Subscriptions
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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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Numb Day
Clobbering tourism, sports, higher ed, and all tech conferences Privacy International says “The U.S. Government intends to force visitors to submit their digital history and DNA as the price of entry.” The proposed changes are here. Particulars from the piece: The changes include: All visitors must submit ‘their social media from the last 5 years’ Continue reading
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How to Make Customers Hate You
Exhibit A: Welcome to negative option billing at work. Other labels include “sludge,” “dark patterns,” “gotcha pricing,” “subscription trapping,” and “bait-and-default.” Works like this: offer a service at a discount that jumps up to a high “regular” price after the discount runs out, and count on the customer forgetting when the jump happens. It’s a Continue reading
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Visitations
It's still creepy. World showed off its Orb a few years ago at IIW to approximately no applause at all. A lot seems to have happened since then. Here's what Wired says about it. Such as the "@ username" in the Profile setting. I'm in a group zoom-like conference call (is it a "call"? a "session"? not Continue reading
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Personal Agentic AI
“Agentic” is hot: As an adjective, it is typically used as a modifier for AI. Hence this coincidence: Not surprisingly, Gartner puts Agentic AI first among its Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2025: Here is one Gartner explanation, among many: Theme No. 1: AI imperatives and risks drive organizations to protect themselves Trend 1: Agentic Continue reading
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The Personal Internet
—is not this: By now we take it for granted. To live your digital life on the Internet, you need accounts. Lots of them. Everything on the Internet that requires an account has a lock on you—for their convenience. They don’t know any other way. That’s because all the services we use in the online 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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Whither Medium?
I subscribe to Medium. It’s not expensive: $5.00 per month. I also pay about that much to many newsletters (mostly because Substack makes it so easy). And that’s 0n top of what I also pay The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Reason, The Sun, Wired, and others that Continue reading
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An exercise in perspective
I wrote this today for a list that’s mostly populated by folks in overlapping music, broadcasting, legal, tech, and other businesses who share a common interest in what’s happening to the arts and artists they care about in a world now turning almost completely digital.—Doc Here is a question I hope can get us out Continue reading
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One example of how subscriptions suck
My goal here is to make e this brilliant poster by Despair.com obsolete: Starting with just one magazine: The New Yorker. I’ve subscribed to The New Yorker for most of my life. As an adjective, loyal doesn’t cover what that magazine means to me. But wholly shit, they sure make subscribing a pain in the ass. Continue reading