Doc Searls
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Fuseday
First, and most importantly, don't miss Peter Kaminsky's talk today at 4 PM Eastern. Required Viewing I EXPOSED what big tech knows about you by becoming… a data broker, by Chris the Producer, on YouTube. It's brilliant. More about him here. And here. And here. Hat's off to Don Marti for the find. Bonus link.… Continue reading
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Cluesdays
Riding wide On the road for a while. Above is a storm coming over Elk Country in north-central Pennsylvania. After that, Elk Country, Ohio, and back to Indiana, by RAV4. Didn’t know there was one, but yeah Chick-fil-A takes a stand against fast-food drive-thru AI trend. Maybe Is doomscrolling doomed? Continue reading
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The Mentat’s Method of AI

This is the flyer for the next talk in our speaker series at IU. It’s on Tuesday, and a can’t-miss event. I explain more below. I know a lot of people who know a lot about AI. Or seem to. Or say they do. But Pete Kaminski is the real deal. More importantly, he knows… Continue reading
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Enjoying the Shows

The idea was to get my photos from the latest Lotus Festival up right after the three-day event ended on Sunday the 4th. I had too many other things to do, so a week went by. But at least my shots of the last two performances are up. This one is for Nikki D &… Continue reading
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Running
I'm in Chicago for the Marathon and our son's birthday (he's running tomorrow). Also hanging with relatives and enjoying the city, which always feels to me like a giant Boston. (Color me wrong, it's okay.) Meaning it was fully yours Steven Levy: I’m Still Convinced the iPod Was the Perfect Gadget—Apple’s original music player got… Continue reading
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Time to book your rides

AI isn’t just a “surf’s up” moment. It’s a tsunami. You have to surf that tsunami, just to keep from drowning. Using your time. Your calendar is your surfboard. What’s your best beach for riding that calendar? Well, right now there are countless conferences with “Identity,” “AI,” or “Agentic” in their titles. Yes, they’re beaches.… Continue reading
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Cluesday

Closer to homes Tornado Alley moves east. Here’s one I recorded live on my phone in February here in Bloomington, Indiana. Here is the trench of destruction dug by a later tornado that went through thick woodlands about twelve miles north of here. Didn’t know there was one, but yeah Chick-fil-A takes a stand against… Continue reading
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WaningCrescentMoonday

That’s what it says at MoonPhase.today Specifically, 26%. I’ll consider them unreal if they’re not at IIW. The UOR Foundation has plans to… Well, I can’t copy and paste the text, so here’s a screengrab: I’ll say not. Quite. AM I? | A Documentary About AI Consciousness. Ever notice the groovy ditches in tidal swampland?… Continue reading
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Lintlinks
If you don’t, you’re a human AI Test: See if you don’t laugh at something as you scroll down through this. Am I alone in finding it annoying? Does anybody want, or use, the “workspace” that shows up, whether you want it or not, every time you open a Zoom session? Getting less faint Wall… Continue reading
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Thumbsday
A billion rights don’t make a wrong Except for a few books and thousands of long-since-tossed magazines and newspapers, all my writing is on the Web. Some of that died long ago. For example, David Bunnell (four days older than me, and for whom I was often mistaken) did nothing (to my knowledge*) to save… Continue reading
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Notesday
In wasted dollars Our species began to get civilized when it invented clothing: the original privacy tech. But that was in the natural world. In the digital one, we are still naked, and privacy is just a promise you get from “consent” (cookie notice) agreements and settings. It’s a fail. Example: the GDPR Privacy Monitor examined… Continue reading
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Don’t fall in

AI shit gets so weird. For example, the fake golfer Grace (aka Gracie) Brooks appeared in the midst of my Facebook doomscrolling (above) to say something to me (scrolled across her boobage) about “an older guy” watching her. Never saw her before, or cared to see her. But I am curious about “her” business model.… Continue reading
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Cruiseday
Real hard forks Hmm… NiemanLab: NPR, the quintessential audio news brand, adapts to a video-first future. Specifically, “NPR … landed Machine Gods, the new video-first podcast from veteran tech journalists Casey Newton and Kevin Roose.” I subscribed to Casey and Kevin’s old podcast, Hard Fork, and I’ll subscribe to Machine Gods too. But I doubt I’ll… Continue reading
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Moonday
Ilmoonination Actually, we have a waning gibbous moon tonight. It was full two nights ago. But I need to a headline, so there ya go. How's fishing? Mainstream media continues to get sidestreamed. That's what I take from Ad Market Resumes Tepid Growth In August, 'Traditional' Media's Share Falls Below 20%, by Joe Mandese in today's MediaPost.… Continue reading
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Sunlint
A taller way to tell time Liblice II, the tallest structures in the Czech Republic, are about to come down. They carried the 1.5 million-watt signal (30x the maximum power of an AM station in the US) of Czech Radio Two until 2021 on 639 mHz. The cool thing is this (from that last link,… Continue reading
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Performing a pooplic service
When a whole business category is fubar, and its members together exemplify enshittification better than each does alone, I suggest we speak of their collectivity as a fecosystem. I’ve been using that word since 2016, and bring it up now because these two posts about the subscription industry‘s fecosystem have been getting action lately, and I… Continue reading
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Attaday

It’ll get better before it gets worse before it gets better I trust Meta’s Muse.ai about as far as I can throw a data center. But at least one person whose wisdom I value says Muse will be the winner in the personal AI wars that I want none of the giants to win. It will… Continue reading
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Blitheday
Turned out to be yummy Thirteen years ago, I wrote this defense of QR codes, which friends were calling “robot barf.” If I count this right Public radio in the Boston market has a 17.6 Nielsen share. WBUR is #1 with a 7.9. Impressive. And not just because when governments try to erase history others… Continue reading
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Hey Europe: Make Privacy a Contract

Anu Bradford‘s book, The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (Oxford, 2019), hardly exaggerates the EU’s influence. Many EU regulations have global reach, especially in respect to personal privacy. And for that we should be grateful, because the US and China mostly don’t give a shit. On the other hand, every cookie… Continue reading
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Splatterday
They need more. Smithsonian Magazine: An Amateur Astronomer Using Google Maps Spotted a Strange Indentation. It Turned Out to Be a Meteorite Crater From 390 Million Years Ago. That one has been added to the excellent Impact Earth crater map. I’ve shot three of those: Manicougan, Upheaval Dome, and Meteor Crater. No doom, no utopia In Jeff Jarvis’ They’re covering… Continue reading