Doc Searls
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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
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Toosday
Also, it’s not podcasting if you can’t skip ads Spotify is reportedly improving what we do anyway on podcast apps: hitting the 30-second skip-forward button when the host says “we’ll be back after a quick break.” (On Pivot, I might hit the +:30 button six or seven times, because that first “quick break” is up… Continue reading
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Unotherday
Another Para Digm Spotted one of the above, flying up and down East Beach in Santa Barbara. If I were half my age, I’d be up there too. Unhuman Matt Hinkle: The Week AI Agents Got Hands. It begins, The chat window era just ended. This week, AI agents got hands — Cloudflare shipped a… Continue reading
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Whetherday
Check them out Hackernoon today: Cyber Libertarians: Esther Dyson & The Knowledge Age. Esther is an old friend and one of my favorite people. Front burner for her right now is .agent. Exit signals Last night we were suffering through one of the most annoying movies we've ever seen (Ladies First on Netflix, which, among other… Continue reading
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The Web and the New Reality
Until Linux Journal hired me in 1996, no publication—tech or otherwise—would employ me. Not full-time, anyway. I was too obsessed with the Internet, the Web, and what I saw as the dawn of a new reality: a digital world we would co-occupy with the natural one. So I self-published on the Web, at Searls.com, where… Continue reading
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Whetherday
On big changes in nowheres becoming somewheres Audacy, by far the most stressed-out owner of too many radio stations, is killing off another big old signal: KXNT/840 in Las Vegas. I dug into that, and wrote about it on Trunkline, my neglected blog about infrastructure that will soon get a big facelift. C****heck them out… Continue reading
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Fur eye day
Why we need Searls Glasses (first described 16 years ago) Wetherspoons bans Meta Glasses in pubs amid privacy concerns Book now The next three IIWs: November 3 – 5, 2026 IIWXLIII #43 Fall 2026 April 27 – 29, 2027 IIWXLIV #44 Spring 2027 October 19 – 21, 2027 IIWXLV #45 Fall 2027 Early bird ends… Continue reading
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The Internet of Stuff
We now have an internet of stuff, at the heart of which are the distribution and fulfillment centers that have been replacing farmland and former broadcast transmitter sites near highways and airports everywhere. (The one above straddles I-65 in Whitestown, Indiana, northwest of Indianapolis.) In The Rise of the Stupid Network, which he wrote in 1997,… Continue reading