Contrails in the stratosphere, smearing sideways into broad cloud cover. This view is toward the place in the sky where a full solar eclipse will happen a few hours later.
Contrails form behind jet aircraft flying through the stratosphere. Since high-altitude aviation is happening all around the earth more or less constantly, planes are painting the sky everywhere. (Here is one time-lapse. And another. And one of my own.)
Many contrails don’t last, of course, but many do, and together they account for much of the cloud cover we see every day. The altocumulus, altostratus, and cirrus clouds that contrails produce are now officially recognized as homogenitus and homomutatus, which are anthropogenic: owing to human activity.
And today, Eclipse Day, Delta is offering to fly you along the path of totality. Others too? I don’t know. I’m taking a few moments to write this before we walk up to our hilltop cemetery to watch the eclipse for over four minutes, thanks to our lucky location near the very center of Totality.
I’m curious to see and hear contrail reports from others now awaiting their few minutes out of the sun.
1:14pm—The moon’s shadow made landfall in Mexico a short time ago. Here in Bloomington, the sky is well-painted by contrails. Mostly it looks like high-altitude haze, but believe me: if it weren’t for commercial aviation, the sky would be solid blue. Because the contrails today are quickly smeared sideways, losing their form but not their color.
5:00pm—Contrails were aplenty, and a spread-out contrail did slide in front of the sun and the moon…
Artificial is AI’s frst name. And Intelligence is a quality, not a quantity. You can’t measure it with a dipstick, a ruler, or an IQ test. If you could, you’d get the same result every time.*
But being artificial doesn’t mean AI isn’t dangerous, fun or both. It is, and will be, what we make of it.
That’s what Don Norman says, and he’s been publishing in AI journals since 1973. His laboratory produced the first multi-layer neural nets in the 1980s. He wrote Things that Make us Smartin 1993.
In the opinion of myself and countless others, Don is also the foremost authority on design—of anything and everything. For more on that, check out Don’s Web page, his Wikipedia page, and his books. Or, if you just want to sample some of his thoughts on AI, watch this.
Or you can skip all that and come to the good stuff: joining us in a talk with Don in the final salon of this semester on the topic of Artificial +/vs. Human Intelligence. It’s next Tuesday, April 9, at Noon Eastern time. (That’s less than 24 hours after the shadow of the Moon passes over the Indiana University campus. Yes, totality will be local here.)
Also, this won’t be a lecture or a presentation. It will bea lively discussion because Don is especially good at that.
It’s also free and online, but you have to register first. Do that here.
*For what it’s worth, my own known IQ test scores have an 80-point range. I’ve written about that, and the myth of “IQ” here, here, here, here, and I suppose in too many other places.
By expert acclaim, this is the best antenna for receiving hard-to-get over-the-air (OTA) TV signals
I think I will be the last person in Bloomington to try getting free over-the-air TV from what’s left of all the major networks. But that’s just my style, so roll with me while I explain how I’m hoping to do it, with the antenna above, which I’ll need because here is what the Search Map at RabbitEars.info says we might get here:
We live next door right now, and the top station above, WTIU from Indiana University (our PBS affiliate), comes from a tower you can walk to from here. We can get that signal by using a straightened paper clip for an antenna. (You jam the clip into the center hole of the coaxial connector in the back of the TV.) Even a real indoor antenna connected to the same jack gets nothing else, not even the two stations above with “Fair” signal strength.
But this Televes antenna might do the job because we’re on the slope of a hill that faces the Indianapolis stations that carry CBS (WTTV/4 on 27), ABC (WRTV/6 on 25), NBC (WTHR/13 on 13), and Fox (WRDB/41 on 32)*. These range from 27 to 54 miles away, in roughly the same direction. VHF and UHF signals always gain strength when they hit the faces of hills, similar to how surf builds as it approaches a sand bar or a shore. Also, the Televes DAT BOSS antenna gets great reviews:
I was going to put it in our new attic before the drywall goes up. However, the attic space is low and full of close cross-braces. Worse, the antenna is not small and kinda complicated to fit in a space that’s a web of short 2x4s. Dig:
So it will go on a pole in the backyard and feed a coaxial line that will tunnel through conduit under the yard and inside to the new living room.
But I would like to test it first, preferably with a tuner gizmo I can plug into my laptop. I had one of those for years: the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid TV Tuner stick, which looked like a fat thumb drive,with USB-A at one end and a coax connector for an antenna at the other. It was sold in the ’00s and picked up both analog and digital TV (the Digital Transition was happening then), on every North American channel, and came with good software that ran on Macs and operating systems that have long been abandoned. Far as I can tell there are no replacements that run on current hardware or operating system, other than this one sold in Europe. Far as I can tell, it only works on TV bands over there. But I could be wrong. If anybody knows of a gizmo/softward combo I can use, please tell me. My only other option is to buy or find a cheap TV and try that out. Any advice is welcome. Thanks!
*After the digital transition in 2008, and again with the “repack” after 2016, most TV stations moved onto channels other than their original ones, using less spectrum overall. All the TV channels above 36 were auctioned off, first in 2008 and again in 2018. Most buyers were cellular and other short-range wireless carriers, which have been repurposing the old TV spectrum for 5G and other modern uses. The only station in Indianapolis that didn’t move its channel position was WTHR/13. That one is listed in the chart above as one of the “bad” signals for this location. The Televes antenna is designed specifically for “high band” VHF (channels 7-13) and the remaining UHF (14 to 36) TV channels. It also filters out any 5G signals that the antenna might pick up on what used to be the higher UHF channels. By the way, the old “low band” VHF channels (2 to 6) are still in use in some places, but by very few TV stations. So it’s not worth it for Televes to design an antenna to pick those channels up. Such an antenna would also be a lot bigger and longer because the low-band elements of the antenna would be much longer.
I asked ChatGPT to give me “people eating blogs” and got this after it suggested some details.
Two things worth blogging about that happened this morning.
One was getting down and dirty trying to make DALL-E 3 work. That turned into giving up trying to find DALL-E (in any version) on the open Web and biting the $20/month bullet for a Pro account with ChatGPT, which for some reason maintains its DALL-E 3 Web page while having “Try in ChatGPT↗︎” on that page link to the ChatGPT home page rather than a DALL-E one. I gather that the free version of DALL-E is now the one you get at Microsoft’s Copilot | Designer, while the direct form of DALL-E is what you get when you prompt ChatGPT (now 4.0 for Pro customers… or so I gather) to give you an image that credits nothing to DALL-E.
The other thing was getting some great help from Dave Winer in putting the new Feedroll category of my Feedland feeds placed on this blog, in a way similar stylistically to old-fashioned blogrolls (such as the one here). You’ll find it in the right column of this blog now. One cool difference from blogrolls is that the feedroll is live. Very cool. I’m gradually expanding it.
Meanwhile, after failing to get ChatGPT or Copilot | Designer to give me the image I needed on another topic (which I’ll visit here later) I prompted them to give me an image that might speak to a feedroll of blogs. ChatGPT gave me the one above, not in response to “people eating blogs” (my first attempt), but instead to “People eating phone, mobile and computer screens of type.” Microsoft | Designer gave me these:
When Parisians got tired of cemeteries during the French Revolution, they conscripted priests to relocate bones of more than six million deceased forebears to empty limestone quarries below the city: a hundred miles of rooms and corridors now called The Catacombes. It was from those quarries that much of the city’s famous structures above—Notre Dame, et. al.—were built in prior centuries, using a volume of extracted rock rivaling that of Egypt’s Great Pyramids. That rock, like the bones of those who extracted it, was once alive. In the shot above, shadows of future fossils (including moi) shoot the dead with their cell phones.
This is a very human thing to want. But before we start following his lead, we might want to ask whether death awaits us there.
Not our deaths. Anything’s. What died there to make life possible for what succeeds it?
From what we can tell so far, the answer is nothing.
To explain why life needs death, answer this: what do plastic, wood, limestone, paint, travertine, marble, asphalt, oil, coal, stalactites, peat, stalagmites, cotton, wool, chert, cement, nearly all food, all gas, and most electric services have in common?
They are all products of death. They are remains of living things or made from them.
Consider this fact: about a quarter of all the world’s sedimentary rock is limestone, dolomite and other carbonate rocks: remains of beings that were once alive. The Dolomites of Italy, the Rock of Gibraltar, the summit of Mt. Everest, all products of death.
Even the iron we mine has a biological source. Here’s how John McPhee explains it in his Pulitzer-winning Annals of the Former World:
Although life had begun in the form of anaerobic bacteria early in the Archean Eon, photosynthetic bacteria did not appear until the middle Archean and were not abundant until the start of the Proterozoic. The bacteria emitted oxygen. The atmosphere changed. The oceans changed. The oceans had been rich in dissolved ferrous iron, in large part put into the seas by extruding lavas of two billion years. Now with the added oxygen the iron became ferric, insoluble, and dense. Precipitating out, it sank to the bottom as ferric sludge, where it joined the lime muds and silica muds and other seafloor sediments to form, worldwide, the banded-iron formations that were destined to become rivets, motorcars and cannons. The is the iron of the Mesabi Range, the Australian iron of the Hammerslee Basin, the iron of Michigan, Wisconsin, Brazil. More than ninety percent of the iron ever mined in the world has come from Precambrian banded-iron formations. Their ages date broadly from twenty-five hundred to two thousand million years before the present. The transition that produced them — from a reducing to an oxidizing atmosphere and the associated radical change in the chemistry of the oceans — would be unique. It would never repeat itself. The earth would not go through that experience twice.
Death produces building and burning materials in an abundance that seems limitless, at least from standpoint of humans in the here and now. But every here and now ends. Realizing that is a vestigial feature of human sensibility.
Take for example, The World Has Plenty of Oil, which appeared in The Wall Street Journal ten years ago. In it, Nansen G. Saleri writes, “As a matter of context, the globe has consumed only one out of a grand total of 12 to 16 trillion barrels underground.” He concludes,
The world is not running out of oil any time soon. A gradual transitioning on the global scale away from a fossil-based energy system may in fact happen during the 21st century. The root causes, however, will most likely have less to do with lack of supplies and far more with superior alternatives. The overused observation that “the Stone Age did not end due to a lack of stones” may in fact find its match.
The solutions to global energy needs require an intelligent integration of environmental, geopolitical and technical perspectives each with its own subsets of complexity. On one of these — the oil supply component — the news is positive. Sufficient liquid crude supplies do exist to sustain production rates at or near 100 million barrels per day almost to the end of this century.
Technology matters. The benefits of scientific advancement observable in the production of better mobile phones, TVs and life-extending pharmaceuticals will not, somehow, bypass the extraction of usable oil resources. To argue otherwise distracts from a focused debate on what the correct energy-policy priorities should be, both for the United States and the world community at large.
In the long view of a planet that can’t replace any of that shit, this is the rationalization of a parasite. That this parasite can move on to consume other irreplaceable substances it calls “resources” does not make its actions any less parasitic.
Or, correctly, saprophytic; since a saprophyte is “an organism which gets its energy from dead and decaying organic matter.”
Moving on to coal, the .8 trillion tons of it in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin now contributes 40% of the fuel used in coal-fired power plants in the U.S. Here’s the biggest coal mine in the basin, called Black Thunder, as it looked to my camera in 2009:
About half the nation’s electricity is produced by coal-fired plants, the largest of which can eat the length of a 1.5-mile long coal train in just 8 hours. In Uncommon Carriers, McPhee says Powder River coal at current rates will last about 200 years.
Then what? Nansen Saleri thinks we’re resourceful enough to get along with other energy sources after we’re done with the irreplaceable kind.
I doubt it.
Wind, tide, and solar are unlikely to fuel aviation, though I suppose fresh biofuel might. Still, at some point, we must take a long view, or join our evolutionary ancestors in the fossil record faster than we might otherwise like.
As I fly in my window seat from place to place, especially on routes that take me over arctic, near-arctic, and formerly arctic locations, I see more and more of what geologists call “the picture”: a four-dimensional portfolio of scenes in current and former worlds. Thus, when I look at the seashores that arc eastward from New York City— Long Island, Block Island, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, Cape Cod—I see a ridge of half-drowned debris scraped off a continent and deposited at the terminus of an ice cap that began melting back toward the North Pole only 18,000 years ago—a few moments before the geologic present. Back then, the Great Lakes were still in the future, their basins covered by ice that did not depart from the lakes’ northern edges until about 7,000 years ago or 5,000 B.C.
Most of Canada was still under ice while civilization began in the Middle East and the first calendars got carved. Fly over Canada often enough and the lakes appear to be exactly what they are: puddles of a recently melted cap of ice. Same goes for most of the ponds around Boston. Every inland swamp in New England and upstate New York was a pond only a few dozen years ago, and was ice only a dozen or so centuries before that. Go forward a few thousand years and all of today’s ponds will be packed with accumulated humus and haired over by woods or farmland. In the present, we are halfway between those two conditions. Here and now, the last ice age is still ending.
As Canada continues to thaw, one can see human activity spark and spread across barren lands, extracting “resources” from ground made free of permafrost only in the last few years. Doing that is both the economic and the pestilential thing to do.
On the economic side, we spend down the planet’s principal, and fail to invest toward interest that pays off for the planet’s species. That the principal we spend has been in the planet’s vaults for millions or billions of years, and in some cases cannot be replaced, is of little concern to those spending it, which is roughly all of us.
Perhaps the planet looks at our species the same way and cares little that every species is a project that ends. Still, in the meantime, from the planet’s own one-eyed perspective, our species takes far more than it gives, and with little regard for consequences. We may know, as Whitman put it, the amplitude of time. We also tend to assume in time’s fullness all will work out.
But it won’t.
Manhattan schist, the bedrock anchoring New York City’s tallest buildings, is a little over half a billion years old. In about the same amount of time, our aging Sun, growing hotter, will turn off photosynthesis. A few billion years later, the Sun will swell into a red giant with a diameter wider than Earth’s orbit, roasting the remains of our sweet blue planet and scattering its material out into the cosmos, perhaps for eventual recycling by stars and planets not yet formed.
In a much shorter run, many catastrophes will happen. One clearly is what our species is already doing to the planet during what geologists correctly call the Anthropocene. I suppose that’s a good reason for Elon and crew to “save” a few members of our vain little species. But why fuck up Mars before we’re done fucking up Earth, when there’s still some leverage with the death we have at home and that Mars won’t begin to have until stuff dies on it?
I’ve always been both an optimist and a realist. Specifically, I’m an optimist for at least the short run, by which I mean the next few dozen years. But I’m a pessimist for our civilization — and our species. Death is always a winning bet.
But hey, maybe nature knows better what to do with us than we do.
I just returned to DALL-E 3 after using its Microsoft version (currently called Copilot | Designer) for a while. But I can’t get in.
See how it says “Try in ChatGPT↗︎?” When I do that, it goes to https://chat.openai.com/. After I log in there, it offers no clue about where DALL-E 3 is. So I asked, “How do I get to the DALL-E 3 page after I’m logged in here?”
ChatGPT answered, “As of my last update in January 2022, DALL-E 3 is a hypothetical iteration of the DALL-E model, and there’s no information about its existence or how to access it. If it were to be released, you might typically find access through OpenAI’s website or platform if they make it available to the public. However, without further updates or announcements, it’s challenging to provide specific instructions. If OpenAI releases DALL-E 3 or any similar model in the future, you can check their official website or announcements for information on how to access it.”
Additional useless dialog followed. So now I’ll ask the Lazyweb. Does anyone know how to get into DALL-E 3?
Prompt: “a field of many different kinds of people being harvested by machines and turned into bales of fertilizer.” Via Microsoft CoPilot | Designer.
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 having studied this proposition myself for the last twenty years or more.
The business category harvesting the most personal data is adtech (aka ad tech and “programmatic”) advertising, which is the surveillance-based side of the advertising business. It is at the heart of what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, and is now most of what advertising has become online. It’s roughly a trillion-dollar business. It is also nothing like advertising of the Mad Men kind. (Credit where due: old-fashioned advertising, aimed at whole populations, gave us nearly all the brand names known to the world). As I put it in Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff, Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself.
Adtech pays nothing to people for their data or data about them. Not personally. Google may pay carriers for traffic data harvested from phones, and corporate customers of auctioned personal data may pay publishers for moments in which ads can be placed in front of tracked individuals’ ears or eyeballs. Still, none of that money has ever gone to individuals for any reason, including compensation for the insults and inconveniences the system requires. So there is little if any existing infrastructure on which paying people for personal data can be scaffolded up. Nor are there any policy motivations. In fact,
Regulations have done nothing to slow down the juggernaut of growth in the adtech industry. For Google, Facebook, and other adtech giants, paying huge fines for violations (of the GDPR, the CCPA, the DMA, or whatever) is just the cost of doing business. The GDPR compliance services business is also in the multi-$billion range, and growing fast. In fact,
Regulations have made the experience of using the Web worse for everyone. Thank the GDPR for all the consent notices subtracting value from every website you visit while adding cognitive overhead and other costs to site visitors and operators. In nearly every case, these notices are ways for site operators to obey the letter of the GDPR while violating its spirit. And, although all these agreements are contracts, you have no record of what you’ve agreed to. So they are worse than worthless.
Tracking people without their clear and conscious invitation or a court order is wrong on its face. Period. Full stop. That tracking is The Way Things Are Done online does not make it right, any more than driving drunk or smoking in crowded elevators was just fine in the 1950s. When the Digital Age matures, decades from now, we will look back on our current time as one thick with extreme moral compromises that were finally corrected after the downsides became clear and more ethically sound technologies and economies came along. One of those corrections will be increasing personal agency rather than just corporate capacities. In fact,
Increasing personal independence and agency will be good for markets, becausefree customers are more valuable than captive ones. Having ways to gather, keep, and make use of personal data is an essential first step toward that goal. We have made very little progress in that direction so far. (Yes, there are lots of good projects listed here, but there we still a long way to go.)
Businesses being “user-centric” will do nothing to increase customers’ value to themselves and the marketplace. First, as long as we remain mere “users” of others’ systems, we will be in a subordinate and dependent role. While there are lots of things we can do in that role, we will be able to do far more if we are free and independent agents. Because of that,
We need technologies that create and increase personal independence and agency. Personal data stores (aka warehouses, vaults, clouds, life management platforms, lockers, and pods) are one step toward doing that. Many have been around for a long time: ProjectVRM currently lists thirty-three under the Personal Data Stores heading. Some have been there a long time. The problem with all of them is that they are still too focused on what people do as social beings in the Web 2.0 world, rather than on what they can do for themselves, both to become more well-adjusted human beings and more valuable customers in the marketplace. For that,
It will help to have independent personal AIs. These are AI systems that work for us, exclusively. None exist yet. When they do, they will help us manage the personal data that fully matters:
Contacts—records and relationships
Calendars—where we’ve been, what we’ve done, with whom, where, and when
Health records and relationships with providers, going back all the way
Financial records and relationships, including past and present obligations
Property we have and where it is, including all the small stuff
Shopping—what we’ve bought, plan to buy, or might be thinking about,
Subscriptions—what we’re paying for, when they end or renew, what kind of deal we’re locked into, and what better ones might be out there.
Travel—Where we’ve been, what we’ve done, with whom, and when
Personal AIs are today where personal computers were fifty years ago. Nearly all the AI news today is about modern mainframe businesses: giants with massive data centers churning away on ingested data of all kinds. But some of these models are open sourced and can be made available to any of us for our own purposes, such as dealing with the abundance of data in our own lives that is mostly out of control. Some of it has never been digitized. With AI help it could be.
I’m in a time crunch right now. So, if you’re with me this far, read We can do better than selling our data, which I wrote in 2018 and remains as valid as ever. Or dig The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), which Tim Berners Lee says inspired Solid. I’m thinking about following it up. If you’re interested in seeing that happen, let me know.
Bloomington Hospital on October 15, 2022, right after demolition began.
After we came to Bloomington in the summer of 2021, we rented an apartment by Prospect Hill, a quiet dome of old houses just west of downtown. There we were surprised to hear, nearly every night, as many police and ambulance sirens as we’d heard in our Manhattan apartment. Helicopters too. Soon we realized why: the city’s hospital was right across 2nd Street, a couple blocks away. In 2022, the beautiful new IU Health Bloomington Hospital opened up on the far side of town, and the sounds of sirens were replaced by the sounds of heavy machinery slowly tearing the old place down.
Being a photographer and a news junkie, I thought it would be a good idea to shoot the place often, to compile a chronicle of demolition and replacement, as I had done for the transition of Hollywood Park to SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California. But I was too busy doing other things, and all I got was that photo above, which I think Dave Askins would categorize as a small contribution to topical history.
Dave is a highly productive local journalist, and—by grace of providence for a lifelong student of journalism such as me—the deepest and most original thinker I know on the topic of what local news needs in our time—and going forward. I’ve shared some of Dave’s other ideas (and work) in the News Commons series, but this time I’m turning a whole post over to him. Dig:::::
In the same way that every little place in America used to have a printed newspaper, every little place in America could have an online local chronicle.
Broadly speaking, an online local chronicle is a collection of facts organized mostly in chronological order. The “pages” of the chronicle can be thought of as subsets of a community’s universal timeline of events. These online local chronicles could become the backbone of local news operations.
First a word about what a local chronicle is not. It is not an online encyclopedia about the little place. It’s not a comprehensive history of the place in any conventional sense. Why should it not try to be those things? Because those things are too hard to think about building from scratch. Where would you even start?
It is at least conceivable that an online local chronicle could be built from scratch because you start by adding new facts that are newsworthy today. A new fact added to the chronicle is a touchstone, about which anyone can reasonably ask: What came just before that?
A working journalist in a little place with an online local chronicle will be in a good position to do two things: (1) add new facts to the local chronicle (2) help define sets of old facts that would be useful to include in the online local chronicle.
A journalist who is reporting the news for a little place would think not just about writing a report of new facts for readers today. They would keep this question in mind: What collection of old facts, if they were included in the local chronicle, would have made this news report easier to write?
Here’s a concrete example. A recent news report written for The B Square Bulletin included a mention of a planned new jail for Monroe County. It included a final sentence meant to give readers, who might be new to that particular topic, a sense of the basic reason why anyone was thinking about building a new jail: “A consultant’s report from two and a half years ago concluded that the current jail is failing to provide constitutional levels of care.”
About that sentence, a reader left the following comment on the website: “I know it’s the last sentence in an otherwise informative article, but at the risk of nit-picking that sentence seems inadequate to the task of explaining the context of the notion of a new jail and the role of the federal court and the ACLU.”
What this reader did was to identify a set of old facts that should be a collection (a page) in Bloomington’s local chronicle.
It’s one thing to identify a need to add a specific collection of facts to the local chronicle. It’s quite another to figure out who might do that. Working journalists might have time to add a new fact or two. But to expect working journalists to add all the old sets of facts would, I think, be too tall an order.
The idea would be to recruit volunteers to do the work of adding old facts to the online local chronicle. They could be drawn from various segments of the community—including groups that have an interest in seeing the old facts about a particular topic not just preserved, but used by working journalists to help report new facts.
I think many community efforts to build a comprehensive community encyclopedia have foundered, because the motivation to make a contribution to the effort is mostly philosophical: History is generally good to preserve.
The motivation for helping to build the online local chronicle is not some general sense of good purpose. Rather it is to help working journalists provide useful facts for anyone who in the community who is trying to make a decision.
That includes elected leaders. They might want to know what the reasons were at the time for building the current jail at the spot where it is now.
Decision makers include voters, who might be trying to decide which candidate to support.
Decision makers also include rank-and-file residents—who might be trying to decide where to go out for dinner and want to know what the history of health inspections for a particular restaurant are.
For the online local chronicle I have set up for Bloomington, there are very few pages so far. They are meant to illustrate the general concept:
But not of who, how, and why. Start by looking here:
That’s a page of TV Guide, a required resource in every home with a TV, through most of the last half of the 20th century.
Every program was on only at its scheduled times. Sources were called stations, which broadcast over the air on channels, which one found using a dial or a display with numbers on it. Stations at their largest were regional, meaning you could only get them if you were within reach of signals on channels.
By the time TV came along, America was already devoting its evenings to scheduled programs on AM radio, which was the only kind of radio at the time. After TV took over, everyone sat in a room bathed in soft blue light from their TV screen. Radio was repurposed for music, especially rock & roll. My first radio was the one on the right. Being in a New York suburb, my stations were WMCA/570, WMGM/1050, WINS/1010, WABC/770, and WKBW/1520 (coming in at night from Buffalo, loud as a local). All of those stations are still on the air, but playing talk, sports and religious programs. Many fewer people listen to AM radio, or over-the-air anything, anymore. They watch and listen to glowing rectangles that connect to the nearest router, wi-fi hot spot, or cellular data site. Antennas exist, but wavelengths are so short that the antennas fit inside the rectangles.
The question “what’s on?” is mostly gone. “Where?” is still in play, at least for TV, because nobody knows what streaming service carries what you want. All the “guides”—Apple’s, Google’s, Amazon’s, everyone’s—suck, either because they’re biased to promote their own shows or because there’s simply too much content and no system to catalog and display all of it. Search engines help, but not enough.
The age we’re closing is the one Jeff Jarvis calls The Gutenberg Parenthesis. The age we’re entering is the Age of Optionality. It began for print with blogging, for TV with VCRs and DVRs, and for radio with podcasting and streaming. John Robb calls what we have now packetized media. It is obsolescing all the media we knew, almost too well, by putting it in the hands Clay Shirky named in 2009 with Here Comes Everybody.
What we make of this new age is now up to all of us. We are who, how, and why.
Mom would have been 111 today. She passed in ’03 at 90, but that’s not what matters.
What matters is that she was a completely wonderful human being: as good a mother, sister, daughter, cousin, friend, and teacher as you’ll find.
There is a thread in Facebook (which seems to be down now) on the subject of Mom as a third and fourth grade teacher in the Maywood New Jersey public school system. Students who inhabited her classes more than half a century ago remember her warmly and sing her praises. Maybe I’ll quote some of those later. (I’m between flights right now, but getting ready to board.)
Once, sitting around a fire in the commune-like place where I lived north of Chapel Hill in the mid-’70s, discussion came around to “Who is the sanest person you know?” I said “My mother.” Others were shocked, I suppose because they had issues with their moms. But I didn’t. Couldn’t. She was too wise, good, and loving. (Also too smart, quick-witted, tough, and unswayed by bullshit.)
Perhaps I’m idealizing too much. She had flaws, I’m sure. But not today.
My favorite version, however, is this one by KPIG’s Fine Swine Orchestra, recorded by Santa Cruz musicians sheltering in place during the pandemic. That’s a screen grab, above.
I am pretty sure I’ve blogged about “Ripple” before, but can’t find evidence of that right now, perhaps because I published it somewhere obscure, or perhaps because we have entered the Enshittocene. Whatever the case, it doesn’t hurt to re-hear a classic.
KPIG, long one of my favorite radio stations, is no longer live streaming for the world, but for subscribers only. (It’s free only for a week.) I know they need the money. But so does Radio Paradise, which has KPIG ancestry, is free, and supported by donations.
Toward normalizing the donations for every worthy thing, see what I wrote here.
But her most leveraged dish was the breakfast she made for us often when my sister and I were kids: soft-boiled eggs over toast broken into small pieces in a bowl. It’s still my basic breakfast, many decades later.
Mine, above, are different in three small ways:
I cut the toast into small squares with a big kitchen knife. (For Mom the toast was usually white bread, which was the only thing most grocery stores sold, or so it seemed, back in the 1950s. I lean toward Jewish rye, sourdough, ciabatta, anything not sweet.)
Mom boiled the eggs for three minutes. I poach mine. That’s a skill I learned from my wife. Much simpler. Put the eggs for a second or two into the boiling water, take them out, and then break them into the same water. (Putting them in first helps keep them intact.) Make sure the water has some salt in it, so the eggs hold their shape. Pull them out with a slotted spoon when the white gets somewhat firm and the yolk is still runny. Lay them on the toast.
I season them with a bit of hot sauce: sriracha, Tapatio, Cholula, whatever. That way they look like this before I chow them down—
The hot sauce also makes the coffee taste better for some reason.
Thus endeth the first—and perhaps last and only—recipe post on this blog.
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 fifty-six years have passed since that assassination, and the cause still has a long way to go: far longer than what MLK and the rest of us had imagined before he was killed.
Also, since MLK was the world’s leading activist for peace and nonviolence, those movements were set back as well. (Have they moved? How much? I don’t have answers. Maybe some of you do.)
I was twenty years old when MLK and RFK were killed, and a junior at Guilford College, a Quaker institution in Greensboro, North Carolina. Greensboro was a hotbed of civil rights activism and strife at the time (and occasionallysince). I was an activist of sorts back then as well, both for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. But being an activist, and having moral sympathies of one kind or another, are far less effective in the absence of leadership than they are when leadership is there, and strong.
Alexei Navalny was one of those leaders. He moved into the past tense today: (1976-2024). His parentheses closed in an Arctic Russian prison. He was only 47 years old. At age 44 he was poisoned—an obvious assassination attempt—and survived, thanks to medical treatment in Germany. He was imprisoned in 2021 after he returned to Russia, and… well, you can read the rest here. Since Navalny was the leading advocate of reform in Russia and opposed Vladimir Putin’s one-man rule of the country, Putin wanted him dead. So now Navalny is gone, and with it much hope of reform.
Not every assassination is motivated by those opposed to a cause. Some assassins are just nuts. John Hinkley Jr. and Mark David Chapman, for example. Hinkley failed to kill Ronald Reagan, and history moved right along. But Chapman succeeded in killing John Lennon, and silence from that grave has persisted ever since.
My point is that assassination works. For causes a leader personifies, the setbacks can be enormous, and in some cases total, or close enough, for a long time.
I hope Alexei Navalny’s causes will still have effects in his absence. Martyrdom in some ways works too. But I expect those effects to take much longer to come about than they would if Navalny were still alive. And I would love to be wrong about that.
Cluetrain is a word that did not exist before we made it up in 1999. It is still tweeted almost daily on X (née Twitter), and often on BlueSky and Threads, the Twitter wannabes. And, of course, on Facebook. Searching Google Books no longer says how many results it finds, but the last time I was able to check, the number of books containing the word cluetrain was way past 10,000.
So by now cluetrain belongs in the OED, though nobody is lobbying for that. In fact, none of the authors lobbied for Cluetrain much in the first place. Chris and David wrote about it in their newsletters, and I said some stuff in Linux Journal. But that was about it. Email was the most social online medium back then, so we did our best with that. We also decided not to make Cluetrain a Thing apart from its website. That meant no t-shirts, bumper stickers, or well-meaning .orgs. We thought what it said should succeed or fail on its own.
Among other things, it succeeded in grabbing the interest of Tom Petzinger, who devoted a column in The Wall Street Journal to the manifesto.* And thus a meme was born. In short order, we were approached with a book proposal, decided a book would be a good way to expand on the website, and had it finished by the end of August. The first edition came out in January 2000—just in time to help burst the dot-com bubble. It also quickly became a bestseller, even though (or perhaps in part because) the whole book was also published for free on the Cluetrain website—and is still there.
You can’t tell from the image of the cover on the right, but that orange was as da-glo as a road cone, and the gray at the bottom was silver. You couldn’t miss seeing it on the displays and shelves of bookstores, which were still thick on the ground back then.
A quarter century after we started working on Cluetrain, I think its story has hardly begun—because most of what it foresaw, or called for, has not come true. Yet.
So I’m going to visit some of Cluetrain’s history and main points in a series of posts here. This is the first one.
*A search for that column on the WSJ.com website brings up nothing: an example of deep news‘ absence. But I do have the text, and may share it with you later.)
Prompt: “A panopticon in which thousands of companies are spying on one woman alone in the center with nothing around her.” Via Microsoft Bing Image Creator
In her latestArs Technica story, Ashley Belanger reports that Patreon, the widely used and much-trusted monetization platform for creative folk, opposes the minimal personal privacy protections provided by a law you probably haven’t heard of until now: the Video Privacy Protection Act, or VPPA. Patreon, she writes, wants a judge to declare that law (which dates from the videotape rental age) unconstitutional because it inconveniences Patreon’s ability to share the personal data of its users with other parties.† Naturally, the EFF, the Center for Democracy & Technology, the ACLU of Northern California, and the ACLU itself all stand opposed to Patreon on this and have filed an amicus brief explaining why.
But I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to bring up the inconvenient fact that Ars Technica is also in the surveillance business. A PageXray of Ashley’s story finds this—
But will Ashley, or any reporter, grab the third rail of their employer’s participation in the tracking-based advertising business? Or visit that business’s responsibility for what was already the biggest boycott in human history way back in 2015? The odds are against it. I’ve challenged many reporters to grab that third rail, just like I’m challenging Ashley here. In every case, nothing happened.
I never challenged Farhad Manjoo, but he did come through exposingThe New York Times (his employer’s) own participation in the privacy-opposed tracking-based adtech business, back in 2019. Here’s a PageXray of tracking via that piece today:
If you think regulations are going to protect your privacy, you’re wrong. In fact, they can make things worse, especially if they start with the assumption that your privacy is provided only by other parties, most of whom are incentivized to violate it.
Exhibit A for how much worse things can get is the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). As soon as the GDPR went into full effect in May 2018, damn near every corporate entity on the Web put up a “cookie notice” requiring acceptance of terms and privacy policies that allow them to continue violating your privacy by harvesting, sharing, auctioning off and otherwise using your data, and data about you.
For websites and services in that harvesting business (a population that rounds to the whole commercial web), these notices provide a one-click way to adhere to the letter of the GDPR while violating its spirit.
There’s also big business in the friction that it produces. To see how big, look up GDPR+compliance on Google. You’ll get 232 million results (give or take a few dozen million).
None of those results are for you, even though you are who the GDPR is supposed to protect. See, to the GDPR, you are a mere “data subject” and not an independent and fully functional participant in the technical, social, and economic ecosystem the Internet supports by design. All privacy protections around your data are the burden of other parties.
Or at least that’s the interpretation that nearly every lawmaker, regulatory bureaucrat, lawyer, and service provider goes by. (One exception is Elizabeth Renieris@hackylawyer. Her collection of postings is required reading on the GDPR and much else.) The same goes for those selling GDPR compliance services, comprising most of those 190 million GDPR+compliance search results.
The clients of those services include nearly every website and service on Earth that harvests personal data. These entities have no economic incentive to stop harvesting, sharing, and selling personal data the usual ways, beyond fear that the GDPR might actually be enforced, which so far (with fewexceptions), it hasn’t been. (See Without enforcement, the GDPR is a fail.)
Worse, the tools for “managing” your exposure to data harvesters are provided entirely by the websites you visit and the services you engage. The “choices” they provide (if they provide any at all) are between 1) acquiescence to them doing what they please and 2) a maze of menus full of checkboxes and toggle switches “controlling” your exposure to unknown threats from parties you’ve never heard of, with no way to record your choices or monitor effects.
So let’s explore just one site’s presentation, and then get down to what it means and why it matters.
Our example is https://www.mirror.co.uk. If you haven’t clicked on that site already, you’ll see a cookie notice that says,
We use cookies to help our site work, to understand how it is used, and to tailor the adverts presented on our site. By clicking “Accept” below, you agree to us doing so. You can read more in our cookie notice. Or, if you do not agree, you can click Manage below to access other choices.
They don’t mention that “tailor the adverts” really means something like this:
We open your browser to infestation by tracking beacons from countless parties in the online advertising business, plus who-knows-what-else that might be working with those parties (there is no way to tell, and if there was we wouldn’t provide it), so those parties and their “partners” can use those beacons to follow you like a marked animal everywhere you go and report your activities back to a vast marketplace where personal data about you is shared, bought and sold, much of it in real time, supposedly so your eyeballs can be hit with “relevant” or “interest-based” advertising as you travel from site to site and service to service. While we are sure there are bad collateral effects (fraud and malware, for example), we don’t care about those because it’s our business to get paid just for clicks or “impressions,” whether you’re impressed or not—and the odds that you won’t be impressed average to certain.
Okay, so now click on the “Manage” button.
Up will pop a rectangle where it says “Here you can control cookies, including those for advertising, using the buttons below. Even if you turn off the advertising-related cookies, you will still see adverts on our site, because they help us to fund it. However, those adverts will simply be less relevant to you. You can learn more about cookies in our Cookie Notice on the site.”
Under that text, in the left column, are six “Purposes of data collection”, all defaulted with little check marks to ON (though only five of them show, giving the impression that there are only those five). The right column is called “Our partners”, and it shows the first five of what turn out to be 259 companies, nearly all of which are not brands known to the world or to anybody outside the business (and probably not known widely within the business as well). All are marked ON by that little check mark. Here’s that list, just through the letter A:
If you bother to “manage” any of this, what record do you have of it—or of all the other collections of third parties who you’ve agreed to follow you around? Remember, there are a different collection of these at every website with third parties that track you, and different UIs, each provided by other third parties.
It might be easier to discover and manage parasites in your belly than cookies in your browser.
Think I exaggerate? The long list of cookies in just one of my browsers (which I had to dig deep to find) starts with this list:
I know what zoom.us is. The rest are a mystery to me.
To look at just that first one, 1rx.io, I have to dig way down in the basement of the preferences directory (in Chrome it’s chrome://settings/cookies/detail?site=1rx.io), where I find that its locally stored data is this:
_rxuuid
Name
_rxuuid
Content
%7B%22rx_uuid%22%3A%22RX-2b58f1b1-96a4-4e1d-9de8-3cb1ca4175b0%22%2C%22nxtrdr%22%3Afalse%7D
Domain
.1rx.io
Path
/
Send for
Any kind of connection
Accessible to script
No (HttpOnly)
Created
Wednesday, December 12, 2018 at 4:48:53 AM
Expires
Thursday, December 12, 2019 at 4:48:53 AM
I’m a somewhat technical guy, and at least half of that stuff means nothing to me.
As for “managing” those, my only choice on that page is to “Remove All”. Does that mean Remove everything on that page alone or Remove all cookies everywhere? And how can I remember what I’ve had removed?
Obviously, there is no way for anybody to “manage” this, in any meaningful sense of the word.
We also can’t fix it on the sites and services side, no matter how much those sites and services care (which most don’t) about the “customer journey”, the “customer experience” or any of the other bullshit they’re buying from marketers this week.
Even within the CRM (customer relationship management) world, the B2B customers of CRM companies use one cloud and one set of tools to create as many different “experiences” for users and customers as there are companies deploying those tools to manage customer relationships from their side. There are no corresponding tools on our side. (Though there is work going on. See here.)
So the digital world remains one where we have no common or standard way to scale our privacy and data usage tools, choices, or experiences across all sites and services. And that’s what we’ll need if we want real privacy online.
The simple place where we need to start is this: privacy is personal, meaning something we create for ourselves (which in the natural world we do with clothing and shelter, both of which lack equivalents in the digital world).
And we need to be clear that privacy is not a grace of privacy policies and terms of service that differ with every company and over which none of us have true control—especially when there is an entire industry devoted to making those companies untrustworthy, even if they are in full compliance with privacy laws.
Devon Loffreto (who coined the term self-sovereign identity and whose good work we’ll be visiting in an upcoming issue of Linux Journal) puts the issue in simple geek terms: we need root authority over our lives. Hashtag: #OwnRoot.
It is only by owning root that we can crank up agency on the individual’s side. We have a perfect base for that in the standards and protocols that gave us the Internet, the Web, email, and too little else. And we need it here too. Soon.
We (a few colleagues and I) created Customer Commons as a place for terms that individuals can proffer as first parties, just by pointing at them, much as licenses at Creative Commons can be pointed at. Sites and services can agree to those terms, and both can keep records and follow audit trails.
And there are some good signs that this will happen. For example, the IEEE approached Customer Commons last year with the suggestion that we stand up a working group for machine-readable personal privacy terms. It’s called P7012. If you’d like to join, please do.
Unless we #OwnRoot for our own lives online, privacy will remain an empty promise by a legion of violators.
One more thing. We can put the GDPR to our use if we like. That’s because Article 4 of the GDPR defines a data controller as “the natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body which, alone or jointly with others, determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal data…” This means each of us can be our own data controller. Most lawyers dealing with the GDPR don’t agree with that. They think the individual data subject will always need a fiduciary or an intermediary of some kind: an agent of the individual, but not an individual with agency. Yet the simple fact is that we should have root authority over our lives online, and that means we should have some degree of control over our data exposures, and how our data, and data about us, is used—much as we do over how we control or moderate our privacy in the physical world. More about all that in upcoming posts.
† This is an example of what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification” and Wikipedia (at that link) more politely calls “platform decay.” It’s a big trade-away of goodwill by Patreon. Says to me they must be making an enshitload of money in the adtech fecosystem.
Society is comprised of individuals, thick with practices and customs that respect individual needs. Privacy is one of those. Only people who live naked outdoors without clothing and shelter can do without privacy. The rest of us all have ways of expressing and guarding spaces we call “private” — and that others respect as well.
Private spaces are virtual as well as physical. Society would not exist without well-established norms for expressing and respecting each other’s boundaries. “Good fences make good neighbors,” says Robert Frost.
One would hardly ask to justify the need for privacy before the Internet came along; but it is a question now because the virtual world, like nature in the physical one, doesn’t come with privacy. By nature, we are naked in both. The difference is that we’ve had many millennia to work out privacy in the physical world, and approximately two decades to do the same in the virtual one. That’s not enough time.
In the physical world, we get privacy from clothing and shelter, plus respect for each others’ boundaries, which are established by mutual understandings of what’s private and what’s not. All of these are both complex and subtle. Clothing, for example, customarily covers what we (in English vernacular at least) call our “privates,” but also allows us selectively to expose parts of our bodies, in various ways and degrees, depending on social setting, weather and other conditions. Privacy in our sheltered spaces is also modulated by windows, doors, shutters, locks, blinds, and curtains. How these signal intentions differ by culture and setting, but within each the signals are well understood, and boundaries are respected. Some of these are expressed in law as well as custom. In sum, they comprise civilized life.
Yet life online is not yet civilized. We still lack sufficient means for expressing and guarding private spaces, for putting up boundaries, for signaling intentions to each other, and for signaling back respect for those signals. In the absence of those we also lack sufficient custom and law. Worse, laws created in the physical world do not all comprehend a virtual one in which all of us, everywhere in the world, are by design zero distance apart — and at costs that yearn toward zero as well. This is still very new to human experience.
In the absence of restricting customs and laws it is easy for those with the power to penetrate our private spaces (such as our browsers and email clients) to do so. This is why our private spaces online today are infected with tracking files that report our activities back to others we have never met and don’t know. These practices would never be sanctioned in the physical world, but in the uncivilized virtual world they are easy to rationalize: Hey, it’s easy to do, everybody does it, it’s normative now, transparency is a Good Thing, it helps fund “free” sites and services, nobody is really harmed, and so on.
But it’s not okay. Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done, or that it’s the right thing to do. Nor is it right because it is, for now, normative, or because everybody seems to put up with it. The only reason people continue to put up with it is because they have little choice — so far.
Study after study shows that people are highly concerned about their privacy online, and vexed by their limited ability to do anything about its absence. For example —
Pew reports that “93% of adults say that being in control of who can get information about them is important,” that “90% say that controlling what information is collected about them is important,” that 93% “also value having the ability to share confidential matters with another trusted person,” that “88% say it is important that they not have someone watch or listen to them without their permission,” and that 63% “feel it is important to be able to “go around in public without always being identified.”
Ipsos, on behalf of TRUSTe, reports that “92% of U.S. Internet users worry about their privacy online,” that “91% of U.S. Internet users say they avoid companies that do not protect their privacy,” “22% don’t trust anyone to protect their online privacy,” that “45% think online privacy is more important than national security,” that 91% “avoid doing business with companies who I do not believe protect my privacy online,” that “77% have moderated their online activity in the last year due to privacy concerns,” and that, in sum, “Consumers want transparency, notice and choice in exchange for trust.”
Customer Commons reports that “A large percentage of individuals employ artful dodges to avoid giving out requested personal information online when they believe at least some of that information is not required.” Specifically, “Only 8.45% of respondents reported that they always accurately disclose personal information that is requested of them. The remaining 91.55% reported that they are less than fully disclosing.”
The Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania reports that “a majority of Americans are resigned to giving up their data—and that is why many appear to be engaging in tradeoffs.” Specifically, “91% disagree (77% of them strongly) that ‘If companies give me a discount, it is a fair exchange for them to collect information about me without my knowing.’” And “71% disagree (53% of them strongly) that ‘It’s fair for an online or physical store to monitor what I’m doing online when I’m there, in exchange for letting me use the store’s wireless internet, or Wi-Fi, without charge.’”
There are both policy and market responses to these findings. On the policy side, Europe has laws protecting personal data that go back to the Data Protection Directive of 1995. Australia has similar laws going back to 1988. On the market side, Apple now has a strong pro-privacy stance, posted Privacy – Apple, taking the form of an open letter to the world from CEO Tim Cook. One excerpt:
“Our business model is very straightforward: We sell great products. We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don’t ‘monetize’ the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we don’t read your email or your messages to get information to market to you. Our software and services are designed to make our devices better. Plain and simple.”
But we also need tools that serve us as personally as do our own clothes. And we’ll get them. The collection of developers listed here by ProjectVRM are all working on tools that give individuals ways of operating privately in the networked world. The most successful of those today are the ad and tracking blockers listed under Privacy Protection. According to the latest PageFair/Adobe study, the population of persons blocking ads online passed 200 million in June of 2015, with a 42% annual increase in the U.S. and an 82% rate in the U.K. alone.
These tools create and guard private spaces in our online lives by giving us ways to set boundaries and exclude unwanted intrusions. These are primitive systems, so far, but they do work and are sure to evolve. As they do, expect the online world to become as civilized as the offline one — eventually.
No, an AI did not paint this. It’s the West Baden Springs Hotel, which I shot with a camera while gawking at it for the first time.
In the summer of ’22 we were still new to Indiana and in an exploring mood. Out of nowhere one afternoon my wife said, “Let’s go check out French Lick.” She just liked the name of the town, plus the idea of taking a half-day road trip under a sweet blue sky and big puffy clouds. I said “Sure,” because I’m a basketball fan and supposed there would be a Larry Bird museum or something like it in his hometown. (Turns out there isn’t, but never mind that.)
Southern Indiana would be part of Kentucky if the Ohio River didn’t inconvenience that option. It’s hilly, and the natives have Southern accents. They say CEment and INsurance. (You know, like Larry Bird.) About halfway down the roads from Bloomington to French Lick, Google took us off the highway onto a twisty hypotenuse through deep woods and lumpy farmland, away from the hard right angle the boring main route would take at the city of Paoli (home of Indiana’s only ski slopes). This shortcut ended where the going got flat and we turned right onto a highway called 150. Then, in a short distance, we drove under a serious-looking arch that announced WEST BADEN SPRINGS. It might also have said ALMOST FRENCH LICK, because that’s what Google Maps told us. We were less than a mile away. After the arch, the edge of a town appeared straight ahead, but that scene was totally upstaged by the one on the right.
My wife and I both gasped. I said, “What the fuck is THAT?” My wife said “Wow!”
Suddenly we were … where? Spain? France? Croatia? There, under that perfect sky sat a beautiful giant resort-like structure that was obviously old, grand, well-maintained, and set among smaller structures just as old and nearly as grand, on a wide expanse of green.
A few hundred feet farther came this entrance on the right:
The only Carlsbads we knew were the town in California and the caverns in Arizona New Mexico. And all we knew about West Baden Springs was what that arch had just told us.
Of course, we couldn’t wait to get inside this thing, whatever it was. Here’s what we saw:
“Wow” doesn’t cover it. Nor do the many views of what turns out to have been—and still is—the West Baden Springs Hotel, which I’ve put in this album here. Check ’em out.
We’ve been back a bunch of times since then. And to French Lick, home of the French Lick Springs Hotel, which was once a great competitor to the West Baden Springs Hotel, and is almost as grand, just as historic, and a short and fun train ride away. Here’s the West Baden Station.
I’ll be putting up more albums of both places soon. Meanwhile, come visit, ya’ll.
Not long after Cluetrain came out in early 2000, I found myself on a cross-country flight, sitting beside a Nigerian pastor named Sayo Ajiboye. After we began to talk, it became clear to me that Sayo (pronounced “Shaiyo”) was a deeply wise man. Among his accomplishments was translating the highly annotated Thompson Bible into his native Yoruba language: a project that took eight of his thirty-nine years.
I told him that I had been involved in a far more modest book project—The Cluetrain Manifesto—and was traveling the speaking circuit, promoting it. When Sayo asked me what the book was about, I explained how “markets are conversations” was the first of our ninety-five theses, and how we had unpacked it in a chapter by that title. Sayo listened thoughtfully, then came back with the same response I had heard from other readers in what back then was still called the Third World: “Markets are conversations” is a pretty smart thing for well-off guys from the First World to be talking about. But it doesn’t go far enough.
When I asked him why, he told me to imagine we were in a “natural” marketplace—a real one in, say, an African village where one’s “brand” was a matter personal reputation, and where nobody ruled customer choices with a pricing gun. Then he picked up one of those blue airline pillows and told me to imagine it was a garment, such as a coat, and that I was interested in buying it. “What’s the first thing you would say to the seller?” he asked.
“What does it cost?”
“Yes, you would say that,” he replied, meaning that this was typical of a First World shopper for whom price is the primary concern. Then he asked me to imagine that a conversation follows between the seller and me—that the two of us get to know each other a bit and learn from each other. “Now,” he asked, “What happens to the price?”
I said maybe now I’m willing to pay more while the seller is willing to charge less.
“Why?” Sayo asked.
I didn’t have an answer.
“Because you now have a relationship,” he said.
As we continued talking, it became clear to me that everything that happens in a marketplace falls into just three categories: transaction, conversation, and relationship. In our First World business culture, transaction matters most, conversation less, and relationship least. Worse, we conceive and justify everything in transactional terms. Nothing matters more than price and “the bottom line.” By looking at markets through the prism of transaction or even conversation, we miss the importance of relationship. We also don’t see how relationship has a value all its own: one that transcends, even as it improves, the other two.
Consider your relationship with friends and family, Sayo said. The value system there is based on caring and generosity, not on price. Balance and reciprocity may play in a relationship, but are not the basis of it. One does not make deals for love. There are other words for that.
Back in the industrialized world, few of our market relationships run so deep, nor should they. By necessity much of our relating is shallow and temporary. We don’t want to get personal with an ATM machine or even with real bank tellers. Friendly is nice, but in most business situations that’s about as far as we want to go.
But relationship is a broad category: broad enough to contain all forms of relating—the shallow as well as the deep, the temporary as well as the enduring. In the business culture of the industrialized world, Sayo said, we barely understand relationship’s full meaning or potential. And we should. Doing so would be good for business.
So he told me our next assignment was to unpack and study another thesis: Markets are relationships.
In The News Business (which precedes this post), I said the three current business models for local news were advertising, subscription, and philanthropy, and promised a fourth. This is it: emancipayments.
We* came up with this idea in 2009. Here is how the EmanciPay page on the ProjectVRM wiki puts it:
Overview
Simply put, Emancipay makes it easy for anybody to pay (or offer to pay) —
as much as they like
however they like
for whatever they like
on their own terms
— or at least to start with that full set of options, and to work out differences with sellers easily and with minimal friction.
Emancipay turns consumers (aka users) into customers by giving them a pricing gun (something which in the past only sellers used) and their own means to make offers, to pay outright, and to escrow the intention to pay when price and other requirements are met. And to be able to do this at scale across all sellers, much as cash, browsers, credit cards and email clients do the same. Payments themselves can also be escrowed.
In slightly more technical terms, EmanciPay is a payment framework for customers operating with full agency in the open marketplace, and at scale. It operates on open protocols and standards, so it can be used by any buyer, seller or intermediary.
It was conceived as a way to pay for music, journalism, or what any artist brings into the world. But it can apply to anything. For example, [subscriptions], which have become by 2021 a giant fecosystem in which every seller has separate and non-substitutable scale across all subscribers, while subscribers have zero scale across all sellers, with the highly conditional exceptions of silo’d commercial intermediaries. As [Customer Commons] puts it,
There’s also not much help coming from the subscription management services we have on our side: Truebill, Bobby, Money Dashboard, Mint, Subscript Me, BillTracker Pro, Trim, Subby, Card Due, Sift, SubMan, and Subscript Me. Nor from the subscription management systems offered by Paypal, Amazon, Apple or Google (e.g. with Google Sheets and Google Doc templates). All of them are too narrow, too closed and exclusive, too exposed to the surveillance imperatives of corporate giants, and too vested in the status quo.
That status quo sucks (see here, or just look up “subscription hell”), and it’s way past time to unscrew it.) But how?
The better question is where?
The answer to that is on our side: the customer’s side.
While EmanciPay was first conceived by ProjectVRM as a way to make live payments to nonprofits and to provide a new monetization method for publishers. it also works as a counterpart to sellers’ subscription systems in what Zuora (a supplier of subscription management systems to the publishing industry, including The Guardian and Financial Times) calls the “subscription economy“, which it says “is built on ever changing relationships with your customers”. Since relationships are two-way by nature, EmanciPay is one way that customers can manage their end, while publisher-side systems such as Zuora’s manage the other.
EmanciPay economic case
EmanciPay provides a new form of economic signaling not available to individuals, either on the Net or before the Net became available as a communications medium. EmanciPay will use open standards and be comprised of open source code. While any commercial [Fourth party] can use EmanciPay (or its principles, or any parts of it they like), EmanciPay’s open and standard framework will support fourth parties by making them substitutable, much as the open standards of email (smtp, pop3, imap) make email systems substitutable. (Each has what Joe Andrieu callsservice endpoint portability.)
EmanciPay is an instrument of customer independence from all of the billion (or so) commercial entities on the Net, each with its own arcane and silo’d systems for engaging and managing customer relations, as well as receipt, acknowledgement and accounting for payments from customers.
Use Case Background
EmanciPay was conceived originally as a way to provide a customers with the means to signal interest and ability to pay for media and creative works (most of which are freely available on the Web, if not always free of charge). Through EmanciPay, demand and supply can relate, converse and transact business on mutually beneficial terms, rather than only on terms provided by the countless different silo’d systems we have today, each serving to hold the customer captive, and causing much inconvenience and friction in the process.
Media goods were chosen for five reasons:
because most are available for free, even if they cost money, or are behind paywalls
paywalls, which are cookie-based, cannot relate to individuals as anything other than submissive and dependent parties (and each browser a users employs carries a different set of cookies)
both media companies and non-profits are constantly looking for new sources of revenue
all methods of intermediating payment choices are either silo’d by the seller or silo’d by intermediators, discouraging participation by individuals.
What the marketplace requires are new business and social contracts that ease payment and stigmatize non-payment for creative goods. The friction involved in voluntary payment is still high, even on the Web, where one must go through complex ceremonies even to make simple payments. There is no common and easy way either to keep track of what media (free or otherwise) we use (see Media Logging), to determine what it might be worth, and to pay for it easily and in standard ways — to many different suppliers. (Again, each supplier has its own system for accepting payments.)
EmanciPay differs from other payment models (subscriptions, newsstand, tip jars) by providing customers with the ability to choose what they wish to pay and how they’ll pay it, with minimum friction — and with full choice about what they disclose about themselves.
EmanciPay will also support credit for referrals, requests for service, feedback and other relationship support mechanisms, all at the control of the user. For example, EmanciPay can provide quick and easy ways for listeners to pay for public radio broadcasts or podcasts, for readers to pay for otherwise “free” papers or blogs, for listeners to pay to hear music and support artists, for users to issue promises of payment for for stories or programs — all without requiring the individual to disclose unnecessary private information, or to become a “member” — although these options are kept open.
This will scaffold genuine relationships between buyers and sellers in the media marketplace. It will also give deeper meaning to “membership” in non-profits. (Under the current system, “membership” generally means putting one’s name on a pitch list for future contributions, and not much more than that.)
EmanciPay will also connect the sellers’ CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems with customers’ VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) systems, supporting rich and participatory two-way relationships. In fact, EmanciPay will by definition be a VRM system.
Micro-accounting and Macro-distribution
The idea of “micro-payments” for goods on the Net has been around for a long time, and is often brought up as a potential business model for journalism. For example in this article by Walter Isaacson in Time Magazine. It hasn’t happened, at least not globally, because it’s too complicated, and in prototype only works inside private silos.
What ProjectVRM suggests instead is something we don’t yet have, but very much need:
micro-accounting for actual uses. Think of this simply as “keeping track of” the news, podcasts, newsletters, or music we consume.
macro-distribution of payments for accumulated use (that’s no longer “micro”).
Much — maybe most — of the digital goods we consume are both free for the taking and worth more than $zero. How much more? We need to be able to say. In economic terms, demand needs to have a much wider range of signals it can give to supply. And give to each other, to better gauge what we should be willing to pay for free stuff that has real value but not a hard price.
As currently planned, EmanciPay would –
Provide a single and easy way for consumers of “content” to become customers of it. In the current system — which isn’t one — every artist, every musical group, and every public radio and TV station has his, her or its own way of taking in contributions from those who appreciate the work. This can be arduous and time-consuming for everybody involved. (Imagine trying to pay separately every musical artist you like, for all your enjoyment of each artist’s work.) What EmanciPay proposes, however, is not a replacement for existing systems, but a new system that can supplement existing fund-raising systems — one that can soak up much of today’s MLOTT: Money Left On The Table.
Provide ways for individuals to look back through their media usage histories, inform themselves about what they have been enjoying, and determine how much it is worth to them. The Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP), and later the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), both came up with “rates and terms that would have been negotiated in the marketplace between a willing buyer and a willing seller.” This almost absurd language first appeared in the 1995 Digital Performance Royalty Act (DPRA) and was tweaked in 1998 by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), under which both the CARP and the CRB operated. The rates they came up with peaked at $.0001 per “performance” (a song or recording), per listener. EmanciPay creates the “willing buyer” that the DPRA thought wouldn’t exist.
Stigmatize non-payment for worthwhile media goods. This is where “social” will finally come to be something more than yet another tech buzzmodifier.
All these require micro-accounting, not micro-payments. Micro-accounting can inform ordinary payments that can be made in clever new ways that should satisfy everybody with an interest in seeing artists compensated fairly for their work. An individual listener, for example, can say “I want to pay 1¢ for every song I hear,” and “I’ll send SoundExchange a lump sum of all the pennies wish to pay for songs I have heard over a year, along with an accounting of what artists and songs I’ve listened to” — and leave dispersal of those totaled pennies up to the kind of agency that likes, and can be trusted, to do that kind of thing. That’s the macro-distribution part of the system.
Similar systems can also be put in place for readers of newspapers, blogs, and other journals. What’s important is that the control is in the hands of the individual and that the accounting and dispersal systems work the same way for everybody.
I visited EmanciPay use cases twice in Linux Journal:
There are two differences in the world today that should make it easier to code up something like EmanciPay:
Smartphones and apps on them have become extensions of ourselves.
AI.
For the latter, I am not talking about the kind of centralized AI we get from Amazon, Microsoft/OpenAI, Adobe, and the rest. I’m talking about AI that’s as personal as our own underwear and gives us what Sam Altman calls “individual empowerment and agency on a scale we’ve never seen before.” That quote became the title of the post I wrote at that link. I will unpack it further in an upcoming News Commons post.
But first I’ll dig deeper into what we need to develop EmanciPay, and how we can use it to scaffold up the kind of markets first imagined by The Cluetrain Manifesto, a quarter century ago.
*Big hat tip to Keith Hopper for his thinking and work on this, especially toward ListenLog, which is now fourteen years ahead of its time. And that time will come. Also to Joe Andrieu, whose The User as a Point of Integration (published in 2007) is a founding document in the VRM canon. He reported on progress here in 2017. All hail writers who keep their archives alive on the Web.
Finally, a series from DeepAI., each generated in a different style.
First, impressionism:
Surreal graphics:
Renaissance painting:
Abstract painting:
AI art:
What do these say about the news business? Well,
It’s mostly male.
It’s mostly about newspapers, somewhat about TV, and idealized both.
It used to be big.
It doesn’t know what to make of the Internet.
It’s obsolete in the extreme.
For most of the prior century, the news business was big. In tech parlance, it scaled. Here in the U.S. and Canada, every town had a newspaper, and in some cases several. Many towns—and all cities—had radio stations. Every name-brand city had a TV station, or two, or more. The great newsweeklies, Time and Newsweek, had millions of subscribers and made lots of money. So did TV network news operations. Newsstands were everywhere.
All of that has collapsed. Some print and broadcast news operations still exist, but most are shells of their former selves, and many put news icing on a cake of partisan talk shows. Exceptions to collapse are the surviving news giants (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal), and resourceful public broadcasters. (Pew Research shows NPR’s audience has long topped 20 million people, though it is slowly declining.)
People today get most of their news through phones, tablets, and laptops. These are packed with apps that maximize optionality. People now hardly listen, watch, or read on schedules set by publishers, stations, or networks. Everyone with a smartphone had a limitless variety of news sources. Or sources within sources such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and old-fashioned social media such as Facebook and X.
According to Pew, the top news sources for young people today are TikTok and social media. In other words, from each other. The threshold of news creation and production is also low. This is why, according to Exploding Topics, there are now over three million podcasts worldwide.
As Scott Galloway put it in a recent Pivot podcast (which I can’t find right now), news is a shitty business—at least if you want to scale up something huge. It’s not even a great small business. But hell, neither is running a restaurant, a nail salon, a clothing shop, or a small farm. But those are real businesses.
In these early years of The Internet Age, the most substantive news and news businesses are the local kind. True, not everybody cares about local news. But everybody lives somewhere, and it does matter what goes on where people live. Belonging somewhere in the virtual world is optional, but it is mandatory in the physical one. And, as with running a restaurant, a store, or a farm, reporting local news is a labor of talent and love. It’s what we still call “a living.”
Right now there are three models for the local news business: advertising, subscription, and philanthropy. In my next post, the eighth in this series, I’ll lay out the case for a fourth one.
*I didn’t try Midjourney, DALL-E 3, or Stable Diffusion because they all require subscriptions, and I don’t feel like paying for those yet. DALL-E 2 yielded blah results.
By the time TV came along, America was already devoting its evenings to scheduled programs on AM radio, which was the only kind of radio at the time. After TV took over, everyone sat in a room bathed in soft blue light from their TV screen. Radio was repurposed for music, especially rock & roll. My first radio was the one on the right. Being in a New York suburb, my stations were 
