Business
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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 having studied this proposition myself for the last twenty years or more. The business does exist. See eleven companies in… Continue reading
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If Your Privacy Is in the Hands of Others Alone, You Don’t Have Any
In her latest Ars 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… Continue reading
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How is the world’s biggest boycott doing?
Eight years ago, I called ad blocking The Biggest Boycott in World History, because hundreds of millions of people were blocking ads online. (The headline came from my wife, by the way.) Then, a few days ago, Cory Doctorow kindly pointed to that post in one of his typically trenchant Pluralistic newsletters. So I thought… Continue reading
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Some possible verities
Just sharing some stuff I said on social media recently.: It’s easy to make an ad hominem argument against anything humans do. If we had to avoid every enterprise with owners we don’t like, we might as well graze on berries or something. Capitalism is way too broad a brush with which to paint all… Continue reading
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We Need Deep News
First in the News Commons series. Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter. — Thomas Jefferson News is the first rough draft of history. — Countless journalists “Breaking the News” is the title of… 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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A look at broadcast history happening
When I was a kid in the 1950s and early 1960s, AM was the ruling form of radio, and its transmitters were beyond obvious, taking the form of towers hundreds of feet high, sometimes in collections arranged to produce signals favoring some directions over others. These were landmarks out on the edges of town, or… Continue reading
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On Twitter 2.0
So far the experience of using Twitter under Musk is pretty much unchanged. Same goes for Facebook. Yes, there is a lot of hand-wringing, and the stock market hates Meta (the corporate parent to which Facebook gave birth); but so far the experience of using both is pretty much unchanged. This is aside from the fact… Continue reading
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The most important standard in development today
It’s P7012: Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms, which “identifies/addresses the manner in which personal privacy terms are proffered and how they can be read and agreed to by machines.” P7012 is being developed by a working group of the IEEE. Founded in 1963, the IEEE is the largest association of technical professionals in the world… Continue reading
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From Hollywood Park Racetrack to SoFi Stadium
Hollywood Park Racetrack is gone. In its place is SoFi Stadium, the 77,000-seat home of Los Angeles’ two pro football teams and much else, including the 6,000-seat YouTube Theater. There’s also more to come in the surrounding vastness of Hollywood Park, named after the racetrack. Wikipedia says the park— consists of over 8.5 million square feet (790,000 m2)… 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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TheirCharts
If you’re getting health care in the U.S., chances are your providers are now trying to give you a better patient experience through a website called MyChart. This is supposed to be yours, as the first person singular pronoun My implies. Problem is, it’s TheirChart. And there are a lot of them. I have four (correction: five*) MyChart accounts… Continue reading
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On solving the worldwide shipping crisis
The worldwide shipping crisis is bad. Here are some reasons: “Just in time” manufacturing, shipping, delivery, and logistics. For several decades, the whole supply system has been optimized for “lean” everything. On the whole, no part of it fully comprehends breakdowns outside the scope of immediate upstream or downstream dependencies. The pandemic, which has been… Continue reading
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Where the Intention Economy Beats the Attention Economy
There’s an economic theory here: Free customers are more valuable than captive ones—to themselves, to the companies they deal with, and to the marketplace. If that’s true, the intention economy will prove it. If not, we’ll stay stuck in the attention economy, where the belief that captive customers are more valuable than free ones prevails. Let… Continue reading
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Dialog with a robot
So I ordered one of these yesterday… …and got a notice that said, That was to my building in Manhattan: a three-story walk-up in a district that’s post-dangerous but pre-gentrified. In other words, safe; but not beyond worry that someone could walk off with a box on the steps that says Amazon on it. We… Continue reading
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Redux 001: BuzzPhrasing
Since I’m done with fighting in the red ocean of the surveillance-dominated Web, I’ve decided, while busy working in the blue ocean (on what for now we’re calling i-commerce), to bring back, in this blog, some of the hundreds of things I’ve written over the last 30+ years. I’m calling it the Redux series. To qualify,… Continue reading
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Why is the “un-carrier” falling into the hellhole of tracking-based advertising?
For a few years now, T-Mobile has been branding itself the “un-carrier,” saying it’s “synonymous with 100% customer commitment.” Credit where due: we switched from AT&T a few years ago because T-Mobile, alone among U.S. carriers at the time, gave customers a nice cheap unlimited data plan for traveling outside the country. But now comes this… 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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Just in case you feel safe with Twitter
Just got a press release by email from David Rosen (@firstpersonpol) of the Public Citizen press office. The headline says “Historic Grindr Fine Shows Need for FTC Enforcement Action.” The same release is also a post in the news section of the Public Citizen website. This is it: WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Norwegian Data Protection Agency today fined Grindr $11.7 million following… Continue reading
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Toward new kinds of leverage
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world,” Archimedes is said to have said. For almost all of the last four years, Donald Trump was one hell of an Archimedes. With the U.S. presidency as his lever and Twitter as his fulcrum, the… Continue reading