adtech
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From Losing the Web to Saving Us All
Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy—Thesis #7, The Cluetrain Manifesto Big AI subverts everything, including hyperlinks, which are what make the Web a web. With Big AI, you no longer surf from searches to sources across an ocean of links. You ask questions and get answers from the world’s largest Magic 8-Balls. They top the new hierarchy, which… Continue reading
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Memday
Remembering the future What matters most about Memorial Day is that we stop killing each other, especially over problems that could have been solved without anyone dying. Word Pope Leo on AI. The whole thing. More evidence that advertising corrupts and digital advertising corrupts absolutely Wired: ‘Creepy’ Listening Tool for Targeted Ads Didn’t Actually Work, FTC Says. I added… Continue reading
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Wochenende
That's weekend, auf Deutsch. As happened yesterday, something I wrote here in Wordland got too long, so I made it a separate post, titled So maybe it’s not too late to teach it to myself. German, that is. I still have the book I failed to versteh in 1962, so why not? And all of them need… Continue reading
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Mumday
Better late than later I just found that a number of IIWs that I photographed never made it online. I’m fixing that, starting with IIW #7, from November 2008, one sample of which is above. Circling drain Good Marketoon and write-up (titled Circling Back) by Tom Fishburne on why personalization in marketing typically fails. Boo School’s out. 50,000… Continue reading
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Fromday
That number is way too low California AG Bob Bonta writes, “On Friday, we announced a historic $12.75 million settlement against General Motors for illegally retaining and selling hundreds of thousands of Californians’ location and driving data to data brokers.” It’s coming down There are three great teams left in the NBA playoffs. The Knicks… Continue reading
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Default Lines
Suck onward I only had this one day to catch up on all kinds of stuff here in Santa Barbara, and ended up spending half of it trying to get our two printers working. The Brother is a laser printer that only worked on Wi-Fi after I downloaded new drivers and installed them with my… Continue reading
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The Biggest Thing
In his latest blog, Dave says, “If I were running WordPress, my first priority would be to get something exciting out that even non-WordPress users would talk about. Then do it again.” He follows with a good suggestion. I have one too. I’ve told Matt about it, and he was receptive. But it’s not the… Continue reading
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Nowsday
Nobirds? Engadget: Shoe company Allbirds pivots to AI compute in sign of a totally normal and healthy economy. Say hello to “NewBird AI.” It’s April 15, not April 1. Just noting that. Reuters. Investopedia. Marketwatch. Apparently, you can still buy their shoes: allbirds.com. I love The Onion’s American Voices take. One more reason to hate advertising… Continue reading
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TGI Day
Bad news OMFG, news is such a shitshow. Start with Do links hurt news publishers on Twitter? Our analysis suggests yes, by NiemanLab. Then, Social Media has Become a Freak Show, by Nate Silver. Thing is, more and more people in the U.S. now get their news (if that’s what it is) from social media, which… Continue reading
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If privacy matters to you, this is a required assignment
I’m kinda proud of the stars we’ve been bringing to our salon series here at Indiana University since 2021. And there are none I’m more excited to welcome than Helen Nissenbaum, who will be here on Tuesday to speak both in person and on Zoom. The title of her talk is “Why Obfuscation is (still)… Continue reading
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Status Go vs. Status Quo
MyTerms is Status Go toward markets based on full personal agency. Adtech is a $trillion Status Quo based on full agency for corporate entities alone and full subordination of the persons who depend on them: a one-sided power asymmetry manifest in every cookie notice. But, while it is easy to characterize MyTerms as a way… Continue reading
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Keeping Up
Apple’s Mail.app sucks. I could give reasons, but it would only make me more tired than I already am from dealing with my storage issues. I just downloaded and set up Thunderbird for my Searls.com address to see if that works better. I’ve stayed away from Thunderbird since 2013, when it did real damage somehow.… Continue reading
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Back and (Go) Forth
Apologies for the relative silence. Between travels and slow recovery (still far from over) from cataract surgery for my left eye, looking at screens and writing on them hasn’t been easy. But things are improving. Had a productive Monday at the Summit on Human Agency. My talk was a 15-minute interview by Sheila Warren of Project Liberty,… Continue reading
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Where Are We?
While the Web isn’t a place, we know it as one. The language we use to describe it is concrete and structural: domains at locations, with sites that are built and have pages that are authored, and contents that are uploaded and downloaded. For a generation or more, we have searched through the Web’s vast… Continue reading
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Watts Up
Book them now Early bird tickets are on sale for the 42nd IIW, which began on a Gillmor Gang podcast the last day of 2004. In my biased but correct opinion, IIW is the most leveraged tech conference on Earth. This one will happen on April 28th to 30th, Tuesday to Thursday. But for the… Continue reading
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Dues Day
Currently I have three of them. Do you have a principle? I hadn’t thought about that before reading Justin Mikolay‘s Inventing on Principle: A Distillation of Bret Victor’s Extraordinary Talk About How To Live Your Life. And that’s just one of many things that have been written about Bret Victor, a guy about whom I knew… Continue reading
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Endweek
Make America Grate Again Yesterday's depressing news was Trump's latest attempted slaying of the Hudson Tunnel Project, which may be more expensive to shut own than to complete. But that's just my off-the-wall take. The real story is far more complicated. Today's depressing news is the end of the CIA World Factbook, one of the… Continue reading
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Warm Takes
We still await truly personal AI. Google just launched Personal Intelligence. “Get highly personal help with everything from vacation ideas to project plans, and more. Gemini connects the dots across your Google apps—like Gmail, Photos, Search, and YouTube—and your chat history preferences to provide suggestions tailored to your world.” That should be called personalized, because… Continue reading
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Dept. of Overstate
Pull almost-quote: Never mistake malice for stupidity Says here that 4% support for the U.S. taking over Greenland is in the lizardman range. When will he come to the US? Peter Bence is an amazing pianist. Made it a bit punchier I just gave The Only Way to Get Privacy Online a fresh edit, based on… Continue reading
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Securing the right to be let alone
In What destroyed ‘the right to be let alone’, Tiffany Jenkins in the Washington Post argues that demolition of personal privacy began in the postwar years and became normative in 1973. That was when PBS ran An American Family: a cinéma verité exposure of the Loud family in Santa Barbara, and the inaugural example of… Continue reading