Doc Searls Weblog

For many years, I attended an annual gathering of folks who wanted to save the Internet for future generations. Aspirational guidance was provided by the metaphor “big hooks:” ones meant for catching big fish.

Since I was a kid, my life has always been about big hooks, especially ones that maximize personal and collective agency, pulling people together for the common good. I wanted new centers that hold, and to improve the holding powers of old centers.

When I was young, broadcasting and journalism were two of those centers, and I loved working in both. I also learned that these were media environments with what Marshall McLuhan (borrowing from Aristotle) called formal (as in formative) causes: they formed us while we formed them. It pains me that broadcasting and journalism have faded as centers and are mostly holding echo chambers together, thanks to social media, search, AI, and other habitats containerized by algorithms optimized for engagement. But I do see good in how everyone now has powers to broadcast and perform journalism that only a relative few once had.

I’ve also seen some big changes ahead of their time: PCs in the ’70s, the Internet in the ’80s. In the ’90s, I saw Linux as the people’s way to stand up their own servers and establish themselves on the Internet’s vast commons. This got me a gig with Linux Journal that lasted 24 years. During that span, I did my best to also spread the word on free software and open source (both huge hooks of their own).

In the late 90s, Chris Locke brought four of us together to write The Cluetrain Manifesto, which remains a hook too big for any fish—so far. (It became a bestseller mostly because marketers nibbled all over it. They didn’t know Cluetrain was a hook for markets, not one for marketing.)

Now I’m working on three hooks that may not catch anything until after I’m dead, but I do think will matter a lot for the living. These are—

1. MyTerms, a new IEEE standard (P7012), from a working group I chair. It will flip the script on how privacy is respected online, obsolescing notice-and-consent and opening markets to far better forms of mutual trust. It will also set the stage for far better signaling of intentions and agreements between customers and companies, making what was prophesied in The Intention Economy come true. When it does, People vs. Adtech will be a fight people will win.
2. Personal AI, which we don’t have yet. (Personalized AI from suction cups on the tentacles of giants at best only emulates it.) Put simply, we need personal AI for the same reason we needed personal shoes, bikes, cars, and PCs. There is progress here. Open source AI models are available. (Huggingface lists lots of them.) [Update on 14 October: Nvidia has announced a $4k personal AI box called DGX Spark. It’s aimed at developers and AI researchers. But, as Marc Andreessen told me long ago, “All the significant trends start with technologists.” (Note: the Linux Journal site no longer has visuals for old pieces. If you want the full experience of the piece at the last link, my own copy is here.) So watch this space.]
3. News Commons, a set of ways to make local journalism far more sturdy and valuable. EmanciPay, a monetization model that combines ease of use, high personal agency, and collaboration, is a smaller hook in the same tackle box—one with potentially enormous payoffs for artists of every kind.

None may ever catch a thing (though I have high hopes for the first two). But at least they’re in the water. And I am still fishing, full-time.