Freedom
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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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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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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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Personal vs. Personalized AI
Personal AI is personal. It isn’t personalized. Context: There is a war going on. Humanity and nature are on one side, and Big Tech is on the other. The two sides are not opposed. They are orthogonal. The human side is horizontal, and the Big Tech side is vertical.* The human side is personal, social, Continue reading
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Why selling personal data is a bad idea
This post is for the benefit of anyone wondering about, researching, or going into business on the proposition that selling one’s own personal data is a good idea. Here are some of my learnings from studying this proposition for the last twenty years or more. The business does exist. See eleven companies in Markets for Continue reading
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Assassinations Work
On April 4, 1968, when I learned with the rest of the world that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, I immediately thought that the civil rights movement, which King had led, had just been set back by fifty years. I was wrong about that. It ended right then (check that last link). Almost Continue reading
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Start of an Era
After 17 years and 761 episodes, FLOSS Weekly ended its run on the TWiT network yesterday. I hosted the last 179 of those shows. My career as a professional (meaning paid) advocate of open source also ended with that show. The full span ran from 1996, when I first appeared on the Linux Journal masthead, until Continue reading