Customertech
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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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How to Civilize Digital Life
The Right to Privacy is a brief written by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren and published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890. It has not been improved upon since, because what it says is so damn obvious and simple: that the right to privacy is “the right to be let alone.” Those six words 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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If you like public broadcasting, be customers, not just consumers
Public broadcasting has three markets: Listeners and viewers. Philanthropies (wealthy individuals and foundations). Government agencies (primarily the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or CPB). I saw the writing on the wall for #3 in 2010. (Actually much earlier, but that’s the oldest link I could find.) It has been clear for decades that Republicans have no Continue reading
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What-Happenedings
Though it may take longer. Usually does. I say some stuff I trust will eventually prove true in Pew's Imagining the Digital Future report on being human ten years from now. Be theres. In The False Intention Economy: How AI Systems Are Replacing Human Will with Modeled Behavior, Katalin Bártfai-Walcott lays out the battlefield between the real 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
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Going Local With Open Networks
If you’re tired of moaning (or celebrating) the after-effects of the U.S. election, or how all of us seem trapped inside the captive markets of Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and other feudal powers, take in a talk about something constructive that’s nowhere near any of that, but serves as a model for economies and Continue reading
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Toward new kinds of leverage
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world,” Archimedes is said to have said. For almost all of the last four years, Donald Trump was one hell of an Archimedes. With the U.S. presidency as his lever and Twitter as his fulcrum, the Continue reading
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How to get fans inside the NBA’s playoff bubble
For folks visiting from the future, this post went up during the Covid Pandemic, when fans couldn’t attend ganes inside what came to be called the 2020 NBA Bubble. Here is the idea:::: Sell tickets to attend online through Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, Webex, GoToMeeting, Jitsi or whatever conferencing system can supply working tech Continue reading
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Going #Faceless
Facial recognition by machines is out of control. Meaning our control. As individuals, and as a society. Thanks to ubiquitous surveillance systems, including the ones in our own phones, we can no longer assume we are anonymous in public places or private in private ones. This became especially clear a few weeks ago when Kashmir Hill (@kashhill) Continue reading
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Here’s a cool project: completely revolutionize shopping online
In 1995, shortly after she first encountered e-commerce, my wife assigned a cool project to the world by asking a simple question: Why can’t I take my shopping cart from site to site? The operative word in that question is the first person possessive pronoun: my. Look up personal online shopping cart and you’ll get Continue reading
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We can do better than selling our data
If personal data is actually a commodity, can you buy some from another person, as if that person were a fruit stand? Would you want to? Not yet. Or maybe not really. Either way, that’s the idea behind the urge by some lately to claim personal data as personal property, and then to make money (in Continue reading
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GDPR will pop the adtech bubble
In The Big Short, investor Michael Burry says “One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud.” Based on that assumption, Burry shorted the mania- and fraud-filled subprime mortgage market and made a mint in the process. One would be equally smart to bet against the mania for the Continue reading
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For privacy we need tech more than policy
To get real privacy in the online world, we need to get the tech horse in front of the policy cart. So far we haven’t done that. Let me explain… Nature and the Internet both came without privacy. The difference is that we’ve invented privacy tech in the natural world, starting with clothing and shelter, Continue reading
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Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica problems are nothing compared to what’s coming for all of online publishing
Let’s start with Facebook’s Surveillance Machine, by Zeynep Tufekci in last Monday’s New York Times. Among other things (all correct), Zeynep explains that “Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please.” Irony Continue reading
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A Qualified Fail
Power of the People is a great grabber of a headline, at least for me. But it’s a pitch for a report that requires filling out the form here on the right: You see a lot of these: invitations to put one’s digital ass on mailing list, just to get a report that should have Continue reading
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Requiem for a great magazine
Linux Journal is folding. Carlie Fairchild, who has run the magazine almost since it started in 1994, posted Linux Journal Ceases Publication today on the website. So far all of the comments have been positive, which they should be. Throughout its life, Linux Journal has been about as valuable as a trade pub can be, Continue reading
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Let’s get some things straight about publishing and advertising
Synopsis—Advertising supported publishing in the offline world by sponsoring it. In the online world, advertising has been body-snatched by adtech, which tracks eyeballs via files injected into apps and browsers, then shoots those eyeballs with “relevant” ads wherever the eyeballs show up. Adtech has little or no interest in sponsoring a pub for the pub’s Continue reading
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Google enters its chrysalis
In The Adpocalypse: What it Means, Vlogbrother Hank Green issues a humorous lament on the impending demise of online advertising. Please devote the next 3:54 of your life to watching that video, so you catch all his points and I don’t need to repeat them here. Got them? Good. All of Hank’s points are well-argued and make complete sense. They Continue reading
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Daily Tab for 2017_06_09
#Publishing When I heard that Backchannel would be moving to Wired while Google’s Contributor service (“buy an ad removal pass for the web”) was not only rolling out, but already deployed by some publishers (e.g. by Business Insider UK)—and while Wired (with the rest of Condé Nast) was still mistaking tracking protection for ad blocking (and hitting readers with Continue reading