Modest ambitions. I’ll be on the Immergence podcast (above) this coming Tuesday, July 1, at Noon Eastern time, talking with Nico Fara about The Intention Economy, ProjectVRM, Customer Commons, Personal AI, and using MyTerms to completely flip the script on agreements with websites and services, obsolescing all those annoying cookie notices—and blowing up surveillance-based adtech in the process. Nico’s video teaser outlines a bit of what the show will cover.
See the paragraph above. Kyla Scanlon: “…right now, the person who can generate the most compelling speculation about the future gets the most power to create it…”
But not forever. Or much longer. Two days ago, when this blog got almost six thousand visits (a recent record), the most visited post was GDPR will pop the adtech bubble, which went up on May 14, 2018. The GDPR became enforceable on May 25, eleven days later. In this post from December of last year, Dentsu said, “Algorithmically enabled ad spend is estimated to reach 59.5% of total ad spend in 2024 and 79.0% in 2027. Meaning the bubble continues to grow, un-popped. So now I’ve been wrong for more than seven years.
Register to read more free blogs is neither free nor about blogs.
A small example of enshittification, but it qualifies. My credit card company just notified me by text that my card just got hit for its $5 monthly payment to Medium for access to writing behind its paywall. I pay Medium for only two reasons. One is that I wanted to support Ev Williams back when Medium was an infant. The other is that I wanted to be able to read what I had posted there after they put up the paywall, and I discovered that some of my more well-read pieces were behind it. At this point, however, Medium is the pioneer that got Substack’s arrows in its back. And frankly, I don’t like either one of them, because they’re both silos, each with their own quirks and shortcomings. Conditionalities rule. For example atop this Medium post it says, “Non Members on medium can read the full article here for free.”
And how long will they keep flying empty planes? That said (see below), even if travelers are not treated badly on arrival, travel to the US is now highly discouraged.
And, by making it personal, it’s a story after all. For every person we know who has had trouble getting into the U.S. from Europe, Asia, Canada, or elsewhere, we know dozens who have experienced the opposite. Since there are only facts in “no trouble at all,” and no story, the no-trouble non-story tends not to get reported. (For more on why, see Where Journalism Fails.) In I’m at the US border—but will the guards play ball, Martin Samuel of The Times shares his own experience (of entering the U.S. for a World Cup match). It’s a good short read.
What? Oh that, yes. ChatGPT interrupted my experience to tell me about its memory, explaining how it works and how best to use it. Since ChatGPT is the one chatbot I pay for, and there are lots of past chats I would like ChatGPT to recall, I’ll save this link and hope its parents don’t 404 it.
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