Digital Life
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How the Past Models the Future
This is a PageXray of Wired.com: Well, not really. I just want to give you a good idea of what PageXray does, which is far more than show you that a typical website stuffs your browser with cookies. For example, a PageXray shows all the unseen places to which information about you flows, thanks to Continue reading
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Taking it Slower
To the best editor I’ve ever had Paolo once told me that cats came to Earth to enslave the standing monkeys. While funny and in some ways true, cats can be more and other than that. They can be as loyal as dogs (and both species far more loyal than grown humans to each other), 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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!@#$%^&ingPa55w0rds
I'm trying to sign in to Linkedin on a second laptop, in a browser. Here is my log of how that goes: In an email Linkedin says "You can finish signing in to your LinkedIn account by following the instructions that we sent to your LinkedIn App." There is nothing to click on in the Continue reading
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My Three Hooks
For many years, I attended an annual gathering of folks who wanted to save the Internet for future generations. Aspirational guidance was provided by the metaphor “big hooks:” ones meant for catching big fish. Since I was a kid, my life has always been about big hooks, especially ones that maximize personal and collective agency, Continue reading
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The Continuing End of OTA TV, Part 1
I’ve split this post into two parts, because it’s important to unpack how legacy TV works, and why the whole thing is falling apart, with OTA—over-the-air—TV dying first and fastest. Here is Part 2. I haven’t watched Jimmy Kimmel Live, or any late-night talk shows since Carson, and I didn’t watch much of him either. Continue reading
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Education 3.0
Education 1.0 was about learning one one-on-one, or one one-on-few. Also by ourselves. This kind of on-site discovery and mentorship gave us stone tools, cave art, clothing, shelter, writing, engineering, construction on every scale, and great artists in every age. Writing was involved, mostly of the scribal kind before the Gutenberg Parenthesis began. After that, 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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A Hat Tip to United
United Airlines details 6 big inflight entertainment updates, including all-new Control Tower map, by Zach Griff in The Points Guy, is thick with welcome news for frequent United fliers, of which my wife and I are two. (So far I have clocked 1,533,214 miles with United, and she has about double that. We are also Continue reading
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World Wide Whiteboard
Before there were search engines, there were directories. The biggest and best-known was Yahoo. On the first graphical browser (Mosaic), it looked like this: The directory idea made sense because the Web is laid out like the directory in your computer. There is a “domain” with a “location” or a “site,” containing something after the Continue reading
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A Moment of Applied Holiday Robotics
I asked ChatGPT and Bard to “List all Christmas holiday tunes in chronological order, by the year they were written, running from oldest at the top to the newest at the bottom.” ChatGPT gave me a lame list. Bard gave me a much better one, improved by my follow-ups. Here ya go: While creating a Continue reading
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Attention is not a commodity
In one of his typically trenchant posts, titled Attentive, Scott Galloway (@profgalloway) compares human attention to oil, meaning an extractive commodity: We used to refer to an information economy. But economies are defined by scarcity, not abundance (scarcity = value), and in an age of information abundance, what’s scarce? A: Attention. The scale of the Continue reading
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Three thoughts about NFTs
There’s a thread in a list I’m on titled “NFTs are a Scam.” I know too little about NFTs to do more than dump here three thoughts I shared on the list in response to a post that suggested that owning digital seemed to be a mania of some kind. Here goes… First, from Walt Whitman, Continue reading
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What becomes of journalism when everybody can write or cast?
Formalized journalism is outnumbered. In the industrialized world (and in much of the world that isn’t), nearly everyone of a double-digit age has a Net-connected mobile device for sharing words they write and scenes they shoot. While this doesn’t obsolesce professional journalists, it marginalizes and re-contextualizes them. Worse, it exposes the blindness within their formalities. Dave Continue reading
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Welcome to the 21st Century
Historic milestones don’t always line up with large round numbers on our calendars. For example, I suggest that the 1950s ended with the assassination of JFK in late 1963, and the rise of British Rock, led by the Beatles, in 1964. I also suggest that the 1960s didn’t end until Nixon resigned, and disco took off, Continue reading
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How early is digital life?
Bits don’t leave a fossil record. Well, not quite. They do persist on magnetic, optical and other media, all easily degraded or erased. But how long will those last? Since I’ve already asked that question, I’ll set it aside and ask the one in the headline. Some perspective: depending on when you date its origins, 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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Coming From Every Here
To answer the question Where are SiriusXM radio stations broadcasted from?, I replied, If you’re wondering where they transmit from, it’s a mix. SiriusXM transmits primarily from a number of satellites placed in geostationary orbit, 35,786 kilometres or 22,236 miles above the equator. From Earth they appear to be stationary. Two of the XM satellites, Continue reading