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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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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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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 Other Reasons Why Podcasting is Hot
Near the end of this Pivot podcast, starting at about the 55 minute mark, Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway give a great summary of why podcasting is “the fastest-growing ad-supported medium.” Among other things, they say “People actually listen to the ads,” and that host read-overs are very effective and remunerative (bringing much higher CPMs).… 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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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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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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Sum Day
Super. Bowls a strike. Against ChatGPT. This is brilliant. Here's a bonus post from the reliably contrary Gary Marcus. Later… I didn't see this ad during the Super Bowl. But maybe it ran but I got sacked by the Seattle defense, which several times came right through my TV screen and threw me on the… 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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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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Everwhen
Same cancer, different tumor Show of hands: Who wants surveillance pricing? Sez Wikipedia, at that link, “Surveillance pricing is a form of dynamic pricing where a consumer’s personal data and behavior is used to determine their willingness to pay.[1] This form of price discrimination assesses price sensitivity for a products or services based on an… Continue reading
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Playing in Traffic
And it's just f'ing dumb Henry Farrell: America has identified its greatest enemy: Western Europe. It's not a fight the EU wanted or imagined before this year. But it's here. Being based in the US is now a disadvantage for forming partnerships with entities in the EU. I speak from experience. MyTerms is a project run… Continue reading
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Toward giving future thanks
The puppet is not human and doesn't work for you Just a question: Can Big Ai make more money selling your brain to advertisers than the surveillance-based adtech fecosystem does now? I suspect both OpenAI and Google believe the answer is yes. Along those same lines, Ted Gioia reminds us that Big AI is already our… Continue reading
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Sun Day
Dawn in Southern Indiana, and there isn’t a cloud in the sky. And Hoosiers football remains amazing. Wait, LeBron was in the G League? Am I alone in (unfairly) discounting posts and emails that include AI chatbot text and art? Doesn’t matter how good it is (and some of it is damned good), I get turned… Continue reading
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A Cure for Corporate Addiction to Personal Data
I wrote the original version of this post for the March 2018 issue of Linux Journal. You can find it here. Since images from archival material in the magazine no longer load, and I want to update this anyway, here is a lightly edited copy of the original. Bear in mind that what you’ll read… Continue reading
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Friday, June 27, 2025
Modest ambitions. I’ll be on the Immergence podcast (above) this coming Tuesday, July 1, at Noon Eastern time, talking with Nico Fara about The Intention Economy, ProjectVRM, Customer Commons, Personal AI, and using MyTerms to completely flip the script on agreements with websites and services, obsolescing all those annoying cookie notices—and blowing up surveillance-based adtech… Continue reading
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We’ve Had Enough of This Shit
I was going to source this Bloomberg story about AI-related Microsoft Layoffs, but the interruptive popover said, I didn’t accept that, and suggest you don’t either. I just checked in another browser, and in Europe (or at least in The Netherlands, where I am VPN’d right now), Bloomberg gives you these choices: That’s because Bloomberg tries… Continue reading