. That was before it got worse, then much worse. And now it’s more personalized than ever, thanks to Big AI.
This is one of the outcomes that Eli and his team at New_ Public are working toward. You can find out more at that link, at the New Public Substack, and with what they’re doing with Roundabout. Eli will also give us a tour of some local public spaces already forming on the Net through that work.
—because New_ Public is working to bring something that works in the natural world into the digital one. Which is not easy. For one thing, we’ve had the analog world since the Big Bang, and we’ve had the digital one for decades at most—and it will be with us for millennia to come. It ain’t civilized yet, and won’t be until it has public spaces.
Please come. If you can’t make it to Room 008 in Ballantine Hall at IU, you can also register here to attend online.
Not quite finally, my thanks to the Ostrom Workshop and the Hamilton Lugar School for co-organizing the whole Beyond the Web series, now in its fourth year here. It’s not quite a local public park yet, but it’s coming closer.
A thank you to Brian Linse for his kind words on Bluesky. Fact: one of the best parties I’ve ever attended was at Brian’s house in Laurel Canyon, back in blogging’s most golden age. At the party, it seemed everybody was talking about this one blogger, Tony Pierce. I hadn’t met Tony yet, so I assumed that a sort of familiar-looking smart-sounding guy hanging in the kitchen must be Tony, since he seemed to have accreted some fans and well-wishers. So I asked somebody who had been talking about Tony if that guy was him. “No,” they said. “That’s Warren Zevon.” I’m a fan, so I should have known. This was also not long before Warren’s ride arrived. These days Tony blogs at Hear in LA. More about Brian here.
Thanks to Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs (who was also at Brian’s party) for this amazing piece of music on an instrument he describes as a “Nick Benjamin custom semi-baritone hybrid guitar. Designed to be 1/3 Bass, 1/3 guitar, and 1/3 slide. It’s constructed largely from sustainable maple, with separate pickups for the bass strings, and banjo tuners for the top strings.1/3 Bass, 1/3 guitar, and 1/3 slide. It’s constructed largely from sustainable maple, with separate pickups for the bass strings, and banjo tuners for the top strings.” I didn’t want it to end.
While out running errands, I listened on SiriusXM to the Knicks creaming the Spurs at the Garden this afternoon. Broke the Spurs’ eleven-game streak and proved again that the Knicks can beat anybody. Very reassuring.
Law360: Are New Police Drone Programs A Big Help Or Big Brother? Before even reading it, I would have said the latter. Once drones become as common as guns (which outnumber people in the US), and some become armed to kill (whether for law enforcement or bad guys), just the sound of one will creep the shit out of people.
Teaching Dialogic Intelligence with AI, by Rupert Wegerif. Pull quote: “Skeptics insist AI can’t be a true dialogue partner because it lacks empathy. Yet its very other-ness lets it serve as education’s outside voice—embodying everything ever said in a field and inviting students into that living conversation. From there it can prod them to leap beyond inherited ideas and co-create tomorrow’s knowledge.” That’s how I learn from (and presumably with) it. HT to David Weinberger for the pointer.
What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon. Make good trouble.
How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice? It isn’t, except where it happens in nature. And there are no limits.
What is new in your approach, and why do you think it will be successful? Talk and write about it. Because it has to happen eventually anyway, and talking and writing about it might make it happen sooner.
Who cares? If you are successful, what difference will it make? Nobody does yet, but some will, and the difference will be everything.
What are the risks? That it will take longer than I’d like.
How much will it cost? Nothing.
How long will it take? Enough
What are the mid-term and final “exams” to check for success? Imagine asking that question of speech, writing, printing, clothing, the Internet, the Web, or other inventions.
Still, good questions.
This blog post from March of 2020 is getting visits for some reason. Interesting to read it again. I wrote it before the virus became known best as Covid.
It’s great to see Bob Frankston mull out loud about AI and programming. One pull-quote: “Perhaps more to the point is that the current tools have been trained on corporate programming dogma, so they developed all sorts of what I consider are bad practices while others see this as the best of breed. This is not an intrinsic flaw but a teething problem.”
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
War cranks all that stuff up to eleven. As General Pattonput 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 in all of these:
Among other places. A common thread: facts, while good to have, aren’t required. In fact, a story might be more compelling if it’s just about your most or least favorite character, or characters. For maximum engagement, it might be best not to use facts at all. Or to use 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, here are some sources you might want to visit:
See Dale Carstensen’s comments below for what this icon means. I just want to surface it here.
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.
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 have searched th rough the Web’s vast and structured library using 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 inbound link sources, and how likely a given site was to contain keywords, text strings, and other search terms.
That’s now gone. Old pages are missing from many searches. AI guesswork is replacing formerly normal search results. The look of Web structure in search results is just emulation.
This change matters a lot to me. I’ve been writing and publishing on the Web for thirty-one years, and almost all my work is still out there on solid static sites. And now Google fails to find many of those pages, despite having been on the Web for decades and having lots of inbound links. My friend Dave Askins tells me the same malady afflicts much of his own archival work: it’s 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).”
This fucks the Web.
And you too. You are no longer the reader, the researcher. Google thinks what you want from the Web’s library no longer matters. Nor does the library itself. Google search is now guesswork based on what its AI thinks really matters, plus what it thinks you might want to buy. These assumptions are based on what Eli Pariser, in The Filter Bubble, calls “a bad theory of you.” Only worse, because it’s now also a bad theory of the Web. Here’s Gemini again:
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. Here is why those old archives are vanishing from your search results:
Fuckers.
Okay, so there are four giant problems to pull apart here:
How Google is deprecating the Web.
What to call the vast everything that Big AI sources 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 big topics, I will soon take this 3000+ word post and turn it into five shorter posts. One will be what you just read. Here are the next four—
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 sources 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.
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*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.
