So today I went all the way with it
I just realized I’ve been naming each day’s Wordland posts (such as this one) kind of the way the US military names campaigns.
I’d hardly change a word
Escaping the Black Holes of Centralization is getting some visits lately. I wrote it in 2014. Here is how it began:
Turkey shut down Twitter today. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced, “We now have a court order. We’ll eradicate Twitter. I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic.” (Hurriyet Daily News) He also said Turkey will “rip out the roots” of Twitter. (Washington Post)
Well, Turkey didn’t rip out the roots of Twitter. Elon Musk did, a decade later. But the points I made then still apply. The main one:
At the most basic level, the Net’s existence relies on protocols rather than on how any .com, .org, .edu or .gov puts those protocols to use.
The Net’s protocols are not servers, clouds, wires, routers or code bases. They are agreements about how data flows to and from any one end point and any other. This makes the Internet a world of ends rather than a world of governments, companies and .whatevers. It cannot be reduced to any of those things, any more than time can be reduced to a clock. The Net is as oblivious to usage as are language and mathematics — and just as supportive of every use to which it is put. And, because of this oblivity, The Net supports all without favor to any.
Want to buy an AM station for $0? Too late.
Since 1996, 620 AM has been a beacon on the Dallas-Fort Worth radio dial. The station was 5000 watts by day and 4500 by night. On Texas and Oklahoma’s extremely conductive soil, that’s enough to blanket large parts of both states. It moved to Dallas after operating from 1939 to 1994 as a Wichita Falls station called KWFT. After the move, it was licensed to Plano and had the callsign KAAM. Disney bought it for $12 million in 1998, and renamed it KMKI (for Mickey Mouse). Later, Disney put all its stations up for sale after realizing that radio was in the toaster. Salem Media Group bit, buying KMKI for $3 million in 2015. More callsign and format changes followed, while ratings stayed in the tank. At some point between this Google Streetview in 2024 and this Satellite view in 2026, three of KTNO’s five towers came down (causing, far as I can tell, no news). Since then, the station has been operating at reduced power using one of its towers. Finally, two days ago, Salem announced that it would surrender the license. I listened (at 6 AM Eastern) to a few SDR receiving stations, and still heard the signal. But later (about 10 AM) it was gone.
I know reporting on this stuff is deeply boring for most people, but it’s archival stuff I care about and think is worth noting, especially for the (I’m guessing a few dozen) broadcast engineering types who tune into this blog. Our numbers are falling too.
Words from the wise
What Dave says here couldn’t be more right:
…as you get deeper into the AI environment, you get smarter. Not just better informed, that’s what the web has been doing for us for 30+ years. The AI stretches your mind the way PCs did initially. It makes you smarter. Can it help us work better together? Remains to be seen. Perhaps each of us is forming our own multi-billion dollar company, and training the (virtual) people we want working with/for us. There are very few human people who seem interested in collaborating. They all want to blaze their own trail, and if you want to improve their product you have to reproduce the whole freaking thing. The web had a different philosophy, adopted from Unix, not the tech industry. We want to work with others. And we do. And it seems there’s an opportunity to cast the entire AI push in the same light, so that the individual developer has the power to make industry standard products.
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