Customer Commons
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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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Thursday, 26 June 2025

A history lesson. A neighbor who works in tech asked me what my new outdoor TV antenna was for. I told him it was for watching TV stations, mostly from Indianapolis, where the transmitters are about 60 miles away. “Don’t you have cable?” he asked. I said no, we only have Internet service, which for Continue reading
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Real Agency

I nominate agency as Word of the Year for 2025. I don’t nominate agentic, which is suddenly hot shit: See, agency is a noun, and agentic is an adjective. And, as Strunk and White taught us, Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs… it is nouns and verbs, not their assistants, that Continue reading