Doc Searls
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Pre-Labor Day
Yesterday I was working in my home office when I suddenly remembered that the first IU football game of the season was on. So I went downstairs, turned on the TV, found the Indianapolis station carrying it (we still use an antenna here, 60 miles away), and started watching in time to see what I… Continue reading
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Free-Range Childhood
Virginia Mom Gets 6-Month Suspended Jail Sentence for Letting 5-Year-Old Walk to the Pond is a story in Reason, which adds this subhead: “The government also placed Karyann Parkinson on its child abuse and neglect registry, where she will remain for seven years.” The distance to the Pond was half a mile. I turned five… Continue reading
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Undeadlines
Here is some stuff I’ve noticed, thought about, or wrapped up, while ending a summer of travel and work (the order is random): Continue reading
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Blame Canada?
Canadian universities are poaching American academics who could use a more hospitable work and research environment. Here’s McGill’s brag on its bags, one of which is my good friend Ethan Zuckerman, who will be leaving his beloved job at U.Mass Amherst to take a new and promising position at McGill, in Montréal. He explains, Canada… Continue reading
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What next for Hugging Face?
Nvidia just bought Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. That’s what Reuters says The Information says. The latter is behind an expensive paywall, so I’ll take Reuters’ word for it. In The Price Of Independence Was $5.9 Billion, AI Secret says, 🌍 How this hits reality: Last year, Hugging Face turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia at… Continue reading
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Moneyday
Turing Testings Like “Goldie Boone,” whom I wrote about here last month, “Luna Azul” (above right) is a fake singer. Pure AI. Her music too, I suppose. I’m sure of it. But neither artist nor music are identified as AI-generated. “New music every week,” Luna’s YouTube channel says. At first, I thought she traced to… Continue reading
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Umday
It can happen where you are too. No data center required. Spotted and obeyed on West Bloomfield Road in Bloomington, Indiana: a robot traffic control flagger. Hard to wear, but that’s not the point My wife just reported from the Iris van Herpen show in Brooklyn. Wow. I remain charged about both Wired has a… Continue reading
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Utterday
My life Do some stuff Sleep like a dog Do some stuff Sleep like a dog Or watch the play from a seat close to a door “Hell is other people.”—Jean-Paul Sartre Philosopheasy explains, What makes another person’s gaze so powerful? According to Sartre, we exist in two radically different ways. In our own minds,… Continue reading
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Fryharderday
Glad for it. Also think he’s over it by now. Listening to Like a Rolling Stone, Positively 4th Street, and Don’t Think Twice (one of the most passive-aggressive songs ever), it dawns on me, half a century later, that Bob Dylan did a lot of first-rate complaining. But I will run out of days Will… Continue reading
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Pryday
Because “consent” is a fiction Pre-consent tracking is the norm. Prophesy When MyTerms succeeds, CMP—Consent Management Platforms—will mean Contract Management Platforms. These will be contracts you and I proffer and sites and services accept. I look forward to CMPs having a new job. From the Annals of Enshittification Seth Godin on The Amazon Tax: “Amazon… Continue reading
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Webday
Thanks! Gabriel Shalom: In the intention economy, there are two ways that brands are going to show up. One is extractive, and the other is supportive. The extractive brand sees AI as a way to mine consumers for intimate details that feed agentic commerce. The supportive brand understands that in an intention economy, a brand’s… Continue reading
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Oozeday
I was overheard to have said Exhumed this from a Facebook comment to repost here: About advertising, there have been two state changes in the business. One I unpacked eleven years ago, in Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff. The pull-quote: “Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as… Continue reading
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On What Still Hasn’t Happened
I posted what follows more than twenty-six years ago on Searls.com, which now brings up a danger warning because it’s still http and not https. (Yes, I’ll fix it.) It makes interesting reading today for several reasons, one of which is that much of what it (and The Cluetrain Manifesto, which had just come out)… Continue reading
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You can hear the squeak of sphincters closing
How Claude marks AI-generated content is the most self-destructive utterance I’ve ever heard coming out of an AI company. Gary Isaac Wolfe (who contributes a comment below): “Anthropic watermark scheme appears as a comic policeman blowing his whistle while his pants fall down and Mark Pauline loads a cannon with rotting fish.” But maybe that’s… Continue reading
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Doneday
No, neither makes sense I had two posts titled Whensday. Now there is one. It is re-headlined Densday. And give gentle advice Trunkline, the least-written of the three WordPress blogs I run and write for, all with the kind assistance of the good folks at Pressable, has a new theme. The old one dated from… Continue reading
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RainyAgainDay
On my way back to Bloomington from Santa Barbara on Saturday, while I sat in the first row of an Embraer short-haul vectored to Indianapolis but delayed while awaiting its pilot and parked at the far end of the strangely long jetway at O’Hare’s Gate C6, everyone in the first few rows of the plane bonded… Continue reading
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Shots and Misses
There is a meteor impact crater in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. It’s called Upheaval Dome, because that’s what geologists thought it was before it became clear that it wasn’t. When I visited the place with my teenage kids in the late ’80s, all the placards along the trail explained that the circular canyon was what… Continue reading
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Byeday
Well, almost. Tomorrow I fly back to Indiana, where it has been stormy the whole time I've been gone, seems like. In a couple of months, I'll be scanning all the photos I have in dozens of three-ring albums, but keeping the photos themselves, which I want to organize chronologically behind tabbed dividers in boxes… Continue reading
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Burrsday
A flipping iceberg. I subscribed to the Los Angeles Times early last year when I was writing about the challenges for journalism in covering the wildfires there. That was in my News Commons series, which I think has some brilliant and useful stuff. But it didn't go anywhere, so I wasn't sure about renewing. But… Continue reading
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Fendsday
Live and re-learn I’ve been a citizen of California for 41 years, and I learned here long ago that the narrow staircase-like parallel terraces on many ranchland hillsides were caused by cattle grazing on horizontal paths, because ungulates aren’t climbers. I have seen cattle on some of these, so the story made sense. But my… Continue reading